FIND YOUR CREATIVE VOICE: FLY YOUR FREAK FLAG

Here's a transcript of the first episode of our podcast, which you can listen to above. 

We highly recommend a cup of tea, some biscuits, and drawing while you listen.

Tania:
Welcome to The Good Ship Illustration podcast. We're here to offer no-nonsense advice for illustrators and image-makers navigating a creative career.

Katie: 
Our course, Find your creative voice. Fly your freak flag is opening its doors on the 31st of July. But we'll talk more about that later. This is the first episode of our podcast, and we're going to be talking illustration, answering questions, interviewing creatives, and giving no-nonsense advice.

Tania:
But first of all, we're just going to talk about our careers and how we found our creative voice and maybe give you some idea of what we do and who we are. So I'm Tania Willis,

I'm Helen Stephens.

and I'm Katie Chappell.

Helen:
We think of ourselves as the three bears of the illustration industry because we've all worked in different areas and different areas of illustration. And I think we've added up that we have about 60 years experience between us.

Tania:
We all live in the same town, and we used to meet up together to get over the cabin fever of being illustrators, working alone in our studios. Every time we met up, we just felt better and better from sharing experiences and talking to each other about the different areas of our illustration.

And that's how we came to form The Good Ship because it was such a supportive group. We realised other people felt the same and we wanted to share the advice.


It was when we were having those coffees, we realised that we'd all had a time in our creative careers where we'd grappled with finding a creative voice, and taking time out, and starting again.

Helen:
I think it's a really common problem if you've been to art school or even if you haven't been to art school. It's that thing of trying to maintain your voice when you're working for clients.

It's so easy when you first leave art school to just kind of be available to everybody and do whatever it takes to get that job. And if they want a colour change one way and it doesn't feel right to you, you do it regardless because you're A Real Illustrator Now, and it can really knock you sideways and you can kind of forget who you are creatively.

Tania: 
A lot of it's confidence, isn't it?

You know, when you've said before Helen, when you've done mentoring, the same thing comes up over and over again. Confidence in yourself as an illustrator. I think going back to what you said, young illustrators leave college, and they don't have the confidence to say to a client. 'This is what I do. If you like it, commission me for it.' I remember not having that self-belief. So you would really do whatever they needed. Only much later on, you realise in doing that, you've dissipated all the characteristics in your work. And, ultimately if that has happened, it's very difficult to sell your identity to a client and make yourself memorable.

You've become a Jack of all trades. And that's the scary thing. You're dispensable.

Helen:
That's right though. I think if you don't know your own creative voice, you can just be pulled in all directions, and it doesn't make you stand out from the crowd of other illustrators.

Tania: 
I remember you talked as well about the longevity of a career. If you don't know what your work is, you don't know what you're drawing on for inspiration, you're not looking at a longer career because your work changes too much over a few years. 

You want to find a strong identity and it makes it easier for you to project that, that style of work. (We don't like the word style do we? But hey. Sometimes you still have to use that word.)

Helen: 
What I've found over the years though, is that actually what a publisher or a client really wants is to hear your voice! And they're really relieved if you say 'actually that won't work, but I've got this solution'.

When you first start out, you're kind of an empty vessel waiting for them to tell you what to do. And you've got the power the wrong way round, but it takes so long to work that out.

Katie: 
Was that how you ended up finding your creative voice, Helen? Because you'd felt like you wanted to go in your own direction more?

Helen: 
Yeah. I went to Glasgow school of art, studied illustration (Tania was my tutor at art school), which was brilliant. Lots of good fun, but I don't think I ever considered what it would be like to leave art school. I think I thought I was going to be there forever. It was quite a shock to the system to leave. And when I did leave - this is cutting a long story, very short - I started to write and illustrate picture books and it all looked very exciting from the outside.

I had lots of clients, I was having so many clients, I could turn work down. I was making lots of board books for babies and they were selling all over the world and I was making a reasonable income, but I just felt really torn between what my actual voice was and the work that I was doing in the book.

So when I was at art school, I'd drawn from life all the time and had big stacks of sketchbooks. I really loved drawing from life. I did lots of reportage drawings.

When I headed down to London with my folio of work (this is pre-internet days), publishers wanted to see something that wasn't just a sketchbook drawing. And so I worked really hard at turning this work into something publishable. I was like a sponge for advice. I would just take on any advice that the publishers gave me to get published.

And so in that process, I lost my own voice. Really. There was a lot of advice about upping my colours, making them brighter and more pastel colours and everything happy. In the end, I felt like I was stuck in this happy coffin of bright colours that I just couldn't get out of.

It was painful. It was really difficult.

And so, in the end, I decided that I would just take a year out and go back to my sketchbooks and find a bridge between what I'd done, at art school and my sketchbooks and a type of illustration work that would be useful and good for a picture that wasn't this flat, bright coloured world. Something where I could express happiness and sadness and danger and excitement and anger and all of the things children feel. This kind of bright palette that I was stuck in was it was a trap. It just wasn't making me happy.

So I took a year out, went back to my sketchbooks, and came back a much happier illustrator.

Tania:
You were writing as well, weren't you Helen? Didn't you write those first books that you did? Were you being asked to change the stories as well as the images as well, the tone or the emotional quality? Speaking as an author.

Helen: 
Not so much the writing, I think because I think of myself as an illustrator first, I don't really mind being edited as long as something doesn't feel ethically wrong. I don't really mind working with an editor. I really quite enjoy that. As long as it doesn't go in a direction that seems too sweet or too cute, then I'm happy to be edited.

It was the artwork that I felt I was being that my personality was being infringed. And also I was being published in the early nineties when at the time publishers were really keen not to give a book a sense of place because they wanted to sell the book all over the world. And the theory at the time was that if your book had a sense of place, then children in another country, wouldn't be able to associate with it. And so if I drew a sash window or a TV aeriel on the top of a roof, it would look too British and therefore it wouldn't sell. So I was doing towns that were just pink walls with windows that were just a square with no decoration. Nothing that looked too British in it.

It was just a theory of the time. Thank goodness. We're past that now!

Tania:
Yeah 'cause that's the observational part, isn't it? If your work's coming from observational drawing, then it's imbued with a sense of place and characteristics. And some of our most favorite children's books are the escapism of reading a book set in the Caribbean or drawings from India or something like that. It just sounds awful to have to strip down the characteristics of a town to have pink wall with glass windows in it.

Helen:
It was soul-destroying and by the end, I remember that I signed a contract to do four books, and I had to sort of use my left hand to force my right hand to do the drawings because I just couldn't bear it anymore.

I almost stopped being an illustrator completely, but in the end, just decided it'd be more sensible to take a year out and work my way back in from a direction that felt more comfortable for me.

During that year out, I went to Battersea dog's home. I was drawing every day and not putting any pressure on myself for any of those drawings to become a book. I was being really careful about not drawing for a purpose. I would go out drawing every day.

I went to Battersea dog's home one day and I met this dog. I met lots of dogs, but this one, in particular, was called Finn and he was about to be adopted when I was drawing him. He was such an amazing dog. He gave me eye contact and he was kind of sat like he was posing for the drawings. He was so lovely!

He sat in my sketchbook for ages and ages, because I was determined that these drawings would not be stories that I still had work to do before that would happen. And then a few months later, I took that sketchbook down off the shelf and thought, 'Oh, he'd be quite a nice character.' And I had the word Fleabag written in another sketchbook, and I put the two things together and they became a book called Fleabag, which was set around when, where I lived in Hammersmith and Battersea. And do you know that book did better than any book I've ever done before?

So all those nerves about taking a year out and finding my own voice, I really wish I could've gone back and said to younger me, 'don't worry about it. You're doing the right thing'. 

Katie: 
I was going to say it must've felt so nerve-wracking. You take this year out and then wonder, 'what if I go back and there's nothing there anymore!?' How did it- was it okay after Fleabag?

Helen: 
Yes. It was just brilliant. After that, as soon as I did that first book, which was more linked to my sketchbooks, that felt more me, everything was great after that. And, but you know that wasn't the end of the journey with every book I do. I do kind of, re-examine how I want to tackle this book and it's an ongoing process. 

But yes, that year out was the best thing I ever did.

Tania: 
That's so brave. To take the year out and to sustain yourself throughout that year and say, 'this is the right thing to do. I believe in myself, I'm not working'.

I think that's the difficult part when you're making a change in your life and it's not being rewarded with cash or payments that make you think 'I am a real person earning a living'. Once you stop and you take the money out of the transaction and you're just exploring your creative self... How did you find the self-belief to say, 'I will stay this course for a year just drawing because it is the right thing to do'?

Helen: 
You know, sometimes when a decision is just out of your control, it is so desperately needed by every single cell in your body. It was like that. It was just one of those things where if I didn't change it, there was no other alternative. 

Also, I was having some psychotherapy at the time. So before that year out, I think I felt all of my life was slightly out of control or at least other people could be in charge of it more than I was. And so I'd had some psychotherapy which led to that year of me thinking 'actually this is for me to sort out. Only I can do this work and I'm going to do it.'

Tania: 
I'm asking because I find it really interesting that that freefall year where you're in charge of yourself, it resonates with leaving art college, having fine art. And you think 'so I'm painting. I don't know what I'm painting for. Do I have a very strong message that I have to tell the world, and will anyone ever see these paintings? I'm in a studio working, is this real life? Is this a career?'

That whole confusion of whether you are actually moving forward in your work? It's interesting that it happened in illustration as well in an applied art as well as fine arts. I think a lot of creative people feel this in all areas, craftspeople as well. I'm sure they're making things and wondering if they'll ever see the light of day or will they turn into a big project. You can have moments where you question whether this is even real life. Is this a real career? Am I just making all up?

Helen: 
It reminds me a bit of that Ira Glass quote that we sometimes talk about, I bet you can remember it better than me, Katie.

Katie: 
It's the gap, isn't it? When you start making work, you're in it because you have great taste. (I'm butchering this by the way) But you've got you're in this job because you've got great taste, but the work you're making isn't as good as you want it to be. But you know, it's not good. That's why you're in it. And then it's like, yeah, it talks about like this gap of years that it takes for your work to catch up with your taste for good work.

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”

― Ira Glass

Helen: 
I always wonder about that, Tania. How do you know what you want to express in your work? When you're basically a child at art school?

Tania: 
I've always thought that. I think people should go to art school when they're old, when they're full of experience! When they've got something to say and they have wisdom. If the same can be true of illustrators going to a client and saying, 'tell me what you want me to draw'. It's the same in fine art, and it's not really addressed.

You don't know what you're supposed to be painting about. Are you painting to become technically a better painter? Or are you here as some kind of guru to paint great messages to the world? If so, what are they?

No one really ever talks about why you're painting. And at least with illustration, there's a sense of working with a client who will provide content. And then knowing what to do with that content. For illustrators who go into an editorial career, that's quite straightforward because you're looking at ways of visually translating, using metaphor, and methods of articulating other people's content.

What I find interesting about children's book illustration is that you're writing. So you're still providing your own content and message as well as illustrating it. So actually children's book illustration is closer to the fine arts than editorial illustration. Yet we regard children's book illustrations are very workaday applied, vocational kind of illustration form. But in fact, it's entirely self-motivated in the same way, that fine art is.

Helen: 
I'd never thought of it like that before. Yeah.

Tania: 
When I look at what you do, I was thinking you're providing your own content on both levels.

Helen: 
The upside of writing your own story is that you can write about what you want to draw. That's how I ended up writing.

Tania: 
Yeah. I like dogs. So it's going to be a dog story. Yeah.

Helen: 
It was as simple as that. Yeah. If I waited for somebody else to give me a story, always had something in it that I really didn't want to illustrate.

Tania: 
I think that's the trick in editorial illustration as well. Particularly in Hong Kong, the magazines that had a good budget to pay contributors would usually be financial and business magazines and hedge fund managers were my mainstay.

You can't imagine drawing another man in a suit. Oh God, no. Then we had the studio I used to work in. We had a kind of unofficial dictionary of verboten symbolism, including men in suits on a tightrope. If you used that you were a total loser. Or people standing on scales in a suit, that was a total eighties mainstay. And so you'd be marked down if you did any of those.

That was when I was working with Big Orange* in the studios in Shoreditch, but in Hong Kong, 'Oh no, there's another hedge fund manager. Shall I have him actually clipping a hedge? That's a good idea! Let's have him on a ladder and then convert it to a graph with lots of different ladders'. Oh, I'm so glad that I have to draw those things anymore, but the illustration would all be about how can I take something I don't want to draw and come up with such a good metaphor. A: people will understand the metaphor and B: I get to draw a thing I'd like to draw. Can I convert hedge fund managers into a dog or a building? 

* I worked in the same building - we were referred to as 'The Big Orange lot', but I was not in the Big Orange agency.

Helen: 
Tania, you studied fine art at first. And then you jumped ship to illustration. How did that happen?

Tania: 
I think like most students, when you're in the foundation course, you don't really understand the different nuances between the course. Like most kids, I'm good at drawing. So I'm going to do a course that will help me do my good drawings and get better at them. And the obvious answer to that always seems to be fine art, and you don't look much further into it.

Halfway through the fine art course, I had what felt like a really disloyal thought - I just really wanted to do graphic design. And I regretted being on the fine art course and wished I'd either done illustration or, or graphic design.

So by the end of it, I realised I hadn't got anything that I really wanted to say to the world. I also didn't like going back to my village I'd come from, which was a farming village. They'd say things like, 'what are you drawing then? What kind of things are you drawing?' I couldn't explain to them what I was drawing. I'd talk to them a bit about performance art. You know, they, weren't interested in that. And I thought, 'I don't want my life to be so divided that I can't talk to my old friends about what I'm doing'.

I wanted it to be useful as well - I am quite literal. Literal and pragmatic. So I wanted a job that did something that I could see as worthwhile or useful, which is kind of why I have this secret admiration for graphic design, because of posters and activism and all the things you can harness your skills to.

But I decided illustration seemed to be the next logical step. So I applied to the Royal College and took all my paintings and printmaking I'd been working on at West Surrey College of Art and Design, and applied there thinking 'this isn't going to work'. But what was great, it's like showing a client a sketchbook. You don't think they will understand it, but if it's a good client, they'll see more of you in that sketchbook than they will in some of your finished over-art-directed pictures of men on tight ropes in suits.

And that's where you might escape that terrible world of hedge fund illustrations. I did two years at the Royal College and that was great. It was an MA. So they weren't teaching a lot about industry. It was assumed you understood what the illustration industry was about and the nuts and bolts of it. But actually I didn't. And I really wanted to know about that!

It helped develop my work, but I learned on the job when I left college because I had no idea really how to approach art directors or what they wanted from me because you were producing work for a degree show at the, at the end of your course. I ended up doing illustrating a lot of Yates' poetry, how that connected with Construction Monthly was a whole other world.

That's the bit I didn't understand when I showed them these very emotive kinds of fiction-based illustrations or poetry based illustrations. How do you find clients who will employ you for that? Because adult fiction doesn't use illustration, and also children's book illustration. I think that's quite difficult as a 23-year-old.

I didn't understand whether I was appropriate for children's book illustration or what they were looking for. I had a studio in Shoreditch for about five years with our year group that we'd graduated from who were actually a really proactive, extremely talented bunch of people.

It was a really supportive system, a bit like Good Ship is for us. We gave each other advice about different areas of illustration. We shared client lists so that we could send out postcards to clients and do our marketing.

It was very rudimentary marketing at the time - pre-internet - and then I got an opportunity to go to Hong Kong and that was 1990s. I thought I'd go over for six months to have a quick look...but then I stayed there for 25 years and didn't come home!

Hong Kong didn't have a very big illustration industry. When I got there as an editorial illustrator, I realised that Hong Kong versions of magazines I'd worked for in the UK, like Elle or Vogue only had tiny distribution in Hong Kong because Hong Konger's read traditional Chinese writing, whereas in China they read simplified Chinese. So they're two different industries. The distribution in Hong Kong is very small because there's a small area. So they were offering things like 70 pounds for an illustration for Elle magazine. So how can anyone make a living on this? It was bad enough in the UK. So I started working for newspapers. I worked on a redesign of a newspaper, did regular contributions to Hong Kong's main paper, and then ended up working for a lot of corporate clients.

So it's a long-winded explanation, but yeah, that's my journey into discovering my own work really. Moving away from editorial and having a lot more freedom.

Katie: 
Did you feel as well, like the geographical move to Hong Kong was helpful as well and like starting fresh, and being away from peers?

Tania: 
Totally. Yeah, it really was because that's that self-esteem and confidence issue we talk about all the time. I wasn't very confident. We did have an extremely talented high flying group of peers in our MA. Because I still hadn't kind of figured out whether I was a fine artist or an illustrator, I was still a bit in between.

I had a confidence issue and I think when I went off on my own somewhere else, I found it a lot easier to rebuild myself in my own terms. Without the comparison-itis,  that's so bad, isn't it? When you're always comparing yourself. And I think I did have that quite badly. So it was great to kind of hide from that and reinvent myself on my own terms.

Helen: 
I found that with leaving in London and moving to Berwick. I know it wasn't such a huge cultural shock as leaving London to go to Hong Kong. But I was in London for about 17 years around all the publishers, all the other authors, and illustrators. And then we moved up to Berwick, which is a little coastal town and it was brilliant.

It was really liberating not to know what everybody else was up to all the time and just be able to concentrate on my own thing.

Tania: 
Yeah, I think it's definitely something that everyone should undertake for a while. I can imagine coming up to Berwick, just being alone to find out what you sound like, what you look like when not looking over your shoulder, not looking at other people's work.

It's so hard to stay true to yourself. I mean, what did you do Katie? Can you talk about your BA and your MA that journey between the two ways? How did you find your voice?

Katie: 
So I graduated in 2012. I went to Sunderland Uni and it was a good course and everything and the tutors were all lovely and I got a graphic design job. I got head-hunted before I'd even graduated that they were like, 'that's amazing, Katie, this is so successful'. And I was kind of swept along with that. What they thought was really 'a really good job'.

I got to this office in Durham and I remember being like, 'it's going to get better... it's going to be good soon'. I was illustrating, and I was graphic designing, and it was just little things like emailing people that are two feet away from you and having to make coffee for middle aged men and them being like, 'well done, good work', pat on the head sort of stuff.

I was gradually building with rage in this job. I managed three months before I was sacked. (Hah!) So then I was like, you know what? This is not for me. If that's a successful graphic design illustration career, then I don't really want any.

So I went back to my retail job and I did illustration - I took whatever freelance jobs I could get. I was doing three days a week in retail, and I had to studio space in Newcastle. There were very cheap studio spaces, which was brilliant. It was basically a desk in a big building that was going to get demolished. And I could use this desk anytime. I think it was £12 a month? It was crazy. But I could afford it! Which was good.

I was working seven days a week because I was in retail on minimum wage, and I wasn't charging very much for my illustration because I hadn't been taught that and I didn't have the confidence to charge more. 

I just got to a point where I was like, 'this is also rubbish. I'm also opting out of this. I've tried two kinds of illustration now. And I don't like either.' So I went and I got a nanny job in Italy. So I went from Newcastle to Florence and it was just the best thing ever for me at that time. I'd gone from paddling like a swan on the water, paddling all the time to keep going. And then I got to Italy and this family, they were brilliant! I looked after the children, and they had an eco-friendly clothing business that they had me do bits of graphic design for.

They housed me, fed me, gave me some pocket money. And I now had all this time to work on my own stuff away from the pressures of worrying about bills and what other people were doing. And as well, the geographical move away from the North East where I'd grown up, to somewhere else where I was completely doing my own thing? That really helped. After a while in Italy, I moved to Germany and I was a nanny in Berlin as well. I went for like three months and three years later I was still there. It was an accidental 'this is nice. I will stay here'.

Tania: 
Was Berlin really inspiring?

Katie: 
Berlin was amazing. It was super cheap to live there. Everybody was an artist. I just went to yoga every day.

I got a studio space and yeah, it felt like a party all the time. But it did get to a point in three years when I decided to do my master's degree. So I was like, I think 'I've forgiven illustration, for being rubbish. I'll go and I'll do my masters'.

I got into Edinburgh College of Art, which was my dream from age 16. I'd been taken there on a school trip. And I remember just the smell of the oil paint and seeing the statues. I knew I wanted to study there! It just took a bit longer than I expected. But I went and did my masters.

When I was a nanny, I had just been making work for myself, filling my sketchbooks, and I wasn't putting any pressure on myself to like make my rent money or please any clients.

It was those sketchbooks that got me into my masters degree. They'd seen that I was just really obsessed with reportage illustration and observational drawing and that I just wanted to draw pictures. It was completely different to the work that I'd been doing at my BA. In that five years between BA and MA, I'd basically given up on being an illustrator and then come back to it in a sort of roundabout accidental way. 

I inadvertently found my creative voice, I suppose, just by being like 'sod off illustration. I hate this'.

Helen: 
We all kind of gave up on it and in the time we gave up on it and we were free, then we found our creative voices and came back. That's interesting that, isn't it?

Tania: 
Especially as well, hearing Katie's story in more detail, it's amazing. I mean, we give each other potted histories, shorthand versions of what we've done and we think we understand each other, but to find people's real stories, it's really fascinating. And the enrichment of living in Berlin and absorbing all that creative inspiration into your work. Sounds amazing. And can we go and live with your entire Italian employers? I want that life now! 

The opting-out is where the education really happens.

I find myself as we're working together and going through watching you do art club and I'm thinking, 'why don't I do more observational drawing? Why has observational drawing been less important in my illustration career compared to the way you both work?'

And just by articulating ideas about the way editorial, corporate or advertising works quite often, you're drawing from given references and that they're weird references that you can't go and look at to draw. So the conversation is explaining to me, 'Oh, that's why you've always got a photograph in front of yourself'. And - I hate drawing from photographs as much as the next person - and all through teaching, you say, 'Hey, you can't draw from photographs!' 

I think my career has been about trying to draw things and take them away from their photographic pedestrian starting point and make them into something more individual that has a bit more presence.

I can see that the observational drawing that you both do feeds your work so much, and it's such an essential part of what you do. I envy it, actually.

Helen:
It's really essential to what I do because if I wrote a story without imagining a real place, it wouldn't anchor properly. It wouldn't sit right in my mind. And so I like to imagine somewhere I've been or the place where I live. I just like to set it somewhere quite early on in the idea, even if in the end, the book, you can't even tell where it was set or that I did any drawing from life. It just helps the whole thing feel real to me while I'm making it.

Tania: 
Katie, you do lots of observational drawing as well. So how does that come into your work and your personal voice?

Katie: 
I think the observational drawing that I did in those five years, it just kept me drawing and didn't directly feed into my work until I got to my MA. I did a project where I was interviewing people about collections and drawing them at the same time. So I'd be drawing a portrait of them and then drawing what they were talking about around their head. And it was through that, that I accidentally discovered graphic recording and scribing and live illustration, which is what I do now! Live illustrating for Google and Facebook and stuff.

At the time I was just drawing what they're talking about. It was a weird combination of observational drawings and icons out of my head.

Tania:
Can you talk a bit about live illustration because some people won't know what it is and scribing? Can you describe it a bit?

Katie: 
I didn't know what it was until I started doing it! Haha. I was like, 'Oh, it's got a name! Brilliant. People can pay me to do this.' So it's a combination.

Sometimes live illustration is live event illustration. I'm a performance art at an event. For instance, painting windows at Regent street for Nespresso, about how great their coffee was etc.

And then sometimes it's scribing at a meeting. So rather than having boring written notes, I'll draw what people are talking about and make it into a visual narrative. The nice thing with that is the people that I'm illustrating for - they get the images to send to people that were at the meeting and they also get a video that automatically gets generated while I'm drawing. It's got two sides to it. There's the live event illustration. And then scribing, that's practical notes.

Helen: 
And when you're doing the practical notes, are those on a wall or on your iPad? And they project them? How do people get to see what you're doing?

Katie: 
At the moment? Because we're kind of still in half lockdown, pandemic mode while we're recording this, it's all on my iPad on Zoom meetings. But in the olden days before lockdown, I used to go and sometimes it'd be a giant piece of paper on the wall or a roll of paper and I'd be doing big drawings or I'd be on my iPad and they'd have it beaming onto a big screen or a projection so that everybody can see. So yeah, there's loads of different ways people use it.

Tania: 
What about live illustration? Are there two types like in live illustration is some of it observational drawing from life with people around like drawing the people who are there?

Katie: 
Yeah. Sometimes it is observational. So instead of hiring a photographer, they'll get me to draw what's going on. And sometimes for workshops and stuff, if there are children there and they don't want to have to get lots of permission slips, they'll get me to draw what they're doing and draw the activities as a way of recording the workshop. It's great because they get pictures afterwards to use in their social media, website, or whatever.

Helen: 
If you know, you're going to, say, a conference about wind turbines or whatever. Do you do a bit of research before you go to see what they look like so that when you get there, you can, or do you completely wing it?

Katie: 
It depends on how confident I'm feeling! When I went to work for Google, I thought I was going to die. So I was researching everything. I was like, 'I can't remember how to draw!' But I just researched everything I could possibly think of that they might mention, so that I knew what it looked like in my head before I began. But usually I just wing it and I just turn up and I'm like, 'I'll draw whatever you want.'

Tania: 
Illustrators are usually quite solitary or they hide away in a dark studio. 'I'm going to do a weird drawing. No one look over my shoulder'. Whereas you're the opposite, Katie. You're right in it. Everyone watching you draw as entertainment. How did you deal with the bravery issue and the confidence?

Katie: 
I dunno. I think like the main thing that I love about it is that it's done. I can't procrastinate because it has to happen live. And then there are no changes because it's live. It's removed all the things that I hated about traditional illustration! I'd be putting it off until the very last minute, and hating every minute of it. And then all the changes the client would want, and both of those things are not involved in live illustration.

When I'm nervous I tell myself, 'when this is done, I can go to sleep and they will never talk to me again.'

Tania: 
I'm so jealous. The job I'm working on now is going at such breakneck speed. The only blessing is there is no time for changes. So I'm glad I'm old and experienced where I can think, 'no, don't put that in because they won't like it. And then it'll be a disaster when it's printed, just stay safe because this is going to print tomorrow morning'.

Helen: 
I'm interested to know what you've edited out, Tania, that you've thought 'they won't like that. I won't put it in'.

Tania:
There's nothing exciting. I wish I could give you something really thrilling, but it was basically a suitcase with it is dangerous stuff like, Oh, that looks too much like a Louis Vuitton suitcase, take all the pattern off it.

You get to the stage where you think, 'Oh they'll always get upset about that. Don't put it in'. Even if I want to. So yeah, Katie, you're in the right place with that. It's over. It's done. I performed it. It's finished.

Katie: 
Yeah. If you don't like it... Tough.

Tania:
It's just nice to share proper inside stories about each other's careers and find out how many commonalities there are. And I think lots of people who might consider doing the course share the same things.

It's the bits that you never talk about are actually your major concerns. Who am I? Who is my work? And that's what the course is. Hopefully. Well, given the testimonials, that's what I cost does address is spending some time to find out who you really are and how that looks in your work.

Katie: 
Yeah. And what effect that has on your career. Like once you know your creative voice, you become kind of a magnet, don't you? For the work you want to do more of.

Helen: 
You stand out from the crowd. It's the key to a long career. Isn't it?

Tania:
I think it's also similar to the role you occupy amongst friends or socially. If you are someone who's very sure of themselves, you are calm. You know who you are. That attracts people and they remember you for who you are, because you're a safe pair of hands and you stand out.

 FIND YOUR CREATIVE VOICE: FLY YOUR FREAK FLAG

Doors closed for this live round on the 10th of August but... you can still

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