Here's a transcript from our podcast. In this episode we cover imposter syndrome, being a beginner (and why that's a superpower), embracing ugly drawings, and permission to reinvent yourself.

Dealing With Imposter Syndrome as an Illustrator

Tania: This is really common within the crew on the course. I felt like that at some points, I know, and you still have to keep addressing it and going back to it because it does rear its ugly head every now and then, but just know that you have permission to do it. You don't have to seek permission from someone else. This is your choice.

Katie: Understanding that everyone feels imposter syndrome at some time, no matter how successful they seem to you or how far or early on in their career they are, they do feel imposter syndrome. It's totally normal.

A really common thing that illustrators and creatives struggle with is imposter syndrome.

Helen: Be careful how you portray yourself to other people. So if you've got imposter syndrome and on your Instagram profile you write 'would-be illustrator', then people see you as a, 'would-be illustrator' rather than illustrator! Be brave and call yourself an illustrator.

Katie: We dare you to get rid of the word aspiring or wannabe!

Helen: I remember in the early days of being an illustrator, when a lot of my college or school friends had gone off and bought houses and got married and I was still living in a studio flat, so desperate to be an illustrator, I was just doing everything to make that possible.

I'd go to a family wedding or something and I would talk to distant relatives and they'd say 'what're you doing?'. And I felt apologetic, as if I should say why I hadn't done all of these things. I hadn't ticked off all these life achievements. And I'd say, 'well, you know, I'm trying to be an illustrator'. And then I'd feel hurt when they reflected it back at me. It's good to make a kind of rule that you're not going to feed bad vibes to other people because they'll just reflect them back!

Katie: It's so important to say nice things to yourself. It reflects in your outside world! I remember uni lecturer used to say that it was just silly 'California life coach talk'. But I was like, YES, that's really good! We need to have California life coach talk in our head! Or we'll not get anything done...

Tania: Why wouldn't we want it? And that's why we want to live like a Californian life coach because they have great lives because what they said worked and now they live in the sunshine only doing three hours a day. So I think there's something to be learned from it.

Helen: Do you know what? I went to psychotherapy when I was really struggling with this feeling that distant members and non-important people in my life were judging me and she would pick apart those conversations and she'd say, well, what did you say at the beginning of the conversation? And I'd recall what I said and she'd say, 'well, there you are, you started it'. And it was really important to recognize it. And it was an incredibly simple change to make that made a huge difference.

Tania: Yeah. I think the thing we said earlier as well about, um, when you say to someone who is unfamiliar with your industry, um, I'm an illustrator or I'm a writer, I'm a musician, their brain races come up with something relevant. So they're always going to say, 'Oh, so have you had a book published?' Or 'where can I see your work?' And because you may not have an answer in the early part of your career, you feel like the imposter or the fraud and they are just trying to speak to you. They're not saying you don't have the right to call yourself that because you haven't got published book, they're just trying to make conversation. And you took it seriously, like a lack of permission.

They're just grasping for conversation threads.

Katie: They're not going to say, 'hows your portfolio? Are you, drawing every day?'

'I'm going to take that illustrator badge off you because you're not published'.

Tania: But you have to remember as well that writers, painters, authors all feel like this because you're doing the work and you're not being paid at that time because you're creating work to present to someone - that doesn't invalidate you in terms of your career.

"Everyone has to start somewhere. The money, the revenue may come later, but the work is your choice and you are that person by merely doing it. You don't need extra permission."

Helen: I remember somebody said to me, once that you should never say to your child, wow, that piece of artwork is so good. You could be an artist one day, because guess what? They are an artist immediately right now.

"The other barrier people put up to stopping finding their creative voice is that they're too scared to start because they're worried they won't like what they make."

Katie: Every time we launch the course, (it's called Find Your Creative Voice: Fly Your Freak Flag). And people say, what if people don't like my freak flag. What if I make this new body of work? And then I don't get any more commissions, I don't make any money. So it's a totally understandable barrier. It's very real.

Helen: The thing is though, I think if you're not enjoying the work you're making, now you have absolutely nothing to lose by finding your own voice. It's so incredibly valuable.

Tania: It's also your voice. If you don't like it, as it is now, if it's artificial or false and you want to find the kind of the real you, it will show in the work you're doing. Now, if you've really lost faith in it, it's kind of dead in the water. So you've got nothing to lose by abandoning. And moving sideways to find your real voice. I mean, we did discuss economic aspects of this. Some people say, as you mentioned, Katie, if you've got a lot of work, you feel you haven't got the freedom to take time off to create a new body of work. So what would you suggest for that?

Katie: Yeah. So it's definitely a privilege to press pause on your career and take time out.

Helen: You could put a small time aside every day. If you wanted to carry on taking your commissions, you could always put an hour aside every morning. Yeah.

Katie: Yeah. So it doesn't have to be this giant scary 'take a year off, abandon everything' thing. You can just carve out daily time. Or if you're not getting any work and you just want to kind of start fresh, then it could be that your part-time job supports you while you investigate new avenues of work and different ways of working.

Helen: Some people are literally scared to start a drawing though. I've come across that quite often, people have had a break in their career or something. And that gap makes them too scared to even put the pen on the page. You know, that thing with a blank sheet of paper, you're so worried about making a mark in case it's wrong. That's a really common issue, isn't it?

Tania: I think it's the expectations are too high at that state. And the first drawing you make is going to define whether this is going to go well or go badly, but you really have to make loads of work to begin with, to find, to get through the ugly stuff, to start to find your actual voice and be prepared to make that ugly work.

Helen: I liked what you said about inviting the ugly in Tania. That's brilliant. Invite the ugly in!

Katie: And also take the emotional thing out of it. And if you can put your data head on, like, say for instance, as a 3% success rate, if you make a hundred drawings, three of them will be good. I'm using air quotes because there's no such thing as good and bad, but in a hypothetical world where there's good and bad art, um, it's just a case of making more. Like, have you made enough drawings to have good ones come out yet?

Helen: Yeah. Remember you've got millions and millions of drawings inside you and you can afford for half of them more than half of them, you can offer nearly all of them to be bad. And the other thing is go and do our Sketchbooker's Friend!

Katie: Yes. So we created this audio guide, especially for the sort of situation where you want to draw, but you're just not doing it for whatever reason. And it's like the audio equivalent of us holding your hand and sitting down with you to draw for 15 minutes and that's all it takes and it sort of kicks you off.

Tania: And if you did that every day, 15 minutes a day, you know, they're just showing up concept that we've talked about and give yourself 20 minutes a day of drawing time drawing as well. This, this is what we do with The Sketchbooker's Friend - is keep the drawings quite short. So you don't overwork them and you don't overinvest into 15 minutes of one drawing and think it's a failure, try a few drawings, quick ones, longer ones. Um, and the mere act of showing up will guarantee that you get your 3% out of every 15 minutes you draw. And over a week or two, you're going to have a series of good drawings and a full wastepaper bin. And that's perfectly normal.

Helen: You should see the pile of paper that goes in our recycle bin. I finished making a picture book. You wouldn't believe it.

Katie: I also think it's important to know that if you hate your work, that's fine. People get really angry and upset like 'I don't like my drawing!" And I'm like, why are you so worried about that? That's fine. Just make some more drawings.

Tania: I think it's also a bit like going on holiday and working all year and having a really rough time. And it comes to the holiday with your family and just thinking we're going to have a fabulous time, two weeks of loveliness, and it's all going to be great. That's the same as thinking, right? I'm going to give myself time to draw. It won't all be good. And as long as your expectations are realistic, it's going to be a useful process. But I think if you're over expecting, that's when the disappointment comes, and then you beat yourself up with that disappointment and say, 'it's not working for me. It's no good'. You haven't given yourself a chance. Hopefully The Sketchbooker's Friend is where with consistent use, you're giving yourself that chance you need to make good work.

Katie: Yeah. It's not the sexy answer, but it's just show up. Be consistent. Keep drawing.

Helen: Yeah. That's it.

Tania: Yeah. Don't set your expectations at making genius artwork set it at making 15 minutes of work every day.

Does the task seem too big to handle? This task of working on your creative voice.

Helen: I think that it can be really overwhelming, particularly if you've had some time out. Maybe it seems as if getting a folio together, starting work again is just far too big. And where do you start?

Tania: Well, this is where we need Katie's Mum. What did she used to say?

Katie: When I was growing up, I would frequently get overwhelmed with tasks, schoolwork, whatever. And my mum would say, how do you eat an elephant? One teaspoon at a time.

Tania: It seems such a cliche, but you've got to use the right language and chop something up into small tasks. If you say I'm going to do a huge portfolio of work and go and see some clients and get, get a career sorted. And you think that's a two month activity, um, you're kind of setting yourself up to fail for sure. But if you say I'm just going to start drawing and see what comes out and keep the good ones I'm throwing away the bad that's that's already a, a good place to start.

Katie: That's why I like daily projects so much as well. You can do one thing. One thing a day, it's a big undertaking, but you can say, 'This is going to be one thing per day'. And then after a hundred days, you've got a hundred things. But if you sat down and you were like, 'ok i'm going to do a hundred drawings', I don't think you'd do it in the same way.

Helen: Yeah. It's that drip, drip, drip do something consistently. Even if it's just 10, 15 minutes of it, every day builds up into something much bigger. The other thing I like to do is give myself a treat when I've finished a small goal. So I set my goals really small. So, you know, I'll do an hour of, of the work that I'm not that keen on tackling today. I do that this morning at the end of that hour, hot chocolate.

Tania: But yeah, definitely treat yourself like you would treat a reluctant child. If you've got to trick them into doing something only reveal 10% of the task and give them that one day, keep the other stuff secret. And just bit by bit.

Helen: The other thing I do is try to catch myself out. So I will decide to work on the bed for an hour because I feel as if I'm not working and that feels, it just feels like there's not so much pressure it's an easy place to work.

Katie: Oh, that old trick of, Oh, just do five minutes. And then by the time you've got everything out, you're sitting at your desk, you do five minutes and think 'ah, I'm actually quite enjoying it. Now I'm just going to carry on'

Tania: Didn't you have a system Katie, the 20-minute timer, I think. Yeah.

Katie: Well the Pomodoro technique lets you set a timer for 25 minutes. Then you work for twenty-five minutes and have a five-minute break work for 25 minutes. Have a five-minute break. Yeah. That's definitely like treating yourself all the time.

Tania: That first 25 minutes, if you search yourself, you're only going to have to do 25 minutes this morning, just begin that project. And then you have to stop. You can't carry on by 22 minutes having a ball. This is going really well. What do you mean I can't do anymore today? I'm in the zone. Reverse psychology, more tricking of yourself.

Helen: So the other thing that stops people from finding their freak flag or finding their creative voice is that they're worried that if they changed tack nobody like their new freak flag. Yes. So we've all had experience of this, haven't we? We've all in our own ways stopped what we were doing and had a period where we've had a rethink.

And that worked out alright. Yes?

Katie: Yes! I think for all of us it's worked out alright. So for me, it was sort of giving up on illustration and being like, 'you know what, this is rubbish. I'm going to do something else'. And then when I came back around to it because I'd had that time to think about what I wanted to do and what I enjoyed and what style of working worked best, the work that I made after that break was way better than it would have been had. I just plowed through and kept going.

Helen: Yeah. I found the same thing. I was lucky because I'd had some nice royalty checks to keep me going. And I lived very frugally for a year, but I went back to my sketchbooks and tried to work out a bridge between what I'd done at college and the work I really enjoyed at college and my illustration work. Cause I felt I'd gone off track a bit and it was really valuable time. And I worried that entire time that when I came back with this new work, that nobody would like it. But I think people can see your enthusiasm and they value your passion and they can see it has authenticity.

Katie: Yeah. I think when you're excited about your work, other people can get excited about it way more easily.

Tania: I think it also drains you as well. If you don't like the work you're doing the work, the quality of the work starts to degrade and you know, you can't keep repeating it. And probably for all of us, we've been at that stage where you thought, Oh, I'll either stop doing this. I'd rather have to do something I'm not invested in like a regular job than to repeat the fakery of faking work or a voice of mine that I don't, I'm not happy with for me. I was able to leave the UK. Well, I made the choice to leave the UK work abroad and being somewhere else with other people was the perfect situation to kind of reveal who you really are and say I'm changing track, but no, there's no one there to notice or witness you change track because you're in a different place. And it felt a lot easier. Um, living overseas to do what I thought I really wanted to do. Cause I got tired of the work that I'd graduated with. I'd also found it wasn't really technically a wise idea to do monoprints on a mangle as a form of illustration and send tacky oil painted bits of paper to, um, to magazines, which they would have to put on a drum roll. I hadn't really figured this out.

Katie: What could possibly go wrong?!

Tania: They'll all stick to each other when you unroll the piece of paper. I came from quite a fine arty background where finding technical or unusual print methods to create a style of work like material-dependent methods, um, was supposedly your voice. But actually, it's not, it doesn't have to be clever materials or techniques. It's how you draw. It's what you draw and how you visualize that. So I did all that unlearning and had a fresh start overseas, and that was great.

Helen: And I don't think you necessarily need to put aside a whole year to do this. You could put aside an hour or so every day and explore your new work.

Katie: And a lot of people do in the course, they've got kids, they've got full-time jobs, they've got a full life going on and they're just getting up early to do it, or they're doing it after children have gone to bed. I think it can work. You can make it work if you want it to work.

Tania: It's different circumstances, different economic backgrounds. I think if you know yourself well enough that you are A: able to and B: respond to a solid chunk of time, like three weeks away. Or you do the kind of slices of time that you feed into your life. Just the way you would do 15 minutes yoga a day. So there's different methods, whichever suits you, but you have the right to reinvent yourself. It's not inauthentic to do that.

You are allowed!

Helen: And I think it's really exciting to explore new materials all the time. So, you know, I took that year out to find my own voice, but recently I decided to do a book digitally and it was a whole new adventure and it was brilliant and it's not because my voice completely changed I just decided to explore some new materials to keep everything fresh. So yeah, it's great.

Tania: You've got to begin again. Be the beginner again, I love that. It's a really underestimated situation when people say, 'well, I don't know whether I know how to learn, how to use these things', whether it's digital or traditional materials, but that's such a good place to be - it's like splashing around in the water. You don't quite know what you're doing, but it can make for really interesting results.

Helen: There's huge power in naivety. Because if you don't know all the rules, you can't make any mistakes. And that's where your voice comes from.

Katie: I'm always amazed when people say like, 'Oh, I could never do that', as if you're born magically knowing how to do things when you've got to figure it out and make mistakes, maybe watch a couple of YouTube tutorials. There's this weird thing when you're an artist or a creative, people say 'you're so talented. That's amazing what a gift you've been given' - gah! I draw every day, practice loads, I learn all the things. It's not like somebody just bashed me over the head with a magic book when I was a baby or something.

Tania: That's sort of where people, you know, underpay because they think it's a natural gift that you haven't struggled as hard as a geologist or an accountant or an upholsterer to master your trade. This is, we've all done the same thing. So yeah, it's, it's hard work that gets you there.

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