[ This story was first published in my newsletter over at PencilBooth carrying the title “Illustrators of the world, diversify!” ]
Today is April 1st, and while for many it means you are allowed to do practical jokes, in Japan it’s the day schools and companies start the new year.
Every day is a perfect day to start doing things anew and today I’d like to tell you how I do that, with a bit more attention to one concrete example. Hopefully this will incite you to do something creative for yourself.
Happy New Year!
Making things unasked.
As an illustrator I am used to be asked to draw things for clients. The $ compensation is mostly the reason for doing those. It’s great to have the chance to be asked and it puts bread on my table and clothes my children. Wonderful arrangement.
But as a creative you need to be always learning, always hungry for new ways to do things. With client work you will be often asked to do “that thing you did before”. It’s diversity (in subjects, in style, in kinds of work) what will drive your career further. The experiments and tryouts that you do for yourself today is what you will get asked (and paid) to do for clients tomorrow.
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Personal work always pays off.
I’ve often told in interviews how my Home Stayer project set my illustration career on turbo, I sold many prints, got my work featured in several publications and got the attention from Jon and Tom at Handsome Frank, which became my agent ever since.
Honestly, always always make personal work a priority once you’re done with the client deadlines. The gym can wait.
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Make it be anything. But make it.
A t-shirt line, a box full of poems, a clay sculpture or a piece of software. It doesn’t really matter what you do. Just find of a subject that interests you and think of what would be the best way to make it come to life. It could be anything really. I try to do things that are easier for me (series of drawings, a comic, a poster series…) but you might want to finally get guitar lessons before you write a song.
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A iMessage stickers app, sure why not?
This is one of the latest things I made for myself: The Mr Mendo Basic Pack of stickers for iOS.
Since I wanted to learn about character development I created Mister Mendo and gave it life in different ways. I wrote about it in an older edition of this newsletter. By creating the character, I had material to make him live in comics, I made some garments with him, used him a lot on all the Mundo Mendo show in Seoul graphics and signage, and created this iOS (iPhone/iPad devices OS) sticker pack that you can use on iMessage and other apps to spice up your conversations. They also work as Instagram stickers. You can download here.
Before you ask: it’s very difficult to make good looking sticker packs for other message apps and/or keep them yours without making someone else richer.
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Success can’t be measured.
We made the pack for free at first. It’s been 1 year on the App Store and it has been downloaded 90.000 times. Loved by Apple (they featured it on the home of the AppStore in the US) and users have give us nice feedback.
But this is not how I measure success. The whole point of making the sticker pack was just to practise, learn about how to make something like this, and have some fun. Also having a portfolio piece that wasn’t a static image in my portfolio but something people would carry in their pockets. In that sense the pack was already a success before being on the App Store.
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Collaborate
Of course I had no idea on how to technically tackle a project like this, but my friend Vincent Rijnbeek did, and he is always in for a creative challenge. You should never underestimate other people’s talents. When you meet someone working in other fields, always get close: they will teach you things about something you didn’t know and also you can end up being able to work together on something. This is what happened with Vincent and me.
