Potboilers

Your best work will not be produced via commission. Your best work will come from your own vision, undiluted by anyone else's input, and achieved from long uninterrupted hours at your easel. That said, we illustrators thrive on the crazy adrenaline rush of assignments that come at us in a flurry and fly out of our studios just as quickly, leaving us wild-eyed and tired with some money in our pockets. The commissioned project can give us a sense of accomplishment and pride but cannot in the long run sustain us or boost us to the next level of individual skill or personal idea formulation. Assuming that you desire a fulfilling art career in which you get to lavish your attention and manual skills on ideas and projects that you love, then you may want to rethink what projects you take on.

A career made of fast, short projects or uninspiring commissioned work will *never* allow an artist to really hone any rigorous painting or drawing skills other than perhaps how to cut corners for speed. Duh, right? Fast short projects can occasionally be a good exercise for making the illustrator to have to think quickly, sometimes producing clever results. However, this too can eventually go awry since those initially clever solutions can become gimmicky or produce cookie-cutter responses. We see this happening in a lot of the F+SF industry; when artists are asked to design, rough out, and execute a project in color within a few days, many of the solutions become formulaic. Much of the children's science and educational industry is geared towards this kind of production as well. Schedules are often so tight that artists adopt "styles" from whatever is trending in any given season. Fine artists, too, occasionally take on uninspiring commissions for quick income and do so to their own detriment when they allow the patron to dictate the outcome.

Young illustrators looking for quick entry into the industry, the promise of "getting one's feet wet", "exposure", or the feeling of "paying your dues" are always tempted by potboilers. Female illustrators are even more susceptible to falling into the potboiler trap and never getting out. The social reality of women's lives is that mothers' and caretakers' time doesn't often include long uninterrupted hours for big projects; small assignments can be completed in very short bursts and can tolerate incessant interruptions. In an industry like F+SF where rigorous painting and drawing skills are more valued and monetized, the potboiler trap may be greatly implicated as to why there are fewer women illustrators in this genre.

Almost all artists see potboilers as a pathway to "bigger and better things." What is this "bigger and better" thing? And can't we just skip right to it?

Potboilers don't pay all that well so the bar for quality is set a bit lower; the company isn't taking any real economic risks with these works. Depending on how fast you work, you may be able to crank out a dozen or more of these in a month's time in order to pay the bills. Month after month and year after year you may have your bills paid, but will you really satisfied with a career built on throwaway commissions? If you're not spending an equal amount of time on your own personal projects, then your *career* is eroding your artistic desire and you will eventually lose your artistic integrity.

I will say it again: short, fast, throwaway projects will *never* bump you up to the level of the "big players." Why? Because quick and dirty commissioned work is not the same thing as honing your skills or developing a sustained lifetime practice in art. Ask yourself: why did you get into this in the first place?

Better commissions pay more, have lengthier turnaround time, and offer the artist more say in the conceptual process. By paying the artist more, the company is taking more risk and investing in the artists' vision.These are rare commissions and seasoned illustrators are more likely to secure them. If you aren't able to get these commissions right now because you need to build up your "artistic vision capital" within the industry, then the bigger and better thing is having your own "fine art", personal work to do. It is better to spend your time working on your own ideas. stories, and developing a rigorous practice than to waste your time and effort on crappy commission work.

It is the luxury of time spent on a project that an artist needs most of all. Time to conceptualize an idea and plan out a series of images that best carry that idea. Time to grex and mull over the drawings and make revisions if necessary. Time to plan the color and value structure. Time to luxuriate in the medium. It is quality studio time only that will produce excellence in the artist.

If Other Professions Were Paid Like Artists

Art by Melanie Gillman

The Hawkeye Intiative

One of the most socially important memes out there is perhaps the genderflip, and one of the FUNNIEST collections of this strategy is contained in the site, The Hawkeye Initiative. The blog's premise is that in order to identify sexism in the comic book/ graphic novel industry, all one has to do is to flip the gender of the image portrayed. So, if a female superhero's "Strong Female Pose" looks a little suspicious, you can bet that if you put male superhero, Hawkeye, in her place its inherent sexism will be exposed...

      

                         Here, Avengelyne gets the Hawkeye treatment from artist Deimos-Remus on Deviantart.com. 
                                                                        "Owww... got to get to the chiropractor..."

What's really cool about this site is that it allows comic book lovers of all stripes to create their own artwork in response to the ridiculousness of what the industry is publishing, and upload that content (along with the original example) and add it to the site. In this way, it is a curated collection of images that exposes and isolates the sexism embedded and naturalized in the images, and educates the community of comic book viewers to what is really happening within the genre.When the viewer can bring her new awareness to her reading of these stories she can then commit to buying the comic books that already offer better representations of its female characters, and use her purchasing power to demand the industry to produce less-demeaning alternatives. It also offers the aspiring artist a lot of insight into how to authentically empower her own female characters.


              

"Enter now... oof... I think my hip just went out...." (Gambit & The Externals/ Tony Daniels)

And more silly stuff. We humans are a funny lot. 

"Wait! Don't shoot muh package..."  (Jose Malaga/ Jeffrey Dean)

You Don't Know How I Feel

If you are a female, having a career within the art world means that you will be confronted with several issues with which your male counterparts won't necessarily have to contend. To women working in the narrower field of illustration and the F+SF genre in particular, some of these issues are more glaring and others less obtrusive, but all still meriting our attention. Since inception in 1985, an anonymous band of feminist artists called The Guerilla Girls, have been bringing these issues to the fore with its sharp and funny insight into the corporate art institutions' sexist, racist, and corrupt practices and policies, The group has illuminated for over a generation what remains unfair and patently ridiculous about corporate arts culture.

Several of the issues that the group has identified are: unequal representation in museums and national shows, the almost complete lack of representation for artists of color, the fetishization / glamorization of violence against women, unequal pay in the marketplace (women artists earn only *1/3* of what male artists do), having to choose between a career and parenthood, being seen only as another's protege, reinforced hetero-normative values, having your work labeled as "feminine", and so on.

Ingres creepy extra-vertebrated creature gets a reboot.

Are any of these issues personally familiar to you?  You will have, as a female artist, person of color, or different sexual orientation, undoubtedly bumped up against some aspects of this culture at some point in your career. Many other illustrators who've worked in the publishing industry for any length of time will recognize many parallels in their own working sphere.

When we examine more closely the specific experiences of women illustrators working in the F+SF field, we find that many of these issues are simultaneously nullified and amplified.

Of the many artist friends with whom I've conversed about these issues admit to mostly having difficulties with spousal support of their career. Artists who are also parents are expected to automatically shoulder the domestic and child care duties in addition to busy careers, particularly if the spouse with whom s/he shares a household  is a higher wage earner.  Some aspiring young artists feel that they are inevitably faced with a choice of career vs motherhood, and decide to forego the latter entirely. Though partnered, these artists are still expected to attend to the daily household chores. Laundry, cleaning, shopping, cooking, etc., take a substantial chunk of time, time that could be spent on one's career.

And let's be honest for a moment: for a man, choosing a career in art it is thought to be his "calling." He is considered a professional artist. His wife becomes the high priestess in service to his mission, both of them working hard to ensure that he "makes it big" someday. But the reverse commitment is rarely true. A woman's choice to have an art career is not often heralded with equal enthusiasm and may be dismissed as only a dabbler, a dilettante. Oh dearie me, an art career? Well, you need to get married so someone can support your hobby. Yes, this double-standard really exists.

Persistent issues of fewer work hours, lack of domestic support, and general lack of emotional support of women's artistic endeavors are tied insidiously into the issue of lower pay. But add to this the industry's insult by way of "ghettoization' of women's creative work, and you have a perfect system that makes it incredibly more difficult for women to successfully establish themselves as professional creatives. That the publishing industry labels women's work as "feminine" and perceives it as a liability is a well-known fact. It is why many female authors choose male pen names and often write about male heroes and protagonists instead of female ones.

Some may say that the more disturbing aspect of swimming in these testosterone-filled waters, where the industry's profits come mostly from the discretionary money of white males 14-40,  is feeling that one must cave in to creating the work that the industry wants. Because gratuitous violence, aggrandizement of war, and gratuitous female nudity (masturbation melons?) is the bulk of we see in the comic book industry /F+SF, many of us conform to this industry standard by offering up the same kind of work, a general regurgitation of the sanctioned stories within the accepted formulas that has been in force since the genre was born.

Well, what's wrong with it? You might decide that it's perfectly okay to reinforce the status quo and perpetuate the sexualization of violence, misrepresentation (or entire lack of representation) of women and other people on the margins, the romanticization of specific gender roles, etc. You can do this by creating work that is exactly like what has been published for several generations in the western market.

Or you can do something more fun. You can subvert it. Use the form and turn it on its head.

Several contemporary realist painters offer some insight into how this might be done. In an earlier post, I mentioned the work of contemporary fantastic painter, Odd Nerdrum. I offer his work as an example of a classical, Renaissance-style painter who is not a romanticist. John Currin's another one. His beautifully rendered work, while amusing, is deeply disturbing in its candor. And Lisa Yuskavage's seductively grotesque work "one-ups masculinity" by amplifying the female body in all the right places, adding that touch of a soft romantic glow in the colors and value structure, yet the combination of her style and the content leaves the viewer feeling more than a little queasy about one's suddenly realized assumptions.

These painters have taken the traditional form of romanticist realist painting and subject matter (formal portraits, the fantastic-heroic, and sexuality) and have used it to subvert that which it was originally used to aggrandize. Their combinations of fantasy and realism help to drive home their message of the myth and how it depersonalizes. They insist that we take an uncomfortably close look at the ways in which we have fetishized ourselves.

Now that more women than ever are working as illustrators and artists, we have a big opportunity here to change the industry from the inside out. We are on the cusp of a big paradigm shift. Ours is one of the few industries in which its practitioners have actual first-person control over the ways in which we can represent ourselves and tell our stories. It's a huge advantage and we should make the best of it while we can and set some higher, better standards. Are you on board?

The 99

Like superheroes and comics? How about multicultural ones? What if they're Muslim? In a world where certain ideologies are often twisted so that they are perceived as representative of one narrow and intolerant viewpoint, here's one astonishing and ambitious effort to change that.  Using the comic book platform, Naif Al-Mutawa's goal is to create a new moral framework within Islam for confronting evil. With his story of The 99, he and his team hope to "smash stereotypes and battle extremism" while entertaining its readers with stories of hope and positive moral lessons. Here, in this TED talk, Al-Mutawa explains his creative mission, drawing several comparisons to the creators of Superman:

http://www.ted.com/talks/naif_al_mutawa_superheroes_inspired_by_islam.html

Fighting the lack of multi-cultural representation within the comic book world industry since 2010...

 From TED:

Widad the Loving, Bari the Healer, Mumita the Destroyer and friends, all working together to fight evil -- the virtues of Islam are embodied in the characters of the thrilling new comic The 99. Naif Al-Mutawa, a clinical psychologist by training, created the characters with a team of artists and writers to showcase traditional, tolerant and enlightened Muslim values in the guise of good old-fashioned superheroes, ordinary mortals who acquire special powers and crisscross the globe on missions.

In a crossover comic series with the Justice League in 2010, The 99 were saving the world alongside all-American heroes like Superman, Batman, and a fully-clothed Wonder Woman. Al-Mutawa's creative team also launched an animated cartoon series on the US cable channel, The Hub.

Seeing that this is a comic inspired by Islam, you're not likely to see any representative LGBT characters-- but then, it's taken DC a while to out Batwoman. However, this is still quite an interesting and inspiring project that holds promise to be a good force in the world. 

A Portfolio Strategy

If you're an aspiring illustrator and need to create a portfolio or you're tired of the one you've got and need to entirely revamp it, here's a tried-and-true strategy for building a portfolio fairly quickly within a year's time. This method also works for building a body of work for an upcoming gallery show:

1. Make a list of 100 wonderful image ideas. This list should be a fairly direct reflection of your aesthetics  and influences and what you want to look at. Love landscapes and natural places? Make a list of all the real and imagined places you'd like to "see" in paint. Love mythology and spirituality? Make a list of all the interesting deities and or arcana that you think would be cool to visualize. Love pirates and mermaids? ... You get it.

In doing this exercise, your content, if you didn't already know what it was, will begin to emerge through the subject matter. This is your theme, and more often than not it is a mashup of several things. For example, you may enjoy painting sweeping landscapes *and* women on horseback. This means that you are either interested in the Southwestern genre of painting or, changing a few of the details, perhaps the historical or fantasy genre. How realistically you paint, how much historical accuracy you engage in, can determine the philosophical direction in which you go.

2. Cherry-pick the best ideas and begin making sketches / drawings. Do this until you have at least 50 drawings. Some ideas will turn out to be duds and other, more innocuous ideas, may turn out to be spectacular. Keep drawing. Don't worry about anatomical accuracy yet. Don't use reference. At this stage you are only designing the idea and getting it directly out of your head and onto paper. You can go back later and grex over all the specifics and details. Work on standard 8 x 10 paper or similar-- not too big-- a sketchbook size. (If you're working on old-fashioned paper, be sure you love the feel of it. Suggestion: smooth vellum is awesome.) It may take you six months to work this out.

Yes, this will be the most difficult part of this process for most, but it gets easier once you begin to identify the creative elements that "move you" to make art in the first place. 50 drawings is really not such a crazy idea. You will need this many drawings in this mode of thinking - and perhaps more-- to get comfortable with who you are as an artist and what makes you tick. (If you're not a "linear" thinker and prefer value patches, then by all means, make small b&w studies in a different medium; the method will still work.)

3. Then, you will cherry-pick the top 10- 15 drawings to execute in color. Depending on the degree of finish that you gave the drawings, you may have to tighten them up. At this stage, bolt down any specifics for the painting, like value structure, anatomy, perspective, etc., so that your "blueprint" will be as effective as you need it. Refer often to artists whose color / facture work inspires and educates you.

That's it. Plan a year for this process, 6 months if you're fast. It works.
Have fun creating!