This week I published my first piece for Food52, which is also the first piece I’d ever illustrated digitally.
I never thought I’d be able to get into editorial illustration. Not because of lack of skills – though I have also improved a lot since I started drawing late last year – but I found digital art totally overwhelming, so I avoided it. I spent a lot of quarantine making art – sometimes cooking, sometimes biking, but mostly making art. I tried so many hobbies to occupy my time before turning to art at the last minute, back in the fall of last year. Which is funny because I was always an artist. I see kids on TikTok brag (correctly) about the portfolios that got them 5s in AP Art. I took AP Art too. I got a 4 and I don’t remember my portfolio being anywhere near as good as these kids’, but still: I was an art kid. Heck, my best friend is a friend from high school art class.
There are certainly artists out there who get into editorial illustration without mastering digital art, but I knew I wouldn’t be one of them. I needed to be able to edit based on editors’ suggestions and needs, and I can be too precious about my regular (analog?) art. It’s taken a lot of mental dismantling of that preciousness that got me to finally share my art and push myself to try new things with it.
It doesn’t help that when I tried to get into art outside of the classroom, I defaulted to watercolor. Why is it that when people want to start trying making art, they always start with watercolors? Maybe it’s because watercolor isn’t done on an easel or even a drafting table, because the colors might run. So you just need a desk. It requires tiny art supplies, tucked into a small case, which can come cheaply if you don’t know about quality. You can get small watercolor pads or blocks, and simple, seemingly straightforward tutorials, usually of painting nature, or at least natural things like flowers.
In short, watercolor has a marketing problem: its littleness, its tweeness, its femininity suggests ease. But watercolor is hard, especially for a beginner. Take it from someone who had to run through many mediums before being able to tackle watercolor again. You can’t layer colors like you can with acrylic or gouache. You don’t have control like you do with inks or markers. You don’t even have the option to go light to dark, layering as the drawing takes shape, like you can with colored pencils. Oh, if you’re an expert, or someone who’s been doing it a while, you probably have all those things. But when you’re just starting out, something like layering, control, values, what-have-you – they’re hard to catch on1.
I really like this piece by Sophie Lucido Johnson on how difficult watercolors can be. And this is someone is a master of control and color of watercolor.
So during the pandemic, I left watercolor. I tried my hand at acrylics, which need an easel. Acrylics, which need you to be standing and concentrating and treating yourself like a Real Artist, with a palette and tubes of paint. Acrylics, which require facing not a blank page (which can be conceivably tucked away in a desk or sketchbook, or even crumpled up or burned), but a blank canvas, a heavy thing that once bought demands your attention with its blankness, as if to say: well, what are you waiting for? Even if I never showed the canvas to anyone, it would loom large in my mind.
The other aspect of watercolor is its quickness. You fail rather quickly, the colors going muddy or the people becoming lopsided. But with acrylic, there’s always the option of pushing through, of painting layer over layer until something emerges that feels true. I did maybe 20-30 versions before I finished this painting of Chris Evans for my friend Morgan. Friends are a great motivation for art – I texted friends the image to get advice on whether it looked like him, and I pushed myself to finish it over the course of two days because I wanted to give it to Morgan, who I’d kept in contact with during the pandemic even as we were on opposite coasts. Even then I would only get 15 minutes to see her that day, to avoid staying in the city too long.
Acrylics eventually got me into Posca markers, which I first saw on TikTok. This past week I also sent my first commissioned paintings made with Poscas and my first prints based on my initial Posca paintings, also for friends. (Reply to this email if you’re interested in commissions!)
Upon getting the kind of response I was getting for my art when posting it on Instagram during the pandemic, I wondered if maybe I’d been too hard on myself over the past few years when it came to art. Maybe I had skills that were actually useful. Maybe I could do more with them than I realized. That’s when I took my first steps into digital art – thanks to a friend gifting me an iPad, trading in an old laptop for an first generation Apple Pencil, and buying Procreate for a mere $10 from the app store.
But I kept freezing up before trying to make digital art. I watched several tutorials, but the whole thing felt incurably ungainly. I felt like I needed to make a masterpiece every time. Why? Well, even though I wanted to make digital illustrations, I seemed to have forgotten the immense amount of work needed to improve and grow to actually get there. I only seemed able to draw in the dead of night, where I could abandon a piece of art and actually see its merit the next day.
That leads me to another piece I wrote, a few weeks back, a pre-air review of Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s Apple+ series, Mr. Corman. It was a hard show to review because I think it’s better as a binge-watch rather than week to week, but also because the main character is depressing. He’s anxious and unhappy and prone to a kind of angry frustration that I both recognize in myself and find repulsive in other people. But the first episode is about him returning to music after avoiding it for years…and about how music is woven into his understanding of the world and himself throughout the series. It’s a surreal show, but the reason I felt like it’s better binge-watched rather than watched week to week is because the final episode, which covers a lengthy Zoom date (the show dovetails into the pandemic in a way that I really appreciated), makes it all worth it. It’s hard not to see JGL and not think of my favorite movie with him, (500) Days of Summer, but the way the character is aggressively called out is similar to that movie. Having been on both sides of the Summer equation, it’s nice to see JGL, in Mr. Corman, learn from his mistakes more thoroughly. I highly recommend watching it all when the last episode drops tomorrow.
But the way he reconnects with himself is through music. I’ve written about my newfound fascination and interest in playing music before, but I think art and music can be correlated in this case. I particularly like the sequences when he’s adding many different instruments and sounds to a song – it reminds me of how I carry the lessons of all the mediums I’ve played around with since then. Like the character, I disappear into my art, into the flow and nature of the work. I savor the challenges that I bring for myself – recently it was painting mountains, and before that it was realistic portraits of my friends’ pets, but it can always just be, you know, light. Online tutorials didn’t help, but watching people make their art their way did. I saw artists on TikTok and YouTube draw the shape of their image before going back to put details, which is a trick in painting I just personally never learned. It’s how I painted the Food52 piece, as you can see here.
In the end, I had to trick myself into digital art. I realized one problem I had with digital art – with art overall, really – is that I tried to approach it with my thinking mind. I’d try to formulate an idea before I approached the page, instead of letting it flow directly from my fingers. Instead, I needed to let it become second nature, to let myself fail and fall as often as possible so I could navigate by gut instinct alone. I found tutorials online of little things that gave advice on combining layers or using the clipping mask (though don’t ask me to explain that to you in words). But the real work was closing the gap between idea to the page, to the point that I’ll be sketching – on my iPad, in my watercolor Moleskine, in my big sketchbook, even on the canvas – and a story would pour out straight to the page.
That exact process has served me well not just in art, but in writing, in emails, even in the flow of how I move through the world. Don’t overthink it.
Here’s my September playlist, which has a song or two from TikTok, an anime called The Disastrous Life of Saiki K (which my friends refuse to watch, despite my constant harassment), and a song suggestion from reader Sophia Lorenzi.
If you do want my advice on what low-stakes but high reward art medium you could start with, I suggest brush pens. I first used brush pens in 2016, and they really changed the game for me. They have a nonstop flow to them, so you’re encouraged to keep going.