I would like to preface this with the fact that I am just one person who happens to be an artist and make a living from it. This is just my experience and what I have done might not work for you, but I hope at the very least it will inspire or give hope to some!
Consistency of style is something I have struggled to find for most of my life as an artist. I have a very busy brain and so I didn’t really start seriously trying to make art my career until 2004/2005. Between 1997 and that time I spent a lot of time working with horses (I wanted to learn to train them), various jobs like working in a frame shop/gallery and a sweet shop, then receptionist at a very smart estate agent in London and over that time I would also do the odd animal portrait for people, something I was good at but really didn’t feel very passionate about and therefore didn’t really get into a business mindset about it at all (in fact ‘business mindset’ was something to elude me for a LONG time!).
Some of my pastel portraits:
I didn’t go to university since my college experience was very discouraging (I even met a working illustrator during that time who told me not to become an artist as I’d never make money, thanks dude!). So I thought, pfft, I don’t need to go into art, I’ll go and get into the horse world instead (like that’s easy, ha!). This didn’t take off.
Discovering Digital Painting
In 2004 I discovered digital art and to start with made my art using a mouse! I eventually got myself a Wacom and made digital my go-to (having been painting traditionally in pastels/acrylics/oils/watercolours up till that point). I thought that digital was the right thing to do since at the time I thought I wanted to get into creature design/concept art for movies. I didn’t know what that involved at all. Fast forward to early 2016 and I had spent those years in between really struggling to find steady work and to find a recognisable style and decided I would return to traditional media, using Patreon to document my experiments and as a form of accountability for what I was doing.
‘Paint What You Love’
I must make clear that through this time I had been told that my style wasn’t consistent and that I needed to improve my portfolio and that I should paint what I loved. I don’t think I really ‘got’ what they meant by paint what I loved because I thought I was doing it already! I love fantasy art and love werewolves, monsters etc and did a lot of darker work back then (some you can see in an earlier blog) but often when I was trying to achieve something really scary/creepy, people would say ‘that’s cute’ or ‘aww’ in response rather than ‘OH GOD MY EYES!’. It was frustrating!
Still cute:
What I hadn’t realised is that I was painting what I loved seeing other people paint and didn’t realise that for me there was a difference between what I loved looking at and what I really really enjoyed painting. I was constantly fighting my true spirit of whimsy and humour. I also realised, once I started my Patreon page that I had also been working in the wrong medium. I had missed traditional mediums SO much and returning to it really had a profound effect. I decided I wanted to work towards a theme to try to help myself with the consistency issue and toward the end of 2016 I started painting the inhabitants of an ‘enchanted forest’.
I thought that if I gave myself a framework to restrict me (so I didn’t jump around wanting to paint lots of unrelated things as I had in the past) that it would help with my consistency and that maybe at the end of it I might have enough artwork to make a book. I was still, at this point, resisting the whimsy! In my mind I was thinking ‘yes, a mysterious enchanted forest, filled with dark and creepy things’ but what kept appearing was not dark and creepy!
A Turning Point
My ogre painting was a big moment for me when I was creating the forest, I really really loved painting this face and the technique I used was very satisfying.
I didn’t recognise it at the time (2017), but I now realise that this character was a kind of jumping off point of the whole feel of what was to become ‘Strangehollow‘ as well as how I paint currently. It still took me another year and another book (Cauldron) to fully embrace the fact that I wasn’t going to consistently make dark, spooky or unnerving art! (Except occasionally as I do still have the urge, it’s just not really what comes to me naturally as it often ends up looking a bit cute!)
I now know that my art ‘voice’ encompasses the following, not always all at the same time of course!:
Whimsical
Beautiful (I want it to be aesthetically beautiful to me)
Humorous
Dramatic (I do love a powerful dramatic image)
Inspired by the natural world (in evidence with my love of creatures!)
It’s a very helpful exercise to write down a few words to describe your style, I have to thank Savina Fransisco for this particular suggestion as it really helps to keep me on track with what I post. I will be writing a future blog post about branding and how I improved that side of my business which started with the art business boot camp course from Make Your Art Work.
In conclusion it was the restriction to making a ‘world’ along with using only one medium that helped me gain my consistency. This would work on a small scale too, it doesn’t have to be a book full! You could maybe decide to make 8-10 illustrations of your favourite fairytale perhaps, anything that lives in the same world. My dragon calendar also worked in a similar way, making 12 paintings of the same subject, trying to make them all different but also still hopefully look like they are part of the same world, it’s a really great exercise.
Anyway, I could waffle on about this stuff for hours, but I hope that this might help some of you who struggle with the consistency ‘problem’ that I did. I must make it clear that it doesn’t mean that my work won’t change and evolve over time (it already has visibly since 2017) or that having different styles is wrong. It is just something that has worked for me and might work for you too!
“There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. … No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others” – Martha Graham
Martha Graham was a dancer and choreographer and this quote of hers is one of my all time favourites that I return to time and time again with regard to making art.
I love her expression of ‘divine dissatisfaction’ as I think this really encompasses how I feel about making things, you might relate to it too. This sensation is the one that keeps me creating. It’s simultaneously frustrating and deeply enjoyable at the same time!
One of the most tantalising things for me with the creative process is that moment when you have the idea, something inspires you and you go about fantasising about what your painting will look like. You’ve had an idea for an image and it is at this point that (for me anyway!) you feel anything is possible, this could be IT. It could be The Painting. But once you start working on it you will likely find it a struggle, like the moment you start trying to recall a dream and as soon as you do, the image starts to dissipate and drift away. You might spend days on working out the composition which you are trying to translate from your imagination onto paper. It can be so frustrating! That image in your head rarely looks the same when you’ve finally got it on the canvas. You’re left with a painting that you might be pleased with, but perhaps it’s not The Painting you were hoping for.
You will then go through the same process over and over again and each time you learn more and each time you create something slightly more proficient than the last. It’s unlikely you’ll see this in the moment but then you look back at something you made 5 years ago and you will be able to see the progression much more clearly. (I highly recommend this by the way, compare to past you, not to other artists!).
This process/sensation is what drives me to keep making things. I don’t think I’d have the same compulsion to create if I wasn’t trying to chase this idea in my head and put it on paper!
Of course sometimes it isn’t like harnessing a dream at all, once in a while you will pour yourself out onto the paper and it will feel like a direct channel from brain (universe?) to paper, but this is SO very rare.
Do you experience this sensation? Do you think that Martha Graham’s quote has truth to it?
I had been considering moving away from Patreon since the end of 2019. I started looking into how I would do it, casually looking into Patreon competitors in 2020 but didn’t have enough time to spend on building it so decided to return to it in 2021. I also spent some time in Membership Academy (a membership about how to run a membership!) for a month (last year and this) and did as much research as I could on options outside of Patreon. Membership Academy are mainly concentrated on WordPress based plugins and membership building, but they also have a whole roadmap on how to build and launch your own membership which is great if it’s not something you’ve done before.
Some of you won’t find this remotely interesting unless you are actually interested in doing what I’ve done, there is lots of talk of website building and platforms ahead!
If you are thinking of creating your own site, I would give yourself a good six months to research and build (certainly the building part will take you longer if you’re not familiar with WP).
The platform options I looked into which talked about being competitors to Patreon were:
Podia
Gumroad
Squarespace membership (new & part of their platform)
Ko-Fi
Buymeacoffee
Then plugins available that I looked at were:
MemberSpace (plugs in to WP & Squarespace & a few more)
Digital Access Pass
Member Mouse
MemberPress
Restrict Content Pro
Woo Commerce memberships/subscriptions
I should also mention I briefly looked at (and by brief, I mean a few seconds!) MyKajabi which is a platform to build courses/subscriptions on, but it is VERY expensive and would only be feasible if you had hundreds signing up. I’m not remotely in that league!
My own website is run with Shopify which is excellent but unfortunately does not work with any plugins in order to make it into a working membership. If I had already had a WordPress website as my base site it would have been a lot easier (and cheaper!) as It would have just been a matter of using one of the many WP plugins. So those of you considering building your own who are already familiar with WP, you have a massive advantage as the majority of great plugins for this purpose are with them! I could also have set up something with Squarespace if my site had been based with them as MemberSpace will plug in to them (and is more secure than Squarespace’s own membership making abilities… or so my research found), but it was cheaper for me to build on WP than Squarespace.
What did I choose?
WordPress + MemberPress + Mailchimp
I was left with building my own site using WordPress. I used to run my main website on WP years ago and left it because I hated it! It is SO endlessly customisable and it is not friendly to anyone who’s not either tech savvy or someone who is very familiar with the platform. It is possible to build a site very cheaply with them though which is a bonus! Just as an example of difference of ease – if I had built this using Squarespace (or another easy to build drag and drop like Duda etc) then it would have taken me maybe a week to build the pages of Mysterious Corner. This took me 3-4 weeks!! And honestly I’m still whittling and perfecting behind the scenes and learning as I go!
MemberPress has been really simple to set up as they have pages and pages of articles on how to do so and their customer service is brilliant. It was the plugin most recommended by Membership Academy and having used it now for a couple of months I can say that I’m very pleased with it! It’s also got a really great option of being able to make courses – something I will be using in future to make some mini painting workshops.
One thing I needed to figure out was how I was going to let my members know I’d made a new post. There were a few options of plugins for this (email marketing ones) and I initially chose MailPoet. This unfortunately caused a massive drain on ‘CPU seconds’ (still not entirely sure what this is haha!), but the bottom line was it was going to stop my website working. I have since replaced this with the MailChimp add-on which is part of the free add-ons you can get with MemberPress. I set this up to post once a week and it sends a link to the page for folks to go and see what posts I made that week. It’s really simple to set up too and as with other things, loads of videos etc on how to do that.
A WORD OF WARNING
If you are thinking of moving your patrons from Patreon, make sure to give them lots of warning in advance. I started mentioning it last year and many said they would not follow (for perfectly good reasons), and others were keen.
The majority of my patrons from Patreon have not followed me to my new membership. There are a few reasons for this, but many want to stay on Patreon so they can continue to support other creators (since they support several on there) and don’t want to move over. Or prefer a known/familiar platform than an unknown one like my site. Others don’t want to move because they were just supporting in a tip jar capacity on Patreon and I have not (yet) made it an option on my new membership. I have also changed the prices of many of my tiers and am presenting it in Pounds rather than Dollars – I was not able to continue with the $30 commission tier since shipping prices had gone up several times since I started that tier and after Patreon takes its fees, that was unfortunately not viable anymore. I also never expect my patrons to stay with me indefinitely! I am hugely grateful for all the support they have given me over the past five years.
In 2020 I lost quite a large chunk of patrons because of covid, and I felt that I would rather start promoting my own page this year instead of trying to build Patreon again when I wasn’t happy with the platform at all and subsequently am at the whim of the changes they make there.
There was always going to be a risk to move and I now have to build my membership again from almost the ground up. The irony of this is that it’s Patreon which has made this possible since it gave me more time to work on my Kickstarter projects which in turn gave me more independence from client work!
Just be aware that if you do make a move that you could potentially be starting from scratch again. If Patreon is your main source of income, this might be a little risky! I know other Patreon creators who have moved to their own platform who kept taking payments from Patreon from those who wanted to still support them there. There are so many ways to do it!
An Exciting Future
Despite finding myself with less patrons, I am incredibly optimistic and excited about what is ahead with Mysterious Corner! Now that I have total control over how it looks and what I can do there, it feels very freeing.
I have some fun mini painting workshops planned too for later this year which will involve painting creatures, atmospheric effects with watercolour and loads more!
Most people are well aware of Patreon now (and less so Ko-Fi or Buymeacoffee) which gives artists and other creatives, a chance to make an income from giving their fans access to their work that doesn’t get shared anywhere else. There are also many other options to create subscriptions which I have written about in how I built my membership. You can also read about why I left Patreon.
Please note that I will use ‘membership’ to describe subscription in this post but it is the same thing (in my mind) as a subscription. This is going to be a long post, so be prepared!
Would running a membership suit you?
Is the membership format right for you? Will this enrich your workflow or stress you out? Will it feel like too much work or will it bring you closer to your fans?
I previously made a blog post (and foolishly did not save a copy!) about ‘Should You Start A Patreon Page’ – and about six months after I wrote that I had left Patreon and built my own membership page and so decided that having a blog post about Patreon seemed a little odd, considering I was no longer using them myself.
However I think that talking about memberships in general and whether it would be right for you, regardless of the platform you use, is a useful resource. So while I kick myself for not saving the previous post about this, this is a new post on my experiences of Patreon, and now of running my own self-built membership.
Important questions to ask yourself, and be honest!
Do you enjoy working under pressure?
Do you need/want accountability?
Do you enjoy interacting with your followers?
Do you want to share your process or do you prefer to keep it to yourself?
Do you want to teach or make tutorials or just show behind the scenes?
Do you want to offer commissions or special perks?
Do you have an interactive and communicative following?
Do you make a lot of NDA content or do you have lots to share?
Do you want to build your own platform or use a 3rd party like Patreon?
These may seem very obvious questions, but often people get excited about the idea of running a Patreon page or a membership as they see that it can make an income, but they don’t think about EXACTLY what that might entail.
There are of course MANY ways to run your subscription/membership and they don’t have to be super structured at all. I know artists who just have one tier (of usually around $5 or similar) and that’s just access to everything they post on Patreon (or their own membership) and they don’t say how often they will post so it acts more as a true patronage where the fan just wants to support that artist and help them keep making more art.
Patreon also allows the choice of ‘pay per creation’ so any members will pay whenever the creator makes a post, but they can cap that so they only pay a maximum of a certain amount a month. OR you can set it to be per month. Patreon says that per month is always more popular for the people who sign up (from their analytics).
Let’s answer the questions above:
1. While running a membership is not quite the same as hitting deadlines for clients, I think it’s important to think about what you are offering for your patrons and making sure that you are living up to your promises (this is specifically for monthly recurring payments, not per creation).
Think about what you would be happy to pay per month to see things that an artist doesn’t share with anyone else, or getting special benefits etc monthly. When I started on Patreon I was posting very frequently (and each post was short and just an update on a painting’s process) and it was very difficult to keep up consistently. I now offer less posts (1-2 a week max) but with (hopefully!) more quality in each one.
If you don’t want to feel that you HAVE to make something each month to share with your patrons then it isn’t for you (at least not a monthly offering). If you are doing loads of work that never gets shared on social media anyway that you could share with your patrons, then that is a great sign that running a membership could work really well for you.
2. If you need a bit of pressure from an outside source to help you get your work done then this is a great way of doing it. I am someone who needs some lurking accountability and pressure, otherwise I can daydream my day away and end up extremely unproductive! When I started my Patreon page in 2016 I did so in order to have a place to share my traditional art (at the time I was working on illustration jobs digitally) as I wanted to return to using traditional full time. I also wanted to see if I could stop doing client work and start to do membership and other offerings full time. The accountability really helped me but this can have the total opposite effect on other people. Be aware of this and try to imagine yourself in this situation and how it would make you feel.
3. I love being able to chat with my fans/followers and when I began my membership on Patreon I loved being able to hear from them and their reactions in a more intimate space than just social media. If you are someone who is not into sharing or interacting with you fans and likes to keep them at a distance, then this is less likely to be something that will work for you, or even appeal to you.
Obviously each individual has a different level of what they are comfortable sharing (I don’t share much about my personal life at all, only in passing), but be sure to know what you are comfortable with when you start. Some people are not great with boundaries and you will need to keep them strong, for people who might want be, or think they are close friends with you now that they are patrons. You can be friendly and relaxed while also keeping it professional.
4. Think about how generous you want to be with what you share. Some artists have developed a way of working over decades and don’t want to share their secret ‘recipes’ with anyone else. If this is you, then obviously you can still run a membership, but you will be limited in what you can share, so it could be that you run your membership like a tip jar instead and perhaps share your new art with your patrons a week or two before you share anywhere else.
5. Tutorials and teaching style memberships can be very very profitable. There are always people wanting to learn step by step ways to do what you are doing. It seems the majority of this style of memberships focus on realism and painting pictures of animals/wildlife/flowers. If you are a good teacher and you have a lot of interest from your fans asking you how you do X or Y, this could be a great path to follow. If like me, you aren’t interested in making videos or long tutorials on how to do what you do, then you can just offer access to behind the scenes in your studio and everything that entails.
6. Most memberships offer some kind of extra perk as part of it. Be that a discount in the artist’s shop or even receiving a print each month at certain tiers and small commissioned paintings too. My advice for anyone thinking of offering original commissions is to think VERY carefully about the pricing and whatever you do, you MUST have a limit on the number you can do a month or you will get overwhelmed very quickly. Be sure to check out artists who are running their own memberships to see what they offer and what they are charging to get an idea – even better you could email them to ask them how they feel about what they offer. I had to make changes with my offerings as when I started I was offering too much for too little. After postage it was quite a chunk out of the pay (especially after patreon fees and payment processing fees). So just make sure you budget well if you are doing this. I would also recommend not offering these straight away to see how it goes first. You of course do not have to offer any physical rewards at all – they do take up a large portion of time each month.
7. Is your following always in touch with you via social media? Are they interactive and curious about what you are doing and asking you questions? When I started my Patreon page I had a very small following, but they were fairly interactive despite that and it grew slowly and steadily. Building communities like this is slow, unless you already have a very active and thriving following of several thousand ready and waiting for you to set up your membership, then it’s not likely you will be able to give up your day job/client work right away(!)
8. If you are busy with lots of client work that you are not allowed to share due to NDA’s then it is unlikely that the ‘behind the scenes’ of a membership will work for you. It will all depend on how much personal work you can share with your community. If you are up to your eyeballs in super secret client work then running a Patreon using the ‘per creation‘ would work well for you so that when you do post personal things in there you will get paid. Just note that if you decide to switch to per month payments you cannot then switch back to per creation. (Also note that I have not used Patreon now for a good 6 months and am not aware of any changes that may have occurred in that time).
9. Should you choose to use Patreon, Ko-fi, Gumroad or Buymeacoffee to run your membership OR build your own platform like I have done? If you haven’t already, do read ‘how I built my membership‘ which tells you the options I looked at and my experience of it shortly after switching. Since writing that post I would still give a word of caution to those who are considering leaving Patreon for making their own membership instead. My income from my new membership is not what it was on Patreon, no where near. But it is not to be sniffed at! There is no doubt that people are more suspicious of a stand alone platform like the one I have built. It could also be the pricing I have chosen, but there is no way for me to find that out! I know many people who just wanted to stay on Patreon since they supported other artists there. I’d like to say I don’t regret moving to my own platform.
If you have a small following then using Patreon is a great idea as it is a recognised platform and a lot of folks are already on there which makes it easier for them to just click and support you (as well as others). If you have a very large following and haven’t yet built a Patreon page, then I would definitely consider building your own membership as Patreon does take a large chunk of your income (which of course you could consider payment for the familiarity etc and them fixing any bugs or other issues with the site) and does change how it runs things fairly often (one of the reasons I left). Best thing to do is to use your newsletter and social media to ask your followers if they’d be interested in you starting a membership and go from there.
So there it is, my thoughts on memberships and things for you to think about before setting forth into that world. I’m sure there are many more things I could have covered! Do not hesitate to email me if you want to ask any specific questions. Just remember it’s not a quick income stream but one that will grow over months and years (hopefully!).
If you’d like to check out my membership, then whizz up to the links above where you’ll be able to find out about all the tiers.
Four years ago I launched my first ever book on Kickstarter. I named it Strangehollow. I can’t believe it is four years ago already! The project turned out to be a huge success and that success quite literally changed my life. At least my artist life! I went from getting dribbles of client work here and there, to being able to create a future body of work which was entirely my own. In part thanks to Kickstarter, but also to my amazing members who had been supporting me.
‘The Spriggle’ – You can never know what people will like when you make it. This guy is probably one of my most popular creatures.
Before I named it, Strangehollow was just an idea. An idea to help me become more focused and to really develop a personal style. I had always been jumping all over the place with my style, mostly because I was using digital mediums and the fact that that meant I could essentially do ‘anything’ wasn’t good for me and the way my brain works! I made a blog post about how I became more focused titled ‘How I Achieved Consistency In My Work‘ which goes into that in depth. Towards the end of my first year (2016) running a Patreon page, I decided to create and illustrate the inhabitants of an enchanted forest. I figured if I had an all encompassing theme, and a place where these creatures all lived, it would help with creating a body of work which was all connected and looked like it was part of the same world.
Initially I didn’t really have a plan but liked the idea of it being dark and mysterious (being a big fan of dark and mysterious art). As I began to create creatures for it, it became quite clear that I was not destined to make it dark and mysterious at all!
The painting that really solidified the way I work now, and shaped the look of Strangehollow was of this Ogre:
Something clicked when making this guy and the technique I’m using now is still very similar to this. Lots and lots of washes and layers built up to create the form and the hair/textures.
The ogre also set the tone of the forest I think as he was rather benign looking. I think Secrets Of Strangehollow feels a little more dangerous (and I was definitely thinking along the lines of the natural world than fantasy more than I was for the first one).
Once I had a large collection of creatures, I started writing about them. I had already been composing the intro to the book in my head for quite a long time and I really wanted to give a sense of wonder and nostalgia too, that I have about the fairy stories that I read as a kid. I think this yearning for that feeling that magic is real and that this place could have maybe existed, that I felt as a child, is what drives me to make these fantasy creatures and places.
The name Strangehollow took a long time to settle on. I thought of it quite early on when playing with names, but spent another two months toying with other ones but in the end kept returning to this one. Naming creatures and my books is so much fun. For the creatures I often get my patrons to help me name them and there were a few names made up by Kat Cardy which immediately made an image of what the creature would look like as soon as I heard it. The ‘Darkling Glib’ was one of them that was an almost instant download into my brain. Here’s the sketch and the finished painting side by side:
I still prefer the sketch of this guy as he’s far more disturbing! Back then I didn’t do the ‘carbon copy’ method of transferring a sketch and I just had the sketch in front of me as reference and then went straight to watercolour and painted him that way. Not something I’d do now as I prefer to have more control over the final look.
I hadn’t really thought past the Kickstarter project as I had no idea that it would be so successful. Once it was finished and fulfilled and sent out to all the backers, I felt like I didn’t want to just jump back into the forest and create another book in the same world. I was worried that I’d get ‘stuck’ making Strangehollow books! Almost like a rebellious feeling in a way! I also felt like I didn’t have anything more I could add to the book at this point (almost like I’d squeezed all the ideas out of the Strangehollow sponge), so I decided to create some different book projects. These became Cauldron, my second book about witches and their familiars, then Artpothecary (sketchbook and drawings) and a Dragon calendar for 2020.
Once I had begun with the dragon calendar, I was already looking forward to returning to Strangehollow as my brain had started to brew on new creatures and places that I could write about again.
Creating Secrets Of Strangehollow took a lot longer than Strangehollow. Not least because there were more pages and paintings, but with 2020 being such a bizarre and unsettling experience, it kind of put a dampener on my mojo for a few months where I wasn’t making very much art at all. I was very grateful to be able to disappear into this place again and expand the world even more.
Thanks to my patrons, and to all my Kickstarter backers, Secrets Of Strangehollow did really well on Kickstarter. I am again taking a small break before I gather my walking stick, brownie repellent and tasty snacks and make my way back to Strangehollow, but I will definitely be going back.
Here is part one of a mixture of advice I was given and also truths that I have learnt through my own experience in being a freelance artist. Take what you will from it, I hope that it may help!
I do tend to go off on tangents quite a lot so just go with me here!
1. LUCK.
Something that doesn’t seem to be talked about much is the element of luck in succeeding with an art career. Many things will affect whether you succeed, it could be the good fortune of your upbringing, how much risk you take, whether you are business minded, whether you have a family to take care of, the type of personality you have (good with people, or not), the type of art you make (there is no doubt some subjects are more popular than others) – these will all have an impact. But even with EVERYTHING on your side you might still not make it work. This is where the luck comes in.
2. Not taking advice – Or rather, not really understanding the advice I was given. BE OPEN.
I am a tenacious person and so in the past I have not always been very open to advice about art and thought that I had it figured out (even though while thinking this I was not making a living from my art and merely limping along). Tenacity is a very useful trait in this business for sure, but in some instances, not so helpful!
I have often heard the despairing cry of ‘But I’ve tried X Y and Z and nothing has worked’ – that was me for a LOT of years, but I also hadn’t tried ALL the things at that point, but thought I had. I often see people on art forums who ask for advice and then give every reason imaginable as to why that advice doesn’t apply to them (I’ve been that person). There is no magic formula for everyone, but there ARE tried and tested formulas which work. When someone (especially someone who has had years of experience, not a random anonymous person on the internet) gives you advice, try to hear it and really dig down deep and absorb it and the reason why they might have given you that advice. I was particularly resistant to the advice of ‘be consistent’ and wish I had taken that on board years ago. If what you are doing is not working then try something else, try out that advice that you might find prickled you a little as it could help enormously.
3. Be consistent
The number one piece of advice I was always given was ‘be consistent’. My portfolio was always all over the place, and while I thought it was obvious that I was the one who had done all these paintings, if an art director had looked at the portfolio, it wouldn’t have shown them one specific style running through it all and may have even looked like more than one artist’s work. I didn’t know HOW to be consistent because I had so many ideas, but also because I was trying to make what I thought people might like (impossible task!). I considered my ability to paint in different styles to be a strength and that surely it would be good to be able to work in different ways. I know many people do make this work, but with the path I ultimately wanted to take, consistency really was much more valuable. I go into how I achieved my consistency here.
For now I will finish with a few examples of my older art and how much variety there was!
In 2012 I took a Caricature course with Jason Seiler on Schoolism.com which was absolutely brilliant. I have always loved to paint portraits and this gave me a way of doing that in a way that I’d not tried before.
Here are a few pieces from my digital days. I didn’t know what I wanted to be, caricaturist, fantasy artist, horror
Top left, Robert Deniro, top right, Javier Bardem.
Bottom left Iggy Pop, bottom right, Morticia Addams.
Then still more, all different again:
Just before I switched back to traditional media permanently, more of the silly whimsical vibe started to show and are much closer to what I do now:
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