Research point - self directed projects

This is a really interesting subject. As an older illustrator with a full time job that pays the bills I feel that my future is about what I can self generate in terms of ideas and work. The tricky bit is to come up with the ideas in the first place.

I started with a trawl through Colossal who always help with other peoples great projects. The only one I could define as a self directed project was Albert Chamillard who does complicated doodles in old ledgers. It's the sort of meditative project that would nicely compliment a busy demanding day job.

Searching for personal projects I found Wylie Beckert who designed a pack of playing cards and documents the process here. Beckert is generous with the details of his project, the motivation, the problems and the benefits. He used it both to self promote and to learn more about the business of illustration and although he needed to generate money from the project it was equally important to develop learn and grow through the project.

Lynne Chapman was a successful children's book illustrator who became involved in the Urbansketchers movement. Her drawings, which were published online on the Urbansketchers blog and her own website, lead to a residency at University of Manchester working in the Morgan Centre for Research into Everyday Lives. Interestingly Tom Phillips techniques from A Humument were used in a workshop for carers who were looking after people with dementia (discussed towards the end of this lecture)

Jean Edwards is a lecturer in education and a part time artist. She has makes and posts a drawing every day but has a ongoing side project where she makes art using train tickets as the base then manipulating the surface with print and collage.

Sally Muir is a knitwear designer who set herself the challenge to post a drawing of A Dog a Day on Facebook for a year. This lead to portrait commissions, collaboration with Anthropologie  and a book.

John Vernon Lord set himself the challenge to do a one inch square drawing every day in 2016. The drawings were done in pen and ink and were to be just for the sake of it, as an antidote to serious illustration. The drawings were collected together and included in his exhibition at the House of Illustration in 2018. The House of Illustration set a challenge to do a one inch drawing every day in September in exchange for a free entry to one of their exhibitions which I took part in. Although I have drawn every day for years I don't post my work every day and it was a very different challenge to draw something that I could post. I felt that each image should stand up in its own right but at the end when the images were displayed together it was the effect of them as a whole that mattered.

Jean Edwards recognised this from the start and prepared a set of squares which worked together before the start. She followed a simple landscape theme which made the finished images work really well together.