Creative Pep Talk
022 - 10 Ways to Grow Your Commercial Art Practice
(upbeat music) Hey y'all, just a quick heads up. The episode you're about to listen to is eight to 10 years old. Now, these episodes were intended to be evergreen, and I still believe there's a lot of good information in these early episodes, but I do wanna let you know that some of my ideas have evolved over time. Times have changed since we made these episodes, and ultimately, I'd like to think I've grown a lot as an artist and a human, and that these don't necessarily represent my best work, or the best of the podcast. If you're new around here, I suggest starting with the most recent episode, or at least go back to around 300, and move forward from there. Enjoy the episode. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) Man, I just love that song. I got it from the Free Music Archive. It's called How How. Or no, the band's How How, and it's called Steamboat. If you wanna check that out, I just love that song. It makes me, it gets me in the mood for the creative pep talk. I'm a believer in the idea of dressing for the job you want, not the job you have, and I have applied this to my creative practice too, which means if you want professional results, you need to present online like a pro, and that means going beyond social media and having a professional website that reflects your style and looks legit. I rebuilt my site this year with Squarespace's fluid engine and was so happy with how easily I could build my vision without coding, that when they approached me to support the show, I jumped at the chance because I love and use this product. So, go check it out, squarespace.com/peptalk to test it out for yourself, and when you're ready to launch your site, use promo code PEPTALK, all one word, all caps for 10% off your first purchase. Thanks goes out to Squarespace for supporting the show and supporting creators all over the world. Hey, in case you don't know, we have a monthly live virtual meetup every last Monday of the month with supporters of the show from Patreon and Substack. We have so much fun on these calls and they are the warmest, most encouraging creatives that I have ever met. And we also talk real creative practice stuff. We have authors, illustrators, lettering artists, picture bookmakers, fine artists, musicians, and folks that work in video and film as well. And we have people that are just starting out, people super established in their creative careers and everything in between. For the rest of this year, we're gonna chat through our new Journey of the True fan series, exploring questions and ways to apply these ideas to your own creative practice so that you can leave 2024 stronger than you came in with more visibility, connection with your audience and sales. Sign up to whichever suits you best at either patreon.com/creativepeptalk or AndyJPizza.substack.com. And I hope to see you at this month's meetup. - So today, I'm gonna try not to mess around at all. I'm gonna give you two quick announcements and then we're gonna be straight in the content. I'm gonna try to do it in the next 30 seconds. Number one, this shows now an affiliation with IllustrationAge and you can find and listen to this podcast on their website, illustrationage.com/creativepeptalk. And you can listen to all the episodes there as well as see tons of amazing illustration. It's one of the best websites focused on illustration out there, in my opinion. I love the guys who contribute to that. I always see really new stuff and I'm super excited about that. Number two, second thing is just a shout out to all of you who bought my Do Not Be Afraid poster, which is the first creative pep talk poster. And yeah, I super appreciate it. That definitely supports me doing this and yeah, you guys are awesome. I really appreciate it. Okay, let's get straight into it. I don't wanna mess around, no long intros, all right? I've realized with other podcasts, I can't stand when they do a giant half the show is the intro. So, today what we're talking about is 10 ways to grow your commercial art practice. And there's no joking around. There's no messing around, you know. I didn't try to come up with some title that was gonna be super hip. I just came up with something that I thought, you know what? I'd listen to this show. This is the show I'd wanna hear. And I just tried to think about what are the 10 things that I actively did that really did have an impact on my art business. And you know, getting new work and growing my work and getting better work. And so I just tried to pinpoint 10 things that I thought really helped me and continued to help me and maybe they'll help you. All right, let's get into it. Number one, find an audience instead of creating one. Okay, check this out, right? If you wanna make commercial art, if you want clients and you wanna get paid doing what you do, this is my biggest suggestion and it's so massive. So, I did a project called NOD where I did a daily character drawing for a year every weekday and I did 260 of them. And there was really no basis for the project. I loved the project and it was great things that happened from it. But I didn't know this. That NOD was, there was no audience for what I was doing. There was no precedent for the type of project on Tumblr. There was no set audience. I was creating an audience around a new premise completely. Okay, which is fine. It's actually a fantastic thing to do. And the fact that I invested 260 characters to it made it fine because I did grow an audience of it. But I didn't realize, I didn't do that intentionally. And I think that growing an audience is more of a thing that you do if you're a media creator, if you're someone who wants to create some kind of media. And, but even then, even if you're gonna create some kind of media and you're gonna create an audience around something, it's best to go to a place where there's already an audience. And the thing about NOD, the thing that didn't work about it, in some, so there's tons of things that worked. It was really good for my development. A lot of cool stuff came out of it. But there were other ways where I put all this time and energy into it. And it's, and people didn't always understand what it was. And the reason was because there was no existing audience that I was tapping into. I was, because it wasn't part of a, you know, these characters weren't part of a book. They weren't part of a TV show. They weren't part of a story. They weren't part of anything where people like, you know, it could have been a kids, really it made more sense if I would have tried to focus on writing a story geared towards seven to 12 year olds that was fantasy, but also kids. So it wasn't ultra fantasy. And there's a precedent and there's an audience for that that already exists. What there isn't an audience for is 260 characters that have no context, that just is little character studies on characters that nobody already knows. And there's no, and that's as far as it goes. It doesn't turn into anything else that anybody already is an audience for. And so again, there's tons of great things that happen with it, but I feel like this is something that you hear when I think about people doing projects, people doing new work, I feel like they get so wrapped up in like what they wanna make, which is fine. And we're gonna get to that. But they get so wrapped up in what they wanna make, they forget that it's for people. Like you're making this for other people to enjoy. And if you're gonna do that, you need to give it enough context to where you're meeting an audience. It's so hard to grow an audience from scratch. It's nearly impossible, that's the truth. It's nearly impossible. But if you do something where there's an already an audience there, then you're, like for instance, there's already an audience for kids books. There's already an audience for kids books about animals. There's already an audience about weird kids books. There's already an audience for typography. There's already an audience for lettered things. There's already an audience for screen prints. There's already an audience for stationery. There's like that makes so much more sense to go towards something where there's already an audience and you're gonna say something new to 'em. You're gonna bring something new. Like it's not about copying somebody or ripping off someone's audience. It's about going to an audience with something that they can understand, bringing something new to that audience and there's no shame in that. Like, and I think so, with your work, I think one of the things you need to think about is what is the group of people that already exists? What is the niche that already exists that I'm playing a role in, that I'm playing a part in? And I think it's very lofty and unrealistic and not even really in existence, this artist that creates their audience. It's so rare, I'm not even sure that ever happens. So that's my first thing, find an audience instead of creating one. Number two, be the MJ of something. Do the, be the Michael Jordan of something. This is something that, you know what I'm about this, like, okay, you're seniors, I teach seniors, the senior class, and you know, I'm thinking, okay, you've got this far, you clearly have talent, you clearly, you've got something, you've got a passion for this. But sometimes I see them doing something or going a direction where they really don't have any business going that direction. Like, and this is what I think about, right? This is something that's helped me recently is, you know, I drew, you know, I tested out drawing portraits in high school of people. And to be honest, I'd say about one in five, kind of captured the likeness of them. And, you know, but it wasn't something that was natural for me. It wasn't something that I enjoyed. It wasn't something that I was that successful out. You know, I was really good at drawing, but not very good at drawing people and capturing that realistic likeness. And I didn't like doing it. And so back, even far, that far back, you know, that's when I got into gig posters and screen printing and kind of design-like illustration. And it was part of it was, I really responded to it and I loved it, I love the simplicity of it, I love the elegance of an understated kind of nature of art. But part of it was that I knew I could do that. I could do that. Like, I could draw, even if I look back, I didn't even realize that at the time, but even as like, you know, a second grader, I was abstracting characters down to their most simplest forms and trying to make iconic, like characters and type and all kinds of stuff like that. And so that was my thing. Now, even recently though, even recently, I'm thinking about what do I have when I, I'm pretty familiar with my strengths and weaknesses. What things am I doing still that play to my weakness? And it means that I'm eliminating the possibility of being the Michael Jordan of something. What are the things that I think I have the potential to be the best at? Now, caveat, right? So like, Michael Jordan was the Michael Jordan of basketball, which is ginormous, right? Like, you don't have to be the Michael Jordan of illustration. Like, that's, you know, some people, there's a person out there that will be the Michael Jordan of illustration, and that's great for them. But let's talk about the Bulls. Let's talk about Michael Jordan, Dennis Rodman, right? Dennis Rodman was the Michael Jordan of rebounds. That was his thing. He wasn't trying to dominate offensively and score all the points. And, you know, he wasn't trying to be the Michael Jordan of basketball. He knew he couldn't. He knew his limitations. And this is what I think, you know, self-awareness, the self-awareness, and you can go back to the episode about self-awareness that I did, is so key. You have to understand what you're good at, what you're bad at. And you need to be honest with yourself. And you need other people around you that are gonna be honest. For me, one of the biggest inflection points of my work, one of the points where my art grew the most is when I met my wife. You know, she is very honest, and it's so helpful. And she, you know, I remember the work that I was creating, we were both doing art at school. And the work that I would create, she helped me figure out, you're not so good at this, and you're really good at that. And I focused on that. And that's when I started focused on illustration and not so much like graphic design for layout and typography. And so you need that, you need that self-awareness. But I really believe, like, you could be, what if you're just the Michael Jordan of illustration, editorial illustration for parents, magazines, and family illustration? Like, you could do that. Like, is that something you could do? You know, could you be the Michael Jordan of fantasy art for book covers? Listen, again, think about it like this. If, like, that genre, fantasy, requires crazy chops for realism, if you don't have those, you probably don't wanna go down that path. You're not gonna be the Michael Jordan there. You know, I have, I don't wanna out myself because I think, you know, it's one of those things like you're not an artist until someone calls you an artist, like you can't name yourself the artist. And it's one of those things where I don't wanna say, I'm the Michael Jordan of this, 'cause I don't think I'm the Michael Jordan of anything yet, but I do have some suspicions about what are the things that I could possibly be the best out artistically, and then market-wise, and, you know, I just, I think that it's really helped me recently, even in the past year, to say, these handful of things I hate doing, I'm not interested in. I don't like it even in other people's work. I don't feel like I can ever be great at them. I'm not gonna do them anymore, because usually it's some kind of ego thing, like having to prove that you can do this or that, or whatever. I'm not, no, I stopped doing that, and I thought, I'm gonna lean into the thing that I think I have the most potential at growing in my art, even just skills-wise. And I feel like since I've done that, my work has never been better. And, you know, I guess if I do say so myself, but I do think that that's true. All right, number three. Develop an awesome side project, all right, that can be all kinds of things. For instance, this podcast is a side project of mine. You know, it doesn't have to be something similar to stuff that's been done, or even similar stuff that happens in your market. Usually the best ideas are things that, you know, you don't know any other illustrators doing. I'll just give you four things I think that are important about doing a side project, about choosing one and coming up with an idea for one. Number one, it has to have teeth. So, if you give it a, you know, give it a title, and then give it a tagline. And in the title and the tagline, you should be able to, it should be self-explanatory, and people should know what you're talking about, and they should get an instant feeling about what it is you're doing. If you have to tell them, you know, 18 sentences about what the idea for the concept is, it's not a concept. I'll just give you that right now, and I guarantee it doesn't have teeth. In order for it to have that purchase, you know, that thing that like gets some, like, you know, grabs people and like has that, you know, that bite, you need it to have something clearly interesting about the project in the concept. Number two, it needs to be authentic. One of my favorite people is Kate Bingham and Bert. She, you know, one of the things I heard her say in a creative morning's talk is when you start a project, it should be something where you're like gonna die unless you do this project. And those are the only ones you should do. And I think that's so true for the side project. It's gotta be authentically who you are, what you're about. You have to really be interested in it. Don't try to fake it. Don't be like, I'm gonna cash in on this trend. People freaking hate when people try to cash in on trends. Don't do it. Don't sell out in that way. Number three, it has a clear audience. Goes back to number one. Don't try to create an audience. Don't try to create an audience with a project. Tap into some group of people that already exist. And that might sound like a marketing thing or it might sound like you're copying or something. It's not. If you just sit down and think about this idea, I don't wanna spend the whole podcast. If you sit down on this idea, you realize that 99.999 things are marketed to an audience that already exist and there's nothing wrong with it. It's just make sense, it's just practical. It's just the way to go. Number four, directly relates to, we're doing a list within a list. This is number four, four number three of developing an awesome side project. It directly relates to the work that you wanna do, right? Don't do a project that has no practical application where there's nothing that could come of it from clients. I do something where an art director would see it and they know how to use it. And they know, oh, that relates to something else I could do. For instance, you might wanna work on your people drawing or you might wanna work on your animals or you might wanna work, even that simple. Do a project where, okay, now art directors know you're the animal guy and if they have a project for animals, they're gonna go to you. So that's my, and the last thing about the awesome side project is side projects are the best way to promote yourself today. And look, I don't wanna get crazy marketing-ish, but, and I know it's not cool to talk about the fact that you wanna make money, but everybody needs money and everybody wants money and they wanna do it, doing stuff that they like doing, the truth is, right? What's cool is if you wanna talk about content, which I know artists hate that word, like creating content, but your side project is content. It's content for other people, which, okay, the semantics of that, whatever. But it's basically something that other people can engage with and enjoy in and you're bringing value to other people's lives, you're bringing emotional value or connection value, whatever it is. And if you're not bringing value with your art, why are you making it? And so that's really all that content is, but your side project, the cool thing about being an illustrator or being a designer is that you have the power to create content all on your own. Now, businesses out there, they have to hire creative people to create content for them. But the thing about you is that you have the power all by yourself to make your own content. And that's why I think this is important. All right, learn something new. Okay, a few years ago, I felt like what I was doing was really saturated and it was a little bit too easy. I heard someone say, I think it was Chuck Anderson said, all these people that get super aggravated about people ripping them off. And his advice was, do something that they can't rip off. Like that's the best insurance policy. And that got me thinking and it was around the same time as I started thinking about, you know what? I wanna start working, you know, I've seen some people that do their work with a drawing tablet and I love the way that looks. I love the possibilities. Feel like it could really expand my potential and what I can do in my work if I started to work digitally. And so I started learning that skill and actually when I first started, this was like three years ago, when I first started, it was super painful and it didn't work. And, you know, I just decided I'm gonna keep working at it until I can figure it out. And, you know, it took a long time and every year I get better at using it. And now I really, really love the stuff that I'm making with it. But I noticed when I look around, the people that didn't start to grow something new are stuck in the same place or those things are kind of drying up. My dad said, you know, he's a business guy and he said that with their business, you know, they're very intentional about. Every year, they're kind of learning something new, like a new skill or a new part of their business that they're gonna start. And so every year you can start learning something new. Doesn't have to be super dramatic. It doesn't have to be a giant learning curve, but just something where you're always introducing something a little bit new and then that plant those seeds and then you can harvest it in a few years. And it doesn't have to be something where you're like, all right, I'm gonna learn animation and I'm gonna learn it in the next month. Just start messing around with animation if that's something you wanna grow into. Start messing around, make little stupid gifts and stuff and then slowly build up until in a few years, you can harvest that new learning thing because I think for me, one of the biggest things that has helped me grow past that ceiling that I hit was adding new skills or developing stuff that maybe other people aren't developing and can set my work apart from other people. All right. And I really hate learning new stuff, so if you're that type of person, just trust me, I'm the exact same. Five number five is collaborate. You can go back to the episode about collaboration where I go into more detail about this, but just a few things, right? There's three things I think that are important about another list between inside of a list. I love lists. Collaboration is so, it's like the miracle grow for your business, for your commercial art practice. Here's three reasons why. Number one, instantly, if you do a collaborative project, you're instantly reaching twice as many people, right? Because you're using your audience and they're using their audience, so that's an instant doubling of audience. Number two, communicates confidence because for you to sit around and start a new project is the easiest thing in the world, and nobody has to agree with you that it's a good idea, you can just sit around and do it, and anybody can do it and people do it all the time. But for somebody else who hopefully is respected as you and does as good of work as you do, to buy into the, you guys both buy into the same idea, you're saying that that idea is vetted by both of you. And I almost always feel like when you see a zine by someone else, okay, pretty cool, you do a zine with someone else, do a collaborative zine, instantly, it's a little bit more interesting. Like, okay, this is good enough for both of them to agree that this is worth doing. So I think it communicates confidence, and the third thing is you grow. When you work with someone different, even if they're similar to you, they're going to, they're gonna do things that you don't do, and do things better than you do, and every time I've done a good collaboration, I leave almost growing exponentially way more than you would think, almost in ways that you can't explain. You work closely with someone on a project, and you leave just much better off than when you started, you know, and I don't know any other way to explain it than that. The holidays are upon us, and finding the right gift for your kids, nieces and nephews and partner and family members can be super difficult, but it doesn't have to be. Go check out Uncommon Goods. Sophie and I were checking it out the other day, looking for gifts for our kids. They have a Make Your Own Storybook Kit, which we love. There's this cardboard toolkit where the cardboard saw that's safe and connectors. You can build cool stuff and forts and whatnot. They also got these building connectors where you can connect sticks and make a fort. Mainly, I just like forts, but there's tons of cool creative gifts that will inspire your kids to go make stuff, but we could also easily have just bought stuff for each other or even ourselves. 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Go outside, that's number six. All right, when you're an artist, it's so easy to get obsessed with your work, to get obsessed with your hustle, to get obsessed with making the stuff. But honestly, one of the biggest things, even when I lived in a small town, going outside, meeting new people, and not just going out and trying to network and get stuff from people, go out and get involved and give some of your time to the different arts organizations that you live near and go to the events and meet people and make some friends, make some new friends, okay? Don't sit in your studio all day, work it on the stuff, thinking that, look, like the thing about art, just forget the idea that it's a meritocracy. Like the best artists don't necessarily win and that's okay. You can still be an amazing artist, you can still focus on being great at your art. But the truth is, if you don't connect with other people, you've got no chance of this thing working. And I think even when I lived in a small town, I put it off for a long time. When you work on your own, sometimes you lose your social skills and all that stuff, if you're alone too often. But one of the things I started doing was just intentionally go and get involved with the museums and the art organizations and all that. You know what? First of all, just emotionally, it pays off and it's great. Second of all, I got so many cool projects and so I got to collaborate with different companies locally and do some really great stuff. And it actually built out a part of my income that I never expected. But you can't underestimate A, how important real face-to-face connections are with people. And then B, how many opportunities are out there, even if you don't live in a really major city. And so that's a really easy way to grow your businesses to make those face-to-face connections. Go outside of, just go outside, go outside of your comfort zone and go get involved with other people. I think that that's one of the easiest, fastest ways to grow your business. Grow your commercial art practice. All right, number seven, let go of what's not working. All right, I got two examples for this. Number one is from Mean Girls, where I don't remember their names, I don't know at that intimately, but I always liked that. There was a girl on there, one of the popular girls that's trying to make the word fetch happen. She's trying to get people to say this word. And Rachel McAdams, I think it is, is like, stop trying to make that happen. And I feel like you have this thing that you're obsessed with, your ego once it's so bad and you want it now, that you're hammering on this door and nobody is opening it and they might not ever open it or they're not gonna open it for a year. And I'm gonna give you another little story real quick, okay? In the future podcast, I got a guy email me, Brian Hurst, gave me this idea about defining your success. I'm gonna do that one pretty soon, I think. Thanks for the cool idea. And I'm gonna tell you a story about one time where I got lost when I went on a run when I was in England. But long story short, I had to admit that I was wrong and that I was lost. And admitting that you're going the wrong way is so difficult and you feel so stupid or whatever. But, and I flagged someone down, I finally got to call my dad and I kind of expected my dad, I love my dad, he's a good guy. But I just thought, I'm gonna call him and he's gonna be like, oh, why didn't you bring a phone? Why didn't you, how did you get lost? Why did you do this big run that you didn't know where you're going, all this stuff? And, you know, when I called him, I didn't even think I would've gone long enough for him to worry about me. And I was an adult, you know, but it was in my college time. And he, when I called him, he was just very worried and he didn't know where I was and he was upset. He didn't have any, you know, I told you so or you should've done this or you should've done that. No, it was just, he was worried, he wanted to help me get home and, you know, I feel like that whatever reason there's this thing that's, you know, this fear of letting go of this thing that you have, you know in your gut, it's time to let that thing go. And I think just, you know, as much as growing, you know, growing, I think is just as much about, just as much about, you know, more as it is about less, it's just as much about pruning what you're doing as growing new fruit, you know. And I feel like you've got to stop and stopping that thing that you know is not working, it's not gonna feel scary, it's not gonna feel bad. When you end up going to do it, you're gonna be met with great things. And I think you take a moment, get real with yourself and just say, are there a few things that I'm doing in my work that I know they're not working, I know they're coming from jealousy or, you know, copying or something, I ain't, what is it? In your own work that it's time to pause on or time to completely move on from. Because the truth is you can't grow unless you free up some time, you free up some space. All right. Number eight, learn from other industries. This is the don't judge a book by its cover. I would say one of the things that I'm both embarrassed by as well as super proud of is my, you know, I will go into any book or podcast or resource or a person. I will take whatever lessons I can learn from my art. I'll take them from anywhere. And I won't judge them by a book by its cover. I don't care what the presentation is, I don't care what the message is wrapped up in. I don't care. If it's good stuff, I'm gonna take it and I'm gonna use it for my thing. And the cool thing is if you'll not judge a book by its cover and you'll go out there to other industries and learn from them, you're gonna be able to bring new stuff to your industry that nobody else is doing. And I think one of the easiest ways to grow what you're doing is to look out into other industries and see what other people are doing, see things that nobody else is doing in illustration and bring that back. But the thing that you're gonna have to do is you can't be put off by the wrapping of this stuff. 'Cause for instance, I like a lot of marketing people. I like a lot of business work and resources. I love all that stuff. And yeah, there's a lot of times when I'm engaging in that kind of industry where I don't love the way that they're doing things. I don't love the, I hate usually the design of things. And then I hate even more the semantics or the words that they choose to use or when it's icky or whatever, there's all kinds of things that they're not right. But what I've realized is that if I take that idea that they're trying to communicate and I utilize it and I shift it and I change it to work for my industry and what I do, like there's massive payoff there. There's big growth that can happen. And I've been doing that for my whole art career and it's really paid off for me. All right, number nine. Number nine is a good one. Spend time with competitors. Almost nothing grows my practice. Like spending time around people that I wanna be like or that I wanna be more like. The times when I've been around people that are challenging my ideas and doing better things than I'm doing, almost, it's like a weird human thing. It's like one of my favorite examples of that is like, people think that you can only run a mile so fast and there's just, and that's impossible for a human to even run any faster than that. And then one person beats the record and then all of a sudden everybody beats the record. And it defies logic, but I feel like for me, it's exact same. So, whenever I meet somebody or I become friends with somebody who does certain things better than me, I just instantly get better at those. My mind just expands and I quit accepting less or worse. You know, one of the examples of this was I was in college. There's an illustrator called Lee Ford. He came in and he was doing editorial illustration and all kinds of stuff. And for whatever reason, knowing that meeting a real person that does illustration in real life that really gets good jobs and seeing that that's a real thing. It's not just like a celebrity thing, a thing that is totally untouchable. Just seeing that might work instantly got better. Like almost unexplainably. And so I think one of the best things you can do is how can you spend time either in person or online in direct communication with the people that you're in competition with, the people that are better than you. That's the best way to change and best way to grow is to spend time with people like that you wanna be like and less time with people that you don't wanna be like. All right, last one. A big one, give instead of get. When we talk about growth of your work and we're talking a little bit about money, we're talking a little bit about accumulating new things and things working out for you. Often, the way we think we do that is by stepping on other people, taking more than we give, trying to get ahead, all that stupid crap. And I never feel like that's what it's about. For me, I feel like it's about how do I participate more? How do I give more? Because, you know, one of the things I know someone, a friend of mine, early on his career, he would email people, but he wouldn't email them with anything, trying to take away. And it really wasn't even ulterior motives. It was just he, every time he responded to something that he thought, look, that thing is awesome. He would reach out, send him an email and just say, look, that thing you're doing is awesome. And I'll tell you what, the emails that I've sent that had bad motives, they don't go anywhere. But the emails where I've, you know what, I've responded to something, I had an emotional connection to something, you know, for instance, there's a big blogger out there, I'm not gonna give you all the details just 'cause it doesn't seem very classy, but there's a big blogger, they were doing this thing that was helping tons of creative people and it helped me so much. I reached out to him and I just said, look, that thing that you've done is impacting thousands of people and it's amazing and it's meaningful and you should be super proud of it. And I just wanna thank you. You know, she went around, blogged a project of mine, turned into, you know, a free trip across the country for a awesome project. And you know, honestly, that email was so pure. It was literally just like, this is something that's meaningful to me and I want the creator of it to know that they're doing meaningful work. And I really do believe, if you're attitude, if you just shift your attitude, don't shift your attitude. If I give, I'm gonna get more stuff. Don't shift your attitude to that. Don't shift your, don't have the attitude of, I need to take, take, take, shift your attitude to, I'm going to go from a scarcity mentality that says that there's only so much work out there. There's only so much praise out there. There's only, you know, I've gotta take as much as I can get. Shift your attitude from that to I need to go out there and to a generosity and abundance mentality that says there's more than enough for the people that are gonna work hard and do right and be talented and do great work. And I'm gonna go out there and I'm gonna give all that I can get. I'm gonna get, you know, there's podcasts? That's what this is about. Yes, there are cool things that happen from this for me. But I try to remain as pure as possible and say I'm gonna give my time and resources to things that I've learned and I'm gonna try to make it as beneficial to as many people as possible, purely out of the fact that I want other people to have great breakthroughs in their work. Okay, so that's it. I'm wrapping it up. Remember, you can find this and listen to this on illustration with illustration-age, illustration-age.com/creativepeptalk. You can go check it out there. It's an awesome illustration website, tons of inspiration, great news about what's going on in the illustration world. And thanks for the new reviews on iTunes. Super awesome, really appreciate all those kind of words. Thank you so much. Thanks for the emails engaging in the topics, giving me new topics. Thanks for sharing it on Twitter and Instagram and Tumblr. Super thankful to all you guys. Keep listening. Until then, stay peped up. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) Hey, y'all, one more quick thing. Earlier this year, I rebuilt my website using Squarespace's new fluid engine, and I was so pumped about how it turned out that I have been really thrilled to find as many ways to partner with them and tell you about what they can do and bring you discounts as possible. With social media going haywire, I think having a site that feels as unique as your creative work is essential to building trust with your target audience or your clients. I have had several clients point out how cohesive and fresh my site looks lately. And if you wanna check that out and what I was able to do without any code, check out AndyJPizza.com. If you wanna test it out, go to squarespace.com/peptalk to test it out yourself. And when you're ready to launch, use promo code PEPTALK for 10% off your first purchase. Thanks Squarespace for supporting the show and for supporting creative people. Do you love hair raising allegedly true stories about the paranormal? Then summon the podcast Scared to Death. It's the popular horror series with more than 60 million downloads and is co-hosted by me, Dan Cummins. And me, Lindsey, co-host, and also Dan's wife. Each week on Scared to Death, we share bone-chilling tales from old books and creepy corners of the web and some submitted by our listeners, all designed to make you sleep with the lights on. Think you can handle the horror? Tune in to Scared to Death every Tuesday at the stroke of midnight to find out.