Creative Pep Talk
014 - The Answer is Not on the Internet
(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. 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 tool kit, with a 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 them for it. 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. This curated selection of goods means you don't have to scour the internet for something unique and exciting, and you're supporting artists and small businesses at the same time, which you know I love. To get 15% off your next gift, go to uncommongoods.com/peptalk. That's uncommongoods.com/peptalk. For 15% off, don't miss out on this limited time offer, uncommon goods. We're all out of the ordinary. (upbeat music) - Well, it's the creative podcast already back. I've had a lot of different topics build up over the past couple of weeks, and yeah, I'm just feeling like I'm on a roll. I get a lot of different things to talk about, and the feedback from you guys on Twitter and suggestions on topics and stuff is also helping, so I really appreciate that. Today, the episode is inspired by something that my buddy, Abe Viscara, tweeted to me, and it said, he said, "How do you find your style "when you have a highly eclectic palette, "or how do you find your voice?" And so this is something that when I was back at ICON, in Portland, in July, Abe and I talked a little bit about this, and... (upbeat music) 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. (upbeat music) - 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 andiejpizza.substack.com. And I hope to see you at this month's meetup. - You know, it's something actually, I've spent a lot of time, energy thinking about in the past couple months. And I'm gonna start with talking about one of my all-time favorite things. And I say that with no irony. Fraggle Rock, I am obsessed with Fraggle Rock. That's my favorite piece of media out there. It's just perfection in my eyes in so many ways. And actually my first favorite episode, if you're wondering, is about mud well, the mud bunny. So look that up and go watch it. But I'm gonna talk to you about my second favorite episode and it's a close second, it's almost first. But there's an episode, if you're familiar with Fraggle Rock, if you're not, I mean, they're these weird creature, muppet creatures that live underground. And there's like five main ones and then there's a bunch of other ones. And they're called Fraggles. And one day there's this group of musicians, this mysterious group of musician Fraggles, journeys into their underground land. And they're called the minstrels. And the lead is this character called Kantis. And he doesn't look like Yoda, but he's a little bit Yoda-ish. And he's voiced by Jim Henson, I believe. And he's just one of the best characters of all time. I'm obsessed with him. And he brings this pipe, it's a magic pipe. And one of my favorite lines is that he says, someone says, where'd you get it? And he says, I got it from a strange and mysterious, a strange and mysterious, he says, a strange and mysterious what? I don't know, it was so strange and mysterious. (laughs) All right, all right, I'm getting a little silly. But I love that episode and it pertains what we're talking about. So in that episode, he says that every Fraggle has its own song. And then they're gonna come together for the great Fraggle Medley, where they all sing their songs together and they go together. Now, Red is the Fraggle whose she is like the go-getter, always first Fraggle. And she's like so obsessed with being first that she's like saying she wants to find her song first and just tell her what to do. Just tell her what the song is and she'll sing it. And he's like, that's not how it works. Like you can't be told how to do it. Like it's just a song you have to wait and listen and hear your song. And your song's gonna come from inside. And so she doesn't understand that she just wants to get down to business and get moving on it. And so she's so obsessed. She's asking everybody else what their songs are. She's worried so she can't hear her song or she doesn't believe that she'll hear it if she slows down. And then all the other Fraggles are finding their songs and she's supposed to be the leader of the medley. And so she goes and steals his magic flute. And she gets this mark on her hand that shows that she stole this instrument. And it also won't play her song, won't play a song when she tries to play it. And she goes at the end and talks to him about it and he says that the song isn't in the flute. Only when you know your song will it play the song. But the song is inside of you. And as cheesy as that is, and as corny as it is, there's something that here I swear, man, I feel like this is so, so relevant to designers and illustrators finding their voice. I think that there's so many, you know, I think so often when you're a young guy or a young girl and you wanna go out there and you love the art, you love the illustration and you're a go-getter. You're like a high achiever and you just want someone to spell it out. Like go ahead, just tell me what to do. I'm ready to go and just tell me the five steps. I'll do the five steps, I'll do them so fast. And just show me what I gotta do to find my voice and do my style and you're looking at everything, you're listening to what other people are doing and you're not slowing it down enough to let the process happen, to let the work develop for your voice to actually say something, for you to get alone with your work and kind of dive deeper into yourself and not necessarily to activities or necessarily looking at other people's stuff or being a go-getter, you know, it's not, I don't think that that's where it comes from and I think that I just felt like that, that episode, you should go check it out 'cause it's absolutely masterpiece. And it just has, it just sums up that feeling of, you know, it's almost like, I've heard people say that when they're going to like, they're trying to find the one that they wanna be with, you know, a significant other, that it's, I've heard a million people say, it was when they quit searching that they found them. And I'm not saying that it's like that, but I am saying that it's one of these things where it's not something you can force into submission. And the other thing is, the main thing from this Fraggle story is that I'm pointing to is that she was always looking outside of herself for the answer. She was looking to the magic pipe, she was looking to her friends and what they were doing and she was asking for what the five steps were. So she was always looking outside of herself to find out who she was inside of herself. And this is something that I thought a lot about recently. A scary thought at one point for me was, you know, trying to figure out, I was thinking about a few years back, what type of books that I should make or if I could come up with any new ideas for books. And I was thinking back to the other books that I've made and I have this alarming thought when it came to, what type of books do I wanna make? And I felt like a lot of suggestions say, make something based on what you like. And I have this kind of alarming thought that, what if I couldn't describe who I was without relating to things outside of me, without relating, you know, what if I couldn't say, this is who I am without talking about other things, without talking about the things that I like? Yeah, am I more than my tastes and my interest to my likes? There's gotta be more to who I am than other things, does that make sense? Like I'm another thing, I'm a thing all on my own. So I have, I'm unique all on my own without the other things and those other things are unique on their own, without me. And so, I started to think about how that relates to what your voice is in art. And I came up with this phrase, with this phrase, and the phrase was, the answer is not on the internet. And that can mean all kinds of different things. But I just found, I don't know, myself in the past thinking if you just researched long enough, you'd find the answer and it's that same thing from the finals. If you just look outside of yourself, you'd find what was inside of yourself. Now that's kind of my point is that, when you go out there looking outside of yourself to find out who you are, which is inside of yourself, you're not gonna find it, okay? So the closest things you're gonna find are gonna be a lot of different things. The things that come close, the things that you really like or really respond to emotionally are gonna be a bunch of different things. The space in between those things is you, it's your voice. It's your thing. And you'll never find the linking piece because you're the linking piece. You have to stop and look at yourself. And I think we're so busy and jealousy and fear drive this idea that we gotta make it happen right now, we gotta keep going. And I think we're so busy filling up our minds and eyes with Pinterest and Twitter and what other people are doing and stuff that we like and just that it's so noisy. We never stop to actually do something that connects to and brings out the stuff that's in us in actuality. Actually recently I've been leaning harder into this idea of contradictions because and thinking that when you take these two seemingly contradicting things and you try to do something with them together that that's when something new happens because it's not that they're actually contradictory, it's just they haven't been linked together. That's why they seem contradictory. This idea started to develop when I was asked to do an interview and I thought rather than one of these email interviews and I thought rather than say a bunch of weird wordage about my work is graphic illustration that's whimsical and blah blah blah, all these words, I thought that doesn't mean anything to anybody. Nobody knows what that even means. Like it's easier just to look at the work or I'll just come out with an analogy that for most people drive it home really fast. And so I came up with this idea and that's where a lot of these thoughts on this podcast came from which was my work is like if Alexander Gerard was super into Fraggle Rock. And when I put those two really contradictory things next to each other, I was like, yes, I am the space in between there and it doesn't make sense until you see my work 'cause you've never seen that before until you see my work. And then you're like, yeah, that is it. And for me that was like a kind of an aha moment for me. And it was just taking these seemingly unrelated tastes and saying, I'm gonna make something that fits right in between those things. And there's nothing else out there like that because it's my thing. So yeah, I think that there's actually a lot of stuff to go on here. Now, I'm kind of aware of that. Often with these kind of podcasts and stuff and or these books that are like this, they all sound really theoretically great and you listen to them and you're like, awesome. And then you go away from me like, well, what am I actually gonna do? Like, okay, great, that was good. It was good thoughts, but what's the practical application? For me, it looks like a few things. So the first thing is, I'm a giant fan of Free Association, which I think was an invention of Freud. And he just said, this was a therapy technique, I think. So he just told them to talk and don't filter judge what you're saying. Just talk and just let it, just let it flow. And I think Free Association, when it comes to speaking, when it comes to like, you could record yourself or you could write, you can write pages and pages of just what all, it doesn't even make, it doesn't have to make sense, just write and just let it all flow out. Another better thing to do, if you're doing art, is to draw, get a sketchbook. This is one of the things that some of my biggest kind of style breakthroughs and voice breakthroughs came from just getting into a sketchbook or starting a piece of work and just like going to town on it for five hours and not judging it, just letting it kind of flow and happen. And I think actually when you let that stuff fall out into the page, that's you coming out onto the page. So that's a more pure way of finding this thing than looking outside of yourself. This is actually you putting yourself onto paper. And I think those are where the answers are gonna come from rather than researching and looking outside and looking into other things. So that's my number one thing. The other thing, my other suggestion is this. Take those seemingly contradictory tastes and purposefully make some things that incorporate all of those contradictory things. If you've got, recently I tried to do that really more so I thought a few about, I don't know, six months ago or whatever, I felt like my style, my taste is a lot more graphic than I'm letting influence my work. And so I just thought, and at first I'm like, well, but my work is really character driven and narrative driven, how can that really work with graphic stuff? And so again, it appears as a contradiction, but I just thought I'm gonna force myself to do it. I'm gonna force myself to draw cleaner, more strict lines and more graphically, and I'm gonna let some of that mid-century geometric stuff just seep into this stuff even though it feels like, I don't know if it goes together. And when I just forced those things into the same piece of work, I had so many discoveries and so many breakthroughs in like, it looks so much more original, like stuff I hadn't seen before. And so yeah, my two suggestions are, do some free association activities and my other one is to do some pieces of work, where some mashups of your tastes and see what kind of discoveries you make then because I think you're the connecting piece between these seemingly contradictory things and don't look on the internet and put down that magical pipe. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (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. (upbeat music) - I'm Whit Msildine, the creator of This Is Actually Happening, a podcast from Wondery that brings you extraordinary true stories of life-changing events told by the people who lived them. From a young man that dooms his entire future family with one choice, to a woman that barely survived her roommate, we dive into what happened and hear their intimate first-person account of how they overcame remarkable circumstances. Follow This Is Actually Happening on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts or listen ad-free by joining 1D+ in the Wondery app.