Into the Studios: Illustration

It's good to go.

OK.

Great.

Hi, Robert.

Hi, how are you?

Hello, everyone. My name is Natalie Pacheco. I am one of the admissions counselors here at the Pennsylvania College of Art and Design. With me today is Robert Young. He is the chair of illustration. Hi, Robert.

Hi. Hi, everybody. Yeah. So thank you for that introduction. Yeah, my name is Robert Young. I'm the chair of illustration here at Pennsylvania College of Art and Design.

And I'm an illustrator. I'm also a designer and an animator and fine artist and a teacher and a writer and a comic artist and a bunch of other stuff.

So I'm going to talk today about the.

Illustration major and kind of what we do here and how how all of that works and.

Maybe how how it's different from from some other programs or some things that we can offer that I think that are really cool.

So.

There we go.

There.

So yeah, pcad illustration. One of the things that I like to start with is just kind of a.

And an overview like an understanding of what illustration is, because it's a really broad term that can mean all sorts of different things. Like you can you can pick up a a manual that has an image of an engine part and that's an illustration, but that's not really what we do here, so.

What is illustration? Illustration is imagery that conveys information about a text, concept or process to a viewer. It can be drawn, painted, 2D3D, or even animated. There is no illustration style, nor are there illustration specific materials. What we teach here is illustration as a method of visual problem solving, typically done in collaboration with the client. So.

That's one of the things that.

I like to start with that, to kind of like set the attention of what we're going to do. Visual problem solving is very important, so.

Illustration can be drawing, but it can also be 3D, and the more important part of it is actually the brain part is the concept. So how you solve the problem, what kind of problems you're interested in solving, who you want to collaborate with, that's kind of things that we all.

Have to figure out individually. So in this program myself and our other instructor is kind of.

Give you various examples of program of problems that maybe other industries solve, and a lot of them are familiar things like a, you know, a book cover or a portrait or something like that, but also things like like animation. How can we solve problems for magazines?

That people now read on tablets. So like we can have animation, illustrators need to have some animation skill, illustrators need to have some 3D skill drawing skill.

Umm.

So.

Here we go.

So the the process of illustration really has like a kind of specific workflow to it and this works really no matter what.

What industry you want to work in or what kind of materials you want to use?

This is kind of how.

A.

How a job might might come to you so you get this.

You get this initial Commission like somebody, somebody emails you and says, hey, we really like your work and we want you to create an illustration for this book cover for this series or something. So that's the initial Commission. The way that you get that is.

Sometimes people find you on Instagram, although that's actually pretty rare. The more common way is through networking and through getting your work in front of clients that you want to work with. So if you want to work in book covers for like, say, sci-fi fantasy.

You would look at publishers that publish that sort of thing. So there's tour books, there's orbit books, and then you would say, OK, who, who is it at those companies that hires illustrators that orbit books? Maybe it's Lauren Panepinto.

You then create.

Work that would be appropriate for that market and you try to get it in front of this person who might hire you.

And you do that a lot. That's like the bulk of the job of an illustrator is creating work and getting in front of people that will hire them.

So then hopefully that person sees your work, they have a job for you and they do that initial Commission.

From there your your first step is not really drawing yet. It's research. So then it's what? What is it that I need to illustrate? What is this book about?

Often this is there's like meetings you, you know, the client or the art director or somebody talks to you and tells you like, this is kind of ideas that we have or this is what this book is about. And this would be the same if you were working on a game or if you were working on an editorial illustration or surface design or something like that.

But the front of it is all kind of research. You have to know what.

What this thing is about?

Then you start going into ideation, like what are ways that you can communicate the thing that you need to communicate.

What do you need to communicate? Who are you communicating these things to? Like, who's your audience? It's it's very different.

Designing a book cover for.

For like a a sci-fi fantasy book for adults versus designing a book cover for a middle grade fiction book or a phone book or a.

Design book or something like that. So you have you have kind of different audiences of who's going to see your work and that's going to change how you communicate things, what kind of things you do.

Then you get the sketches and that's the like, pretty self-explanatory part. A lot of people are coming to art school like you've done sketches and you've done drawings, so that's at this point now you're going, well, here's like a small version of maybe what I want to draw.

You do that a bunch. Tons and tons of sketches, all different. Different options, different compositions.

And.

At this point you're now kind of going back and forth with with an art director and you're saying, oh, here, here are these sketches usually send like 3 to 5 sketches or however many they ask for. It might be more or less.

And then they may look at them and say, Oh yeah, we really like this one and this one. Can you move this over here? So this is where it becomes a collaborative effort, really. You work with the art director and sometimes the client and sometimes some other people, but usually just the art director.

To kind of refine your sketches and ideas together.

There is kind of a a very old way of doing illustration where maybe the in our director would just say you'd like draw this. Like the example I always use is like, I want you to draw a dog with a cowboy hat on and that can be fine, but that's not how the job works. Very often you're being hired for your brain.

So the collaborative part of this is really.

Really kind of like the best part and the thing that makes contemporary illustration different from from some other versions of illustration.

All through this process, you're making revisions.

You're you're getting the, you're getting this sketch closer and closer to done. You go, and you do color compositions. You refine the drawing, and then eventually you take it to final.

And then you have the final deliverables. Those are really the things that you're being paid for.

Umm.

The.

Some of these steps get repeated a number of times, like you might go back to the research stage at some point. So this isn't like a.

I never like to treat illustration as if it's like a a line where you just go from point A to point B.

It can be quite a bit different, but once you do get to the end.

You that's when you get paid. You send a, you send an invoice, you work with a contract.

Uh.

All of all of this so.

And this is when you send your final files to whoever it is that you're working with.

And it's very important that you get paid for your work. That's a big part of this program and our philosophy is that we're we're trying to.

Give students the tools to turn illustration into a business, something that's, you know, it's it's not just an expensive hobby, it's not just being better at drawing, being able to draw accurately or something like that. It's how do you how do you do this as a job rather than doing a different job and drawing for fun? Not that there's anything wrong with drawing for fun, but you spend four years in art school and you get this degree and.

You could. You can build like the rest of your life out of this.

So who hires illustrators? Since there is such a wide variety of types of illustration jobs and markets in which to find those jobs, who hires you, and how it can vary greatly. The most common scenario is an art director hires you as a freelance artist.

85% of illustrators are freelance, meaning that they don't work for the company.

For any individual company. So in the like book publishing scenario with tour books.

You wouldn't be an employee of tour books, you would have a contract that says we're going to pay you X to draw Y in this time frame.

There's a less common scenario which is being hired as an illustrator full time for an inhouse position at a company.

There are some, like weird places that do that that you wouldn't expect. BuzzFeed News has in-house illustrators, so if you ever go to BuzzFeed and you see like the illustrations on their site, some of those, a number of them were done by people inside.

Umm.

There are a couple of companies like that greeting cards sometimes do that, but it's it's still pretty rare. People that work in comics, people that work in visual development.

Editorial books.

All of these things, most of them work independently, so another part of this program then is professional. We have two professional practices classes.

Where we go over how to put a portfolio together, how to, what to put on a resume, how to make an invoice, how to make a contract, how much you should be paid, how much to ask for, how to ask for, how much you should be paid, which are all really, really, really important skills, I would say.

More so even than the drawing skills sometimes.

Because if you have these amazing illustrations, but you're unable to, like, advocate for yourself and be paid fairly, then it's it's really easy to kind of burn out. You do this wonderful work and these amazing illustrations, but you have to do more and more of them if you're not being paid well.

So that's a big part of our big part of our program.

Umm.

So I like to talk to about pay a lot.

Uh.

The.

There there are, you know, some things in illustration.

Umm.

That haven't changed in a very long time, so some of the, some of the pay rates for illustration.

Have kind of stayed the same, which means that the styles of illustration that people do for those jobs have gotten have become different.

Where you may have seen 30 or 40 years ago more fully rendered, painterly, or even painted work and editorial, you don't really see it anymore.

Because you're working to the same pay scale, so editorial, which is newspapers, blogs, magazines.

The job turnaround is sometimes only a few hours and at most maybe a few days. The longest I've seen is maybe a week or two.

But most often, and this is a field that I've done quite a bit of work in and editorial.

The longest turnaround I ever got, I think, was four days.

So that's really a market that.

That attracts certain people. Like you have to be able to work fast. It's very conceptual.

There are.

There are all kinds of different markets or different like clients and editorial. So just you know.

If you're like.

Doing work that would fit in at the New York Times that may not also fit in it, like Time magazine or something. So depending on your style and the kind of things that you like to illustrate, there are all sorts of editorial outlets that you can work for, but the pay is anywhere between 150 and $5000 with a pretty common.

Pay being around $400.00 for 1/4 page illustration, which is, you know, if you open a magazine or a newspaper. It's an illustration about this, the quarter of the size of the paper, so not very big.

That higher range up to $5000 is really for doing long series of illustration for like a newspaper or magazine where it's on multiple pages or.

Really, getting to 5000 is like if you do a New York Times or a New Yorker cover for The New Yorker magazine.

Which means that if you if you only work in editorial.

You would have to do a lot of editorial jobs.

To get by.

Publishing book covers and interiors. Those jobs last two to six weeks and pay 500 to $6000. So.

You get a lot more time to do that work, and often that leads to a different style of of work for some publishing where you get more.

More rendered, more detailed.

Bigger illustrations.

Visual development and concept art. So animation and game studios are usually the things that people come to mind 1st, and that's the thing that a lot of people that come into our program want to do. So we have classes that kind of cover visual, visual development and character design and backgrounds and all that sort of thing.

And they're usually thinking about animation and game studios, but like ad campaigns and comic books and.

Toys all have visual development and concept art with them too, so it's this huge field.

Which means that jobs can last anywhere from a few weeks to years. Maybe.

And the pay then is extremely variable because it depends on how long you're working there. So some people that do like backgrounds for a show like Steven Universe or Owl House.

They might have like an 18 month contract and then some other people that work on the same show might only have a three month contract, so they only work there for three months.

Children's picture books. So picture and board books. Those jobs can last from 6 to 18 months and pay anywhere from 5000 to $30,000. So if you're a children's book illustrator, you could maybe make fifty $60,000 in a year by doing two or three children's books.

So these are, these are only like a small handful of the number of markets that you can go in. Really. Illustration is one of the broadest categories of kind of a career in art and it pulls from graphic design and fine art.

Entrepreneurial categories. I have students now working on comic books and concept art pitches, and then also puppets and sculptures and greeting cards and wallpaper and clothing lines. Animation.

All sorts of stuff.

So I'd like to talk about the curriculum a little bit.

And this is an example of.

Of student work from the program. All of the images in these slides are examples of student work and the.

From the past couple of years in the illustration program.

Umm.

So your foundation classes are going to be the same.

Kind of regardless of what you do what what program you would go into.

And then you can see in the second year that you start doing not just drawing classes, but also things like typography and visual communication. So those are classes that are shared with the graphic design major.

Because illustrators need to be able to work with type as well. If they're not setting the type and designing type then.

They still need to know how that works so that they can create images that work with type. Often illustrators are working with designers if you.

Our an illustrator for book covers. Again, you probably aren't going to be the person doing the type for the title and the author name and all of that, but your image needs to be able to work with type or a designer needs to be able to work with your image to add type for the title and author.

There's also.

You'll see FI 201 painting methods is a class that we share with fine art. So the illustration program shares classes with graphic design, fine art, and animation and game art.

There's so much overlap between what those majors do and what we do as illustrators that illustrators need all of those skills as well.

So the painting methods class would be something that that teaches you to render to paint.

And as you go through the program, you continue to build those technical skills in painting and drawing, but also concept so in the 3rd and 4th year.

Your course is the the kind of main part of your course is switch a lot from how do you draw and how do you use this material and that sort of thing. Like how does light work? How does perspective work to why did you choose to draw the thing that you're drawing?

This is the thing that I asked my students constantly is.

You know, OK, so you drew this apple on this bench, but why?

Illustration.

Is about communication, and so you have to have an idea of what it is that you're communicating, and so each choice that you make should serve that communicative goal.

There.

There are uses of drawing that are more about recording accuracy, like.

You know, if you've ever done a still life and maybe you put an apple on a bench, your goal is to just draw that and make it look like the thing in front of you.

For illustration, that doesn't quite work. Now we have to have a reason that that Apple is on the bench. So a lot of the 3rd and 4th year classes are built around why you're doing what you're doing and also.

Umm.

Who it is that you are and what sort of things you want to do as an illustrator? What kind of stories do you want to tell so rather than?

Treating illustrator as someone who's a hired hand in that scenario of being asked to draw a dog with a cowboy hat on. Instead, we treat the illustrator as an author. So what sort of things do you want to make?

Then you make those things and then we figure out together.

What markets do those go to? Who, who do you find that will hire you to do that kind of work? We don't want to.

To have people kind of try to change who they are or change the way that they work to fit a specific market. Rather, we want to figure out who you are and what kind of work you want to make and then figure out what market is appropriate for that. And a lot of that is kind of based in an entrepreneurial mindset too.

It used to be that illustrators worked with art directors always, and art director would hire you, tell you what to draw, and you drew it.

Now a lot of illustrators run a business and.

So they create prints.

Illustrated ceramic objects, toys, games, these sorts of things, and they sell them themselves.

So self-publishing prints and multiples entrepreneurial avenues for illustration, even things like stickers, clothing lines, pins, that sort of stuff is a big focus of our specific illustration program.

And where you get a lot of that are in these classes in the 3rd and 4th year that are.

Kind of concentrations. So you can you can take digital sculpture and learn to work in ZBrush and create 3D models and then use that to.

Make 3D prints of statues or game pieces or game assets. Or you can go into design and illustration where you do more packaging design.

Learn to license pattern illustrations.

Umm.

Create wallpaper or fashion lines, that sort of thing.

One of the really.

Important parts of that is that.

Being an illustrator and being mostly freelance you you don't always have jobs coming in so if there is like a lull in.

The jobs that are coming in that you're getting.

Let's say you have a couple of weeks where a client hasn't reached out to you.

Instead of, you know, kind of not getting paid and not doing anything, you can create work and sell it yourself. So like ecommerce has been a huge thing for the last 10 years. And illustration because it's very easy to set up an Etsy store or like my website has a store function built into it so I can sell comics or prints.

Straight through that and people pay me for those things and you get like passive income.

Or you can take your work to art festivals and craft fairs. We have a number of them locally here in Lancaster and also in the area in Baltimore and Philly and DC and New York.

And that's where a lot of people sell the illustrated objects that they make.

It's also a place where you meet other like minded people and other collaborators.

Where you find people, get your work in front of more people that hire you. So all of this kind of isn't a big holistic picture of how to create a sustainable long term job in illustration.

So the two.

The two rough classifications for those classes are.

That you choose and the junior and senior year are classical classes and contemporary classes.

So the.

The classical concentration focuses on the classical approach to illustration, including draftsmanship and painting, representational painting techniques taught both traditionally and digitally, storytelling both visual and written, and conceptually narrative image making. That's the main focus. Some project examples of this type of illustration would include visual development for film, fantasy, and science fiction book covers, comic books, or scientifically accurate illustrations for publishers and clients.

Two of these take place in the junior year and then you have one in the senior year.

The other.

Classification of these classes are contemporary.

So the contemporary classes focus on contemporary shape building and conceptual industry language, focusing on illustrative typography, pattern designs, giftware illustrations, as well as other trending facets of the illustration industry.

A few project examples of this track would include hand lettering for labels or posters, pattern illustration, design for products such as fabric or gift wrapping paper, gift card illustration, or conceptual approach to editorial publishing. And again, there are two of those classes in the junior year and then one in the senior year.

And then I thought I would just show some student work examples of student work. So we have all of these slides, all of these images.

Have been within the last few years and show a wide variety of stylistic approaches, of tools, of conceptual approaches.

Here is something from Stephen Colicchio just just just this year.

This is kind of visual development. It's also narrative. It can be all sorts of things. Stephen Stephen works in all sorts of industries.

We have a lot of students doing comics. Here is a one page kind of horror comic from Jay Amon.

Here is an editorial illustration. So this was from Tyler Lee who graduated 2 years ago.

And within just a few.

Like, within a month of graduating, got his first kind of freelance gig, which was an illustration for the New York Times.

And on the cover of the sports section, which is a pretty big deal.

Here's another comic from Sophia Howk.

And that's it.

So.

There are a number of things that.

That we cover in illustration. Again, it's a very broad.

Very broad approach and you can really kind of explore whatever it is that you're interested in. There are a lot of opportunities to, especially with thesis and your senior year, to create kind of your own assignments where you work with myself and other instructors.

Yeah, so I hope that was informative. And.

Are there any questions?

Thank you, Robert. Yes, so there are a couple of questions ready.

Yeah.

OK so one question that I saw and I get this a lot when I meet with students is.

How important is it for one to develop their own style?

And to kind of follow up.

Is it OK for it to change throughout the years?

Yeah, so one of the things I don't know if I listed in my whole list of jobs that I do, but one of them is as an academic, so I.

Do a lot of thinking and writing and building of kind of.

Philosophy around how we even do what we do as illustrators and and a few years ago.

Published a paper on discussing and developing style. So it's a thing that I talk about a lot with students and it's really, it's a fascinating topic. It's always a question that I get. Style is always, always like one of the most important things that students are really concerned with is like, do I have a good style? If I, how do I get a style? What happens if I get the wrong style and.

There it's hard to answer it kind of succinctly because there's so many different variables, but.

Umm.

A lot of the stuff that we do junior year kind of points.

Point to your research like N words. So we have assignments where.

You kind of catalog just experiences that have happened to you, things that you've lived through, what your values are, what sort of things you like and don't like, and we use that to help students kind of figure out the beginnings of style development.

A lot of times when folks come into the program, they may have heard.

That there are certain styles that are good or bad. We don't think that's the case. So we have a lot of students who are influenced by anime, by comic books, by video games, but also by fine art, by literature, by history.

And, you know, people really get influenced by all these sorts of different things, so.

Your style is kind of the way that you choose to draw the things that you draw and that can change over time. As you as you go through life and you gain more experiences and different things happen, or you see different things, your style usually changes. It's pretty rare anymore to see someone.

Have the exact same style for like 20 years straight.

And so when you're a student.

It's going to go all over the place. I always tell students, like, don't worry about your style necessarily while you're in school because you'll have four or five different instructors showing you all kinds of different things. And, like, they have different preferences and they're showing you a new tool. It's like, we've never used this tool before and it might change the way that you draw and you might like that or you might not like that. And so your style then could be influenced by going like, OK, I did this thing. I've tried this new process, like screen printing. I'd never screen printed before. And you see things. You're like, oh, that's really cool.

That, you know, hits something in my brain and I feel like this is really like able to express in a better way what I want to express.

And that can become part of your style. Or you can do that. And you I hate this. I hate the way that this looks. I don't like this effect. I want to do the opposite of that. And then you start directing your work in a different way, and that can influence your style.

So stylistic development is a lifelong process.

It's it's something that we talk a lot about and.

It's it's really fun. It's cool to see like, everybody works differently if I go back through some of these slides.

No two things really look the same, even if they used the same.

Tools like all of these that I'm showing. These are all digital drawings.

But you know, there's no like digital style or illustration style, so.

Yeah.

Thank you, Robert. I feel like that answer is really important for students to hear, especially when I visit students in high school or just conversation in general. I get the sense of anxiety over developing a a style and it's really nice to hear, especially as a professional working in the industry. It's OK for things to just kind of morph into things little by little. And it's true. No style change, no style stays.

Stays the same for long.

Yeah.

So I have one question for you.

OK.

For students that are just starting out in the industry, they just graduated then and these are the tools that are under there about what kind of guidance or tips to try to overcome challenges in those initial years once they graduate.

Yeah, so.

The way that I teach illustration and what we're trying to build the program around is very process oriented. So one of the things that always bugged me when I was a student was this idea of like just innate talent. Like some people have these great ideas and some people don't, and I was like, well, that doesn't really make any sense to me. So through these classes we set up.

Kind of ways to ways to go through this process of illustration that include like research and ideation and sketches like how many sketches should you do, how do you do sketches?

Do you start with sketches or do you start with research?

All of this stuff basically gets repeated forever, so you don't.

You know, do all of these sketchings and like observational drawings and tests and all of this stuff in school and then graduate and just stop doing it and just go straight into the final.

Just like you know, you've probably heard that like you should draw from reference, like use reference when you draw. You just kind of always do that so most people don't get to a point where they just never have to use reference anymore. So a big thing.

That I always tell students, especially when they're graduating.

Is to is to not forget that process. It's really easy to.

You know want to skip ahead to like the final image or, you know, skip ahead to like your favorite part of it. But if you go through that process then you don't get into those spots as as often where.

You can't come up with an idea, or you can't figure out what you want to draw or how to draw it. The other thing is just persistence. You know, illustration is a challenging industry to work in.

It's always changing. I've been an illustrator for about 15 years and it's changed considerably at least twice.

Umm.

You know there are always new tools, so 15 years ago illustrators.

Didn't really need to know how to animate and now they do because so many things are on screens. So you're always going to be learning new things. If you can be a curious person, if you're, you know, willing to willing to adapt to new challenges and problem solve, not just in the illustration but also in the industry and be persistent, then you have a really, really, really good chance of being able to.

To to be a professional illustrator for a very long time.

The people that I find that have the most trouble are.

People who are like, abandon that process or are like kind of too rigid in their style. So sometimes styles go out of favor and they're they're working on something and it's like, oh, these clients don't, you know, they're not like, picking this up anymore. They don't like it as much.

Then you change something. It doesn't mean you have to change ur but like what is the what kind of approach are you taking? Or is there a new market that the market just the people that buy?

That that want to hire the kind of things that you do.

Maybe they were over here and now they're over here, so it's always changing. It's one of the things that I really like about illustration. I get bored very easily, and illustration is never really boring because I always have to do new things.

But that does that does make it a little bit challenging.

Awesome. Thank you, Robert. So there's one more question.

Great.

So.

After knowing that you've been doing this for 15 years, what keeps you motivated? What keeps you motivated to keep going?

Yeah, this is always fun.

I used to work in IT, so in IN2000I I graduated from high school and I wanted to go to art school and I had a terrible GPA.

And so I had to go to Community College and I failed out of Community College and I was like, OK, well, I'm not going to do that.

But I knew how to fix computers, so I went into it and I hated it.

The whole time I was like.

Like you, you could. I actually worked for like an outsourcing company. And so if you were like, I feel like I should be paid a little bit more. I was like, well, you know, we could just like outsource your job.

And then one day they outsourced me and I was like, OK, I don't want a job that anybody else can do. Like, I want a job that's based around me and my specific skills.

So having worked in an office and having worked in kind of corporate it and not liking it.

I decided to go back to school and got my grades in a better spot. And then when I got into art school, it was a much better experience and I got to kind of cultivate and build this business around me personally and the things that I like rather than working, you know, solely for someone else. So that's that's really a big part of it. I think it's one of the we kind of trade and amount of security sometimes for freedom and illustration has a lot of freedom to tell the kind of stories that you want to tell.

You know, if there's something that you want to see, like change in the world, illustrators are a big part of that, and visual artists in general by calling attention, by telling stories that need to be told.

And that just wasn't, you know.

There wasn't like a fulfilling part of the other jobs that I had before Illustrator for that. So I think it's. I think it's probably one of the best reasons to be an illustrator is is freedom.

I agree wholeheartedly.

OK.

So I think, I think that was the last question. So to wrap up, I want to say a big thank you to you, Robert, for spending your time to talk with everyone to present on the illustration department. And I'm really happy to see all the information that you have given. So thank you so much. I do want to direct our participants to definitely check us out. Definitely come and visit if you're local or if you're close enough to visit the building to be able to talk.

Thanks.

Our lovely faculty like Robert and all the other staff and faculty at the college and definitely check us out. I left a couple of links on the chat one to visit US1 link to be able to see all of our events and as well as the link to the illustration department. So once again, thank you everyone. Thank you Robert for coming and enjoy your day. Bye bye everyone.

Bye.