I met up with Melissa of OperationNICE for First Friday (July) in Philadelphia — a monthly art event that takes place where you can explore Old City art galleries, people watch, and enjoy great entertainment and food. While we were walking about, Melissa shared some of her experience of the recent HOW Conference she attended (so jealous!). It sounded as if it was so inspiring! The events as well as the non-conference related meet-ups were equally interesting. It sounded fantastic! I WILL make it to one of the conferences in the future.

She mentioned a presentation where the speaker (forgive me, I can’t remember his name off the top of my head) spoke about doing what you love. He discussed getting your work out there, having fun with it and ultimately enjoying your career. He mentioned something along the lines of, “you never know what may come of it so why not just go for it?” It’s a good question. It’s a simple question and sort of a no-brainer. There have been many times I’ve explored an idea only to keep it to myself. Maybe it could’ve inspired someone else or expanded in some way, shape or form. Who knows.

As designers, we sometimes keep our ideas to ourselves in case they could lend themselves to an upcoming project. It’s good practice to keep a few good ideas in storage for use at a later date. I’m an advocate of that practice, but it got me thinking about the “other” creative part of me and how I constantly shut down my ideas. Bear with me. It’s sounds strange, I know, but I feel like I am made up of two, somewhat different, creative personas.

I began my career as an illustrator in college. It’s something I haven’t really focused on in ages. It became a sort of love/hate relationship for me and was one of those things that I felt everyone began to expect from me. I became overwhelmed and quite honestly, annoyed, with all of the requests and expectations that I could “just doodle” something “real quick” for a friend, significant other or family member. I began to resent my art. It seemed it wasn’t taken very seriously. “Hey, how about you just draw this real quick?! It’ll be great!” Thinking about it gives me chills. And it was always just assumed that it was easy. A craft that came 100% naturally and didn’t require upkeep or practice. Yes, it became so annoying that I locked it up and threw away the key.

That’s when I began to explore graphic design as a career option. Not that it was my second choice — it was more of a natural progression and what that happened much more organically than this post may illustrate. It was a career choice that I enjoyed immediately, grew to become extremely passionate about, and allowed me to explore another avenue of my creativity. Yes, it did seem that people took it a bit more seriously as a business and that there were more jobs readily available — it was the best choice for me at the start of my career. Illustration is also a lucrative career option and should be treated as such, but at the time, I feel it was a bit more difficult to position myself and honestly, I wasn’t ready to deal with the way people treated the craft.

It’s been 10 years since I graduated from college with my Illustration degree. I’ve been known to sketch from time to time, but I’m no where as good as I used to be. I’m paying for the abandonment now. I used to draw everyday. I used to draw for hours a day. It was something I enjoyed and I was pretty good at it. It’s a craft that should be practiced as much as possible if one wants to it to be their profession. I often wonder how I would’ve done had I stuck to it and plowed through the people who I shouldn’t have been looking at as potential clients in the first place. There is definitely a big market out there for illustrators, but I didn’t feel ready for that at the time. Now that I have experienced the business of design over the past 10 years, I feel that I’m better prepared to offer illustration as a service when a project calls for it. I don’t think I’m ready to do full on illustration projects (illustrate an article for example), but offering illustrations as extra embellishments, curliques, etc. to a design project here and there is no problem. In fact, I already do it. I guess you can’t fully get away from something that’s a part of your creativity. It’s been a great addition to my list of services so far and I’m slowly easing back into it.

During my college experience, I explored different styles as I became tired of photo-realism (which is fantastic, by the way, but I wanted to push my boundaries and play with exaggerated/distorted figures, lines, contrast and graphic quality a bit more). The examples at the bottom of this post are a few of my senior portfolio pieces I created. I trained to be an editorial illustrator who focused on caricatures of celebrities. I LOVE pop culture and still do. It’s my guilty pleasure. I haven’t shared these pieces in what seems like forever, but after speaking with Melissa last week, I figured, why not put them out there? Maybe I’ll make a few prints of them to sell. Not sure, but it’s a fun thought. Maybe it’ll simply be good for me to reminisce and will inspire me to explore a bit more. That is my ultimate goal. Here’s to creativity and exploring our ideas!

I’m trying to get back to my illustration/drawing roots and draw more as I’m out of practice. Maybe one day, I’ll get back to the level I was 10 years ago with the chance of evolving more. These illustrations don’t reflect my current style… in fact, looking at them, there is a lot I’d change/edit today. So, you’ve been primed. Here’s some work from my college days. I hope you enjoy it! Oh, and thank you, Melissa, for inspiring me to dig out these old paintings. You’re fantastic!

Art work © 1999-2000 Nicola Black. All rights reserved. Please contact me if you’d like to use them for anything, please. Thank you!

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