There Are Some Changes Afoot Around Here After A Long Break But Before All Is Revealed Here’s A Recent

On Change

I'm releasing a brand new website today full of barely-seen work and I thought I'd try something different and share some of my thoughts about the launch and why I feel the need to start things over.

I've been laying real low the last couple of months and while I've continued to take on commissions I've also been working on my own pieces in an effort to build a body of work that feels like “me”. My work hadn't felt right for a while and even though I haven't been doing full-time freelance illustration for very long it felt like a malaise was setting in and the thought of making the same kind of work for another ten years felt heavy indeed.

It's silly to think my work wouldn't change during that time, it would of course, but for whatever reason I had begun to feel trapped. I don't know if it makes sense to describe the feeling this way – to say that you feel trapped by your own work – but I have a hunch that this is actually a really common experience with illustrators and something that even the more seasoned among us struggle with.

I have a theory about why this was happening in my case, starting with the fact that I decided I was going to try to launch right into full-time freelance illustration immediately upon graduation from art school. I was not overwhelmed with the number of jobs I was getting in the beginning but I was somewhat overwhelmed in terms of my response to the ones I did get. It wasn't deadlines or the professional relationships I was building but mostly that I didn't really feel comfortable in knowing what the thing is that I do and then being able to deliver that thing to a client with confidence.

Looking back now, that was probably a totally normal response to the transition from school to on-the-job reality but at the time it was incredibly nerve-wracking and often resulted in feeling like a fraud who was about to be found out. None of my clients ever expressed to me that they felt like I wasn't up to the task, this was completely an internal response to my own uneasiness at trying to be a “professional illustrator” and not really knowing how I was going to be one.

As a result, I think I made a lot of decisions about the kind of work I was going to make and how I needed to approach a project when it came in based on this fear and I didn't leave any room to explore alternate approaches on my own time. By the time I got to to a point where my portfolio had turned over with published work, I didn't like any of the pieces I had in it anymore. Objectively the work was good and the clients were happy but I wasn't.

Of course the work you have in your portfolio is the work people will continue to want to hire you for – a client doesn't know you can do something that you don't show them you can do. So the solution seemed pretty clear: make different work, replace the portfolio, press the reset button. I was also nervous to switch directions and thoughts that people/clients wouldn't like the new work or that I'd lose whatever momentum I already had were definitely on my mind but those smaller fears paled in comparison to the feeling of carrying around my portfolio forever like dead weight.

So I stopped promoting, I took whatever commissions came in anyway and the rest of the time I worked really hard at figuring out this illustration thing. By “really hard” I mean I thought about it really hard, made some small experiments here and there, procrastinated, came back to it, thought about it some more, tried a few more experiments, got frustrated, decided I wasn't any good, decided I shouldn't be an illustrator, thought really hard about giving up and then took a long break from making things around the holidays.

After the new year, I sat down at my desk and started again and suddenly I was making work, work that I liked, work that felt like “me”. It wasn't actually sudden and it wasn't inspiration striking out of nowhere, I had put the work in struggling beforehand with trying to make something happen that wasn't ready yet and then giving myself that break let my mind re-order all the information I had gleaned from that struggle and transform it into a process for making new work. I still had and still have experimenting to do but I was able to build a new portfolio in a much shorter time than I had spent trying really hard to make it happen.

I've actually done this before, I found this was my natural rhythm while I was in school. I would work really hard all through the school year and by the end of it feel exhausted. I wouldn't really like much of the work I had made even though I could see that objectively I was getting better. Then summer would come and I'd be working a job, enjoying the break and barely making work at all even though I would always tell myself about the great leaps I was going to make over the break. I'd return to school in the fall, a little disappointed with myself for not making that great leap, but happy to be back and found that as I got back to work I had made a leap anyway without the great push I thought I could achieve by willing it into existence.

I think I can say, fairly at this point, that this is my cycle for making any sort of change in my illustration approach. I work really hard at trying to get somewhere new, I think about it A LOT, I actually do make things, I think I'm doing it wrong and want to turn back, I give myself a break, I sit down more relaxed and I make new work. I'm trying to learn from that, relax more during those periods of struggle or at least accept them as part of the process, adjust my long-term memory to remember that I've done this before and I will do this again, tell myself this is normal or my normal anyway and keep trying to make work regardless.

This is the cycle that I think I had cut off after school because I was trying to be a professional and for whatever reason I had convinced myself that that meant I needed to know what I was doing at all times and if I didn't know it was a major cause of concern and also something I needed to hide. I forgot that I need to keep learning and trying new things and struggling because that makes my work better and it's not something to be put away as I'm building my career and my practice but something I should embrace and acknowledge as maybe the most important part of how I do this and which leads me to make things that feel important to me in the very least.

So that's where my head is at with the new website I'm launching today. The new work feels good and I'm really happy to show it off but most importantly I feel like I'm building a better foundation now for moving forward, one where I'm excited to keep going. I wanted to share some insight into this change because illustration is often a really solitary practice and I know I've always appreciated hearing from other illustrators so here are my thoughts – thanks for reading!

You can see see my new work at katiecarey.ca

I can finally show some of the things I worked on last year! Here's a spread I did for Seattle Met to accompany an article about taking a life changing trip.

Totally forgot to post this and I’ve been a bit neglectful with a big project wrapping up but here’s the work I did for an awesome article on the B-52′s in the latest issue of The Pitchfork Review. This was so much fun to work on and my AD’s Michael Renaud and Molly Butterfoss made it a total dream project!

Some bits and pieces from a new piece for San Francisco Magazine about a pretty cool live/work/play space in Oakland called The Hive.

New piece for The New York Times Book Review to accompany a review of Rachel Moran’s book Paid For: My Journey Through Prostitution.

My first piece I did for Scientific American about the new sharing economy and the success of the ride-sharing service UberX. 

For an article about the waning of traditional funerals and the rise of more individualized death services. I, for one, am currently editing my will to include a laser show.