You Can Follow a Recipe, or You Can Learn How to Cook
Storyboard frame circa 2012
I was in my mid-thirties, making a modest living as a professional illustrator when a friend of mine told me about storyboarding.
She worked at an advertising agency in London, and back then, when they still used storyboard artists on every campaign, the pay was stratospheric. This got me curious. After all, I was a professional illustrator. How hard could this be?
So I sat down and had a go at tackling a typical storyboard brief: a family talking around the kitchen table.
The results were terrible.
It turns out that drawing people doing everyday things is really hard to do if you don't have reference material to copy from, and you need to draw everything from your imagination.
I had no idea how bad I was at this, and it came as a real shock to me. I thought I could draw, and I had drawn people all my life. I had attended dozens of life drawing sessions, where I drew from models. I thought I was good at it.
But drawing people from the imagination is another thing altogether. You need a fundamental understanding of gesture and anatomy, and if you get it wrong the results are terrible.
My dreams of a lucrative payday as an ad agency storyboard artist were ashes.
So I set about improving my skills. I drew hundreds of people, at least one a day, for over two years. I made sure to include plenty of mundane activities such as talking, shopping, and eating. I practised thumbnail gestures, hands, facial expressions, and hairstyles.
After all this practice, when I thought I was ready, I contacted some agencies to pitch for work. I got my first job.
It was a disaster.
Thrown in at the deep end, with a real pitch and the expectation that I could deliver professional results in short order, I fumbled the opportunity. My work was too stylised, too cartoony, and it was missing the energy and realism the agency was looking for.
Under the pressure of real deadlines, my work lacked the sophistication that my portfolio samples had.
It's easy to produce leisurely, slick pitch pieces at home, but much harder to crank out fully finished frames in forty minutes in the pressured environment of an ad agency.
After licking my wounds from this initial failure, I doubled down and worked harder. I landed more opportunities, and slowly, I got better at delivering the kind of work the agencies were looking for. My drawing technique improved immensely. And, for a few years, I made a great living drawing storyboards.
And then something happened that took me completely by surprise.
The better my technique got, the more creative I became. Aside from the storyboard work, I began creating stylised 3D characters that were unique and original.
I have no idea how this happened. All that practice had lit a flame inside me, and out came inspiration, seemingly out of nowhere.
It turned out that doing all that work delivered hidden and unexpected benefits. By working on what at the time seemed like dry, technical stuff, I was also somehow sharpening my creativity.
And so I've learned that mastering technical skills is often worthwhile.
The benefits might not be immediately obvious, but one day, those skills will come in handy in useful and unexpected ways.
My latest deep dive has been learning Geometry Nodes in Blender. They're insanely powerful.
They might appear technical and intimidating, but they have an internal logic that makes them easy to grasp.
And more importantly, they can empower artists like you to create their own bespoke systems, a form of procedural Lego. Once you get your head around them, they're just as much fun as real Lego.