Artist insight LEVEL UP YOUR CREATIVE PROCESS

Illustrator and comic artist Eric Canete provides 10 pro tips for working smarter and building confidence

- Eric Canete

Even with a 30+ year career as a working professional, I still approach every opportunity to level up my craft with a sense of enthusiasm and delight. However, I've come to find that the learning I'm doing now is profoundly different from the learning I did when I first started as an artist, illustrator and storyteller.

Asked for advice by younger artists, I'm often very poor at giving good, actionable feedback when it comes to the 'pixel pushing' part of creating images - I have little to offer the kids these days who are all just SO GOOD! Instead, I find myself sharing insight into the more cerebral aspects of the process; concepts that I don't believe are taught nor mentored enough. Here, I break down ten key aspects of the creation process that I think about as I strive for an image that's not just well drawn, but also evokes a clear narrative - along with some internal mechanisms that keep me energised until I can call something 'finished'.

1 ZOOM OUT

I'm guilty of this myself: I get so excited about an area of the painting or drawing that I get lost in the experience of rendering, but in the end it doesn't really contribute to the intent of the final image. I had to develop an internal mechanism which reminds me to contextualise an area I'm working on, and apply it to the bigger picture; this helped me to evaluate how much time and resource to devote to each part of the drawing.

2 STEP AWAY

It's common to toil away on an image for so long only to lose track of what's working and what isn't. This is an opportunity to take a break to clear your mindset. I'm often working on multiple drawings at any given time, in various stages of completion. This has led me to solutions that I simply could not see originally, now that I'm looking at it again with fresher eyes. 

3 LIGHT SOURCE IS KEY