When I came to art school at age 18, I wanted to be able to draw anything, from any angle, doing anything I want.  I wanted it all to look at least as real as a normal Marvel/DC comic book.  This was a monumental standard for myself; I did not naturally excel in my drawing classes.

The entire time I was learning how to draw, and throughout my childhood, non-artists would tell me I was creative.  I had never considered that it was possible that I could draw well yet lack creativity.  Ironically enough, this was my exact situation.  Society seems to falsely conflate creativity with technical drawing ability.

As an undergrad, I could co-dependently wrangle my professors to pity me, and then validate my mediocrity.  I considered this one of the reasons I was unsuccessful.  I needed to keep up my delusions of how "good" I was at the expense of listening to hash (but often necessary) feedback.  I got older and realized this about myself.  By the time I changed this about myself, I was out of school.

With a renewed sense of motivation, openmindedness and optimism stemming from desperation, I pursued graduate school.  A class called Concepts and Compositions illuminated my lack of creativity.  My educational background was centered in sequential art (storyboards and comic books).  Up to this point, I was unfamiliar with conceptual illustration geared towards the editorial market (magazines).  This class was supposed to prepare me for that market and it demanded that I conceive visual metaphors to communicate an idea. 

 It had been a long time since I had been this bad at anything.  I was shocked.

Up until this point I had long wondered why people who couldn’t draw well were having successful careers working in the editorial market.  It’s because these people had creative concepts.  I did not understand this because I did not understand creativity, thus I could not value it.  I never examined “creativity” and just thought I had it as a given.  I thought that because I was an artist, I must be creative.  I never thought to look at what creativity is, how it manifests, or how it looks. 

Below is an illustration of Aesop Rock that I did.  The drawing and the coloring are complex and crazy looking.  While it certainly looks bizarre, that does not mean it is very creative.  Conceptually speaking, the idea I am communicating is "Look at this guy in a sea of cats." 

The simple illustration below actually communicates an interesting idea.  It is a visual metaphor about startup companies and their rate of success/failure.  I took complex information, simplified it, and used an interesting visual metaphor.  This requires a much greater amount of creative problem solving than the image of Aesop Rock.  The idea here is a lot more interesting than “Whoa this guy is surrounded by a LOT of cats.”    The illustration below is not as visually impressive or striking, but it is more creative.

.I started to understand the value of good ideas.   Most people I speak to that think conceptually the way I do are people that do it naturally and have never had the same problems with it that I have.


I was not this way.  I wanted to develop this conceptualizing ability because this kind of problem solving is indispensable as both a businessman and an illustrator.

For the next couple of years after taking Concepts and Composition, I trained myself to think conceptually rigorously.  I put about 70% of my time in art school into developing creative thinking and conceptualizing and 30% learning technique.  Now brainstorming is one of my strengths as an illustrator.  My ability to develop clever concepts is what got me my first professional assignment as a freelance illustrator.

            I am my most creative when I am in a certain state of mind.  Part of creative thinking is about cultivating this state of mind.  I will explain what I do to cultivate this state of mind in my next post.