Tonight I spent a few hours making test prints to follow up on my November 1 post Pondering Paper. My last round of tests gave me a lot of information to go on, but under the drawing table lights none of the prints were of satisfactory quality. I had to learn whether this was the fault of the paper, the printer, or the quality of the scan from which I was working.

After careful examination of the test prints, I decided that the most likely culprit was the quality of the scan. The lines were just not as crisp as they should have been; everything looked just slightly blurry or out of focus. So I grabbed the file from which I had another set of prints made to my satisfaction so that I could compare the output from the printer to which I have access and the output from PhotoworksSF's printer.

Here's something I don't think gets mentioned enough in the discussion of speculative (spec) work. Artists like to say «you get what you pay for» and talk down about the quality of the work you get if you get it for free, but it's not true. It's actually really easy to find people with talent who are desperate enough to work for free. The difference is not so much about the illustrator's artistic talent (though I agree that people that work for money will tend to be of higher quality) but about the illustrator's ability to advise and develop solutions on a business level.

I look at everything I do—including art—as consulting, which means the giving of advice. A business should get their advice from people that understand business. People who are stuck in the belief they need to be beholden to an employer who will take care of their needs if they just comply with the employer's wishes are not business people.

I'll say it again. Employees. Are NOT. Business people.

Scott Berkun's The Myths of Innovation puts forward the notion that people love a good story and that many celebrated innovators have told stories that oversimplify or even ignore the truth that innovation requires a lot of work. People love the story of a creator observing an odd confluence of events which causes an epiphany, which thereafter leads to an invention no one had thought of previously.

These stories eliminate the uncomfortable idea that a creator or inventor is somehow better than the rest of us. Anyone could have been sitting under a tree to see an apple fall and discover gravity, right? Anyone could want to help his wife trade knick-knacks online and decide to create a website to make that easier, later becoming the wildly successful eBay.

An installation of Kevin Burkhalter's Journal Comic from the end of last year provides an interesting twist on the idea that constant practice is more important than any other aspect of creative work:

http://kevinsjournalcomic.com/comic12-4-2008.html

There are a lot of ways to express this which encompass a variety of iterations and corollaries. Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hours to mastery, Kevin Burkhalter's raising of the lower bar, and my old art skool instructor who said, «Everyone's got a certain number of bad drawings in them. Your job is to get them out onto paper as fast as you can.» It all comes down to: keep doing it and never be afraid to make bad work.