Beyond the Taste Gap

Why Homing Our Craft Matters As Much as Honing It

At the beginning of my freelance illustration career, I knew I had a basic illustration style to work with. I knew what my go-to tools were, as well as what I was inspired by (both important factors of having a style). As a designer by training, I also had a strong sense of concept in my work. I even had a few years of experience, a chance to test my illustration approach in the real world. For the most part, it worked.

But sometimes, it didn’t.

Those were times I really struggled with my confidence as an illustrator. Even to this day, I look on some of the work I did, where there seemed to be a mismatch between my style and conceptual approach (on the one hand) and the goals of the projects I was working on (on the other hand). Right here, in the previous two sentences, I just named the root issue. It’s clear to me now (hindsight is twenty-twenty), but it wasn’t then.

One of the biggest pain points for me was not being able to apply my style to certain kinds of illustration problems. I thought it might just be a technical problem: that if I developed my abilities in Photoshop or physical media, if I could just learn how my influences achieved the look in their own work, I would overcome this struggle. The problem wasn’t my style, it was just my…