Well I’ve been back from Brooklyn and the ICON5 conference for about a week, which is just about the amount of time I’ve needed to settle back down and really digest everything that I learned.

I met so, so many people that I admire: James Jean, Sam Weber, Jillian Tamaki, Keri Smith, and last but quite the opposite of least, Nancy Stahl. I actually got to sit down for lunch with Nancy, which was a little bit overwhelming — because she is so nice. I guess I just expected all illustrators to be like the photographers I met at the conference back in October, which is to say icy, abrupt tools. But they totally weren’t! I could not get over how genuinely kind everyone was! There was zero sense of competition, and just a great feeling of camaraderie.

In fact, in her panel discussion with Tara McPherson, Jordin Isip and Jonathan Levine, Martha Rich underscored how the camaraderie of ICON has really come to mean so much to her, both inspirationally and commercially — you build relationships which can evolve from personal to professional and vis versa. It was this closing remark that just made me feel like, Wow! I am coming to this every year! The key points they seemed to hit the most were: if you want to get into galleries with your illustrations, you need to take your time and build relationships with the gallery owners. You need to support the shows, talk to people, make connections, etc. Do your best to promote yourself without asking for favors; prove your merits before it comes to shopping your portfolio around.

By far the most inspirational segment for me was Tall Tales & Simple Stories with Enrico Casarosa and Ronnie Del Carmen from Pixar. Enrico especially has had an effect on the way I draw now. He spoke a lot about the “inertia of drawing,” how you must keep that inertia going, and must always be ready to draw. He tied this back into his Sketch Crawl, and about the benefits of such a practice and of keeping a fresh sketch book. Ronnie had some wonderful insights regarding telling stories with our drawings, beyond story boarding and sequential art. It seemed like both of them were essentially saying: draw quickly and with abandon. Do not refine. Work on capturing the emotions/essence/exposition of a moment the first time, and as simply as possible. Develop a visual vocabulary: know how to draw anything because you’ve drawn everything.

During the lunch with Nancy, some interesting topics came up. Mainly, how, as digital illustrators do we foster the same sense of skill and self-discovery that comes with sketching, when there is such a disconnect between the act of sketching and the act of producing work on the screen. Am I articulating that well? I mean, you learn how to handle a medium as you play with it — and I think that is what sketching is, play, in the psychologically constructive sense of the word. But when you sit down in front of the computer to draw, you are rarely playing, you are working. You are setting out to produce a finished piece of work. At least thats my experience. There are several illustrators that I can think of that I am sure sketch digitally, who play digitally — Chris Turnham and Kevin Dart spring immediately to mind. I may need to conduct some interviews. More on this later.

Here are some shots I took while I was up there. Surprisingly (or rather, unsurprisingly), I did not sketch much during the trip, and didn’t take tons of pics — I think in moments like these I become a much more verbal person, capturing everything in notes and journals rather than pictures. I think I need to work on that; maybe marrying the two. Anyway -