Not being clever
If you want to sell something you should offer what people want. I knew that before I started and yet every time I get an idea, my brain yells ’ No, you’ll never sell that’! Then I do it anyway. And it doesn’t sell! I just hope, that eventually, I’ll have so many different designs that it's enough to draw more people in. For now, it’s literally all over the shop with plants and animals but it makes me happy. And that’s another important part for me, I don't want to force myself into doing stuff that I don't enjoy. For that, I have a day job. And that's what I'm trying to change.
The clever part
The idea for palm trees came to me one day out of the blue. I used to own a t-shirt with a simple, black-and-white photo of a palm tree. I wore that on my around-the-world trip and it got lost in the Philippines. Palms are closely connected with faraway places and good times and happiness for me, especially as I’m living in a landlocked country. So I started compiling lists of palm trees that would look good on a poster and also look different enough from one another.
It took many attempts to find a drawing style for palm leaves, they are often quite a simple shape but it's easy to make it look too simple and cartoonish. I found this to be a good way back into drawing as the scale of the drawings was quite forgiving on the details. I also soon realised how nicely it fitted my daily schedule, I could just draw one or two palms a night and make slow but steady progress. It's much harder to work on big pieces where work spreads over several days. I don't have the space to just leave stuff on the desk so I would have to put big drawings away every night. The motivation also isn't always the same, even lines are more or less straight, depending on the daily form. And on a big drawing, you can actually see the different stages or motivation levels sometimes.
The niche
After four continents of palms, I needed a change. I liked that my posters looked a bit like old scientific drawings, like out of an old school identification book from Darwin-era golden times of exploration. That brought me to my next topic, "animals that are related but it's not obvious to most people". That brilliant move came after another zoo visit. I spend a lot of time in zoos and love to learn new and interesting facts. One of these was the revelation that camels and lamas are related! The family is called Camelids and once you know it it's so obvious, isn't it? That was the spark for my series on these animal families, orders and groups.
It's quite clearly not a popular style or topic but one close to my heart. I can spend my evenings and weekends looking at animals' pictures and trying to do them justice on my paper. Try to catch their uniqueness or quirkiness and show them to the world. I will continue down that route until I get bored or run out of topics. Eventually, I’ll have to broaden the narrative a bit, maybe trees in general, or focussing on one animal in detail. With so little time next to a day job it’s hard to stick to big ideas, for now, it’s baby steps.