Here is the full transcript of professional illustrator David Litchfield’s talk titled “How Doing A Drawing A Day Changed My Life” at TEDxBedford conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
Okay, hello, I’m David Litchfield, and I’m an illustrator. On the 1st of July, 2010, until the 1st of June, 2011, I drew one drawing every day for a year, posted them online for the world to see, and critique. The reason I did this was because I didn’t always know I was an illustrator. I didn’t really know what I was.
It took me a long time to work out that I was an illustrator. Really that’s what this talk is about, I guess. It’s not about drawing, although here are some of the drawings. It’s about time.
It’s about the notion that you need to make up time. Or one of the worst feelings of all, that you could even be running out of time. Which sounds quite severe, I guess. I don’t know if it’s a UK thing, or a Bedford thing, or even just a David Litchfield thing, but there seems to be a notion, at least, of a cut-off point in life.
If you haven’t found out what it is you want to be doing, or who you are, by a certain age, then it’s too late, and you’re too old, to kind of try and, how do you define yourself from a certain age? Which is nonsense, obviously. Nonetheless, there was a notion that was with me, and I really started to panic, because I was approaching this age. I really hadn’t figured out what it was I wanted to do.
Starting the Drawing a Day Project
I’d been to school, obviously, I’d even been to art school. I’d had a few kind of stop-start careers, and I really wasn’t very good at any of them. As I said, I really started to panic that I wouldn’t find out what it is I wanted to do for the next, I don’t know, 75 years, or whatever I have got left. Now I obviously came, but the important thing to say is that I’d always drawn, every day, for as long as I can remember, and it’s always been the thing that I loved doing the most.
That’s probably one of the reasons why I thought I would never get a job in it, because it was just too enjoyable to call it a job. Just looking at my parents, a career wasn’t something that you enjoyed, it was something that you survived. But then it did suddenly hit me that maybe I could, maybe I could be an illustrator. When I said that, when I said I’m an illustrator, it seemed to fit much more than any of the other careers that I’d done, had.
So I set myself a challenge. I would draw a drawing a day, every day, for a year. I woke up an hour early and just drew while I was still waking up, which incidentally is a great way of drawing, because you have no kind of creative inhibitions while you’re still dreaming and so forth, and all kinds of weird stuff comes out on page. No, I drew, and as soon as I finished, I put them on Facebook, I linked them to Twitter and Tumblr, and just waited for feedback, and invited people to critique them, and give me advice, because that was one of the reasons I did it, again going back to this time.
I wanted to speed up time, I wanted to speed up the creative process, the creative development that you have to go through as an illustrator. I needed to make up that time. Some of the drawings were very simple, line drawings. Sometimes when I had a bit more time, maybe on a weekend or a bank holiday, they were a little bit more detailed.
Feedback and Learning
Sometimes I got good feedback, sometimes I got very bad feedback. Sometimes I’d spend a good amount of time and really focus on a drawing, and think this is one of the greatest drawings I’ve ever done, put it online and there’d just be nothing. Other times I’d spend, I don’t know, a couple of minutes, because I was in a rush on one of the drawings, put that online and it would just be some kind of crappy drawing of a cat or a dog or something, and people would go wild for it. So it was kind of quite a really good learning curve in that respect, as to what people appreciated and what they didn’t.
Now it’s important to say that drawing a day is not new. Stephen Crane has been drawing a comic, a one-page comic, every day since 2010 and still continues to do so. There’s a guy in the States called Hey Beast, who draws an animal every day for a year, and the resulting 365 different animals are going to be turned into a children’s book when the project ends this month, in fact.
About two weeks into my project, I suddenly realised that a few more people were following, a few more people were paying attention, and it wasn’t just my mum or my brother or a few of my friends, it was actually people from the creative industries, people who worked at publishing companies or magazines, started commenting on the drawings and sort of sharing them around and so forth, which was something I completely didn’t expect.
I was doing it as a kind of self-motivated, self-learning project, but people started to take an interest in it and it started to create a real buzz. As I say, about two weeks in I realised that I’d actually created myself a real platform to sort of show off what I could do, and that’s exactly why I did it. I upped my game, so to speak.