Have you got an old teacher or professor who may be long gone, but they taught you so much that you hear their voice in your memory while you're working today?
I sure do. Mr. Richard Brough, my Graphic Design instructor back in the 80s.
Mr. Brough was a throw-back to a Woodie-Guthrie America. Sometimes he'd look around, stop the class, and teach us how to make hand-painted signs, so if we hitched across the country we could start on the Atlantic, never miss a meal, and by the time we hit California we'd have money in our pockets. I am pretty sure that's what he did when he was young. In WW2 he painted murals for the troops, and individual watercolor portraits of recuperating wounded for them to send to their moms.
"You want to get good at watercolors, RD? It's easy-- paint a thousand of them!"
He did a stretch at Disney as an animator, never talked about it much.
At that time, computers were just coming in, and students who'd gone off to work at ad agencies (usually in Atlanta, where they'd dress like Robert Smith of The Cure and tear it up on Apple IIEs) would let us current students know that we were not getting the current know-how. I didn't care. Mr. Brough would show us all kinds of basic techniques with brushes and pens, hand-embossing, silkscreens, stencils, all of it done so old-school punk-rock that we could have figured out how to make a living in between hopping trains. Apple IIEs are a distant memory and I still make sales using old techniques.
He'd get to know you, and tailor projects to your personality. My friend Tony was patient, so he'd give Tony one thing to work on for a long time. Me, I flitted. "RD, your work is good if you do it in less than 5 minutes. If I give you an hour, you ruin it. So do 10 things, 5 minutes each."
How should we price our work? "How much do you need?" "Give them a price, and wait. If they say 'OK', say, well for this much more, I can mat it. If they say 'OK', then you say and for this much more, I can frame it. Keep going until they stop saying 'OK.'"
On job interviews: "Don't show an employer anything you didn't enjoy doing. That'll be the one thing they hire you to do."
On Art Editors: "An editor is paid to edit. Put one obvious wrong thing that's easy to fix in every illustration. When the editor jumps on it, take it back home, fix it in 15 minutes, wait a couple of days, then take it back."
If he knew you needed money, jobs would appear. Maybe they'd be art jobs, maybe they'd be wax-on wax-off clean the dojo, I mean studio, jobs.
Last week I was finishing up a little painting that was OK, but lacked something. I remembered in the 80s turning in an illustration that was the same way, B work. Mr. Brough took a heavy marker and jagged it down one side of the person in my illustration. BOOM it looked like a magazine cover. Back in the present, I took a brush and black paint and added the same savage touch to the painting. BOOM again. It sold that day.
Thanks Mr. Brough.