“2020 self portrait based on a piece I did in 2016 for Harvard Business Review about “Maximizing Productivity” (Image 2), which was a combo of a sketchbook drawing I did of a guy on a laptop at a Chop’t in Manhattan (Image 3) and a drawing I did for a Doodlers Anonymous drawn interview in 2013 (Image 4), which was inspired by a piece of advice my friend Boyd gave my friend Andrea over AOL Instant Messenger on our last day of college in 2006 (Image 5) which she purposely typeset in Comic Sans because we were graphic designers.
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In my Sketchbook Warehouse class at Pratt, I taught my students strategies for using their sketchbooks (and life in general) as the source material for their ideas and how to pull from this library of stuff and use it as the starting point for something new. I called it “mining images”, where ur sketchbook is the mine or cave and you get in there and find gold nuggets and iron ingots and lapis lazuli and the occasional diamond (I miss Minecraft).
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I do this for almost every project or finished illustration I’ve ever done. Anytime I draw in my sketchbook for fun, freely and without an end goal in mind, those drawings become the raw material for unrelated pieces in the future. I wasn’t trained as an illustrator, but this strategy was the only way I could narrow the gap between the stuff I made in my sketchbooks (which felt the most “me”) and finished illustrations.”