BE a kid again and your creativity will soar!

What are 3 of your favorite childhood snacks?

What did you liked to do as a kid? Were you encouraged to do it?

What are 3 things you would NEVER EVER do?

Now, buy yourself those childhood snacks. Do those things you liked to do. And do those things you said you will never do. Because our creativity thrives on generosity with ourselves. You'll be surprised at how stingy we are with our artist self. Do any of these sound familiar?

"I don't have time to draw for myself" "I can't afford to fix my camera, or get that sweater" "Stickers are for children (trans: I will not buy that sticker. I'm an adult now.)" "I can't sleep, I still have work to do!"

We deprive ourselves of rest, of money, of time, of care, enjoyment, of child-like adventures. If we keep doing that, sure we can still make art, but chances are you will be scraping the bottom of the barrel for inspiration. The artists needs to be constantly feed with new experiences AND experiences that you enjoy.

The reason we asked about "childhood" things, is that most of the time, during our childhood, our enjoyment was unadulterated. We found amusement in a simple box. We made it into a jet, a cafe, a dinosaur. As we grow into adults, we feel that we must "put away our childish toys, go to the bank, pay the bills, cook dinner, go to meetings, sign contracts, walk, talk, and do things like an adult."

This is the fastest way to tack on stress, build health problems, and basically deprive yourselves of the freedom of creating. When we make art, we need to tap into our visceral. The more our artist self feels safe to create, the more it will play/work for you.

When was the last time you did your favorite thing? Hopefully, recently. But if you are like most of the population, probably days, weeks, months, and sometimes years ago. So let's begin again.

What is 3 of your favorite childhood snacks?

What did you like to do as a kid? Were you encouraged to do it?

What are 3 things you will NEVER EVER do?

Make Art For You

Only show stuff like this to your clients if they happen to be some of your best friends.

Often time as we're first setting out to become professional artists, we fantasize over realizing that dream. We imagine how amazing it would be to just get paid to create. However, when the reality of paid illustration jobs or concept art positions sets in, you need to remember to keep making art for yourself.

Now don't get us wrong, it's a great privilege and amazing to be able to draw/illustrate/print for a living. However, when you spend 8-10 hours a day drawing stuff for other people, or printing t-shirts that you didn't design, you also have to remember to keep creating for yourself, lest the art you do for a living becomes "another job."

If you don't have time to create for yourself (although we guess you probably do, but that's another story), then you need to make the work you're doing for someone else for yourself as well. If you get hired to do an illustration, you need to make sure that there is something about that illustration that you're doing for yourself. Yes, you have a brief that tells you what needs to be in the illustration, but make sure that you're finding ways to enjoy the revisions and feedback. If anything, sometimes we will do a quick draft of the illustration in a completely experimental style (that you never have to show to your client) as a way to quickly inject the fun into the assignment, even if you might not be 100% enthusiastic about the illustration.

An example of this is the above Save the Date. Monkey was honored to be asked by his good friends from Berkeley to design their Save the Dates and the invitations for their wedding. While Monkey likes to do more non-traditional wedding invitations, they were looking for something more parent-friendly. Monkey was happy to oblige, but the patience and attention to detail with the typography and designing is not Monkey's strong point, and thus for the Save the Dates he created this crazy, over-the-top monster bunny-as-a-weapon design to keep things fun. After that, he was able to really focus and design something that his friends could love and he could be proud of. As a side note, to show how awesome Monkey's friends are, they actually sent this digital save the date to their close friends!

The lesson to learn here is that with art, just as with every job, assignment, or task, is to figure out a way to do it for yourself. Find something fun and exciting and new to learn or try, and keep it fresh. It makes for much happier creating.

Protecting Your Art

As an artist, it's important to protect yourself and your art during the early stages of creativity and surround yourself with people who support your dreams. Once you've got a good start and are towards the middle of your project, it is then helpful to ask other artists to constructively critique your work, in order to evolve.

As an artist, the art of creating is very personal and vulnerable. So it's important that especially during the first early stages to be selective in who you share your work with. Often, the art needs time to mature, to brew, to cultivate the right way of being expressed. Too many artists make the mistake of exposing this early idea to everyone they know. It's natural to want approval or encouragement/ feedback to keep going. But you want to make sure that it's the right person. At this early stage, it's better to jump and go ahead and explore the idea. Risk being wrong.

Have you ever had a brilliant idea, a wonderful dream, and you run to someone who you think would listen to you and tell them all about it, only to get the wet-blanket response, "eh." A complete and utter disregard, a crushing silence, or even a "well-meaning advice" of "well that's kind of already done before . . . " or "how about this, you can do it this way. . . " Too many projects are crushed this way. It's much to early even for you, the artist, to judge the work.

You need to draw a circle and protect the work. For example, time and time again, Seal had shown her early ideas to the wrong people. These were often the people closest to her, people whom she had trust. Sometimes they were straight out negative, competitive, or plain clueless in being able to help the artwork. Especially people who don't understand the process of art would look at the early scribbles, first knitted scarf, or failed experiments and judge it as if it was already finished. Or compare your beginning drawings to a great master. ("Well, this certainly isn't a Michelangelo"). Sometimes well-meaning friends and relatives would like to be "helpful" and push their advice unto you, without being asked. "It would be better if you did this." While you will need some of this constructive criticisms later on in the work, when you are just starting on a project, it's best to show it only to people who trusts in your abilities and potential.

Seal knows that she can show Monkey, her ugly-duckling early sketches of her work before they become full swans. She knows that Monkey will be supportive, and say "yeah, go ahead and explore that." (It may not be the "best idea in the world," but at least it's one more idea that was explored.) The worse thing that can happen is that it doesn't work out.

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Once you get going on your project. You'll come to a point where you don't know where else to take it. Or you've come up to your limits regarding your skills/knowledge, etc. At this time, is a good time to get constructive criticism. People who won't just be "nice" and say the work is "cool," without giving you ways to improve upon it. You want to be surrounded by people who won't settle, who want to make their own artwork better. And at the same time, the criticisms must be done in such a way that is constructive, specific, and have a respect towards you, the artist, and the work.

There is a difference between specific objective criticisms to the work than a subjective comment. A bad criticism is when its shrouded in generality and attacks the person and not the art: "I don't know what to tell you, it just doesn't work." or "something about this is off" or "this is bad art." (any of these comments don't really tell you "why, they think the way they do" and "how to fix it."

An example of good criticism: My mentor would always look at my work and ask me first, "what's your intention here?" That way he understands where the work is coming from. Then he proceeds to give me concrete feedback based on an action I can take forward. "If your intention was X, here's Y in how to do it" With good criticisms, there is always 1) a truth (a-ha! I see that, yeah, you're right the color would be better if I saturate it, etc). and 2) specificity about the work itself (never about you the artist), and 3) a clue or answer on how to move forward with the work.

So again, in order to grow as an artist, we must be bold in the beginning stages, stretch our wings and really explore all aspects of our curiosity while being protective of it by only sharing it with people who will be supportive of you. Then after the art has got a good running start, we must find the right kind of people, preferably other creatives like ourselves, who can give us constructive feedback about how to evolve the work.

If Your Attitude Stinks, No Work For You

Part of being professional artists is more than just having a certain skill set or a strong portfolio. While many of us creatives would rather we just do what we do, paint when we want to paint, and basically have total freedom over every aspect of our lives, that is, unfortunately, not a reality for most of us. The truth of the matter is that we still have bills to pay, and to do that, someone needs to pay us. Even if we have the skillz to pay said billz, if there are no one to sell said skills to, then you're going to be out of luck.

Thus, we have to sell our art to designers, clients, art collectors, etc., etc. While a select few artists can be rude, crazy, and generally not fun to be around, Monkey + Seal think that their reputation will eventually work against them, no matter how "great" they might be. Basically, Monkey + Seal advise to be a professional.

By being a professional, we don't mean that you have to wear a suit and tie and act like you're some no-fun, all-business boring bum, but that you act with integrity and respect. Respond to business emails. Show up on time. Follow directions. Be a nice person. These things, while seemingly obvious and simple, are actually more rare than you might think.

As curators in their roles as Paper Hat Productions, Monkey + Seal have gotten a first-hand look on the other side of the fence - we often are looking for opportunities from other organizers, gallery curators, and the like, but with Paper Hat we get to see what it's like to get approached by artists looking to be featured in a future show. While we generally give everyone a chance (we at least check out everyone's work if they have it online), we most certainly do not curate people into shows if they have terrible attitudes.

At our first show, someone came up to Seal while she was live painting and insinuated that her work wasn't so great. Then, when he asked who she was, and she told him that she was one of the curators for the show, he suddenly changed his tone and introduced himself and gave her his business card and told her how great the show was and how he would love to get involved. Guess who isn't going to be in our future shows?

Now the reason why you being professional can get you ahead of the game (or more likely, being unprofessional can get you put on the poop-list) is that besides whether or not curators think that your art can sell, curators have to work with the artists. Curators send emails with info on where to drop off work, how sales will work, and if they're good, they'll want to interview you, get photos of your work to post up on their site for promotional material. They are going to send you postcards, digital flyers, promo material to put up on your blog. If they're doing their job, they're going to be doing their best to promote you, and if working with you is a pain in the butt, then they're not going to want to do it.

You have to think about the curator. Are you making it easy for them to want to work with you? If you are late, how much is that going to inconvenience the curator and the other artists? Are you going to show up and act like a diva and embarrass the curators? If you are making the curators' life hard, they are not going to want to work with you again. Most likely, if they're curating a show, they're going to have connections with other curators. Just as if we like to brag about how great other artists are, we're also quite vocal about how we've had bad experiences with person x and y. Word spreads fast, so do yourself a favor and make sure that you've got a clean reputation moving forward.

In saying this, we don't expect bribes or people sucking up to us (that turns us off just as quick as if you are rude or lazy), but we advise that you think about what sort of image you're giving off, and whether or not that image is going to help or hurt your career in the future.

Why Naps Could Save Your Life

This lady is actually 17, she just hasn't slept in a few days

You'll often hear students are art school talking (sometimes bragging) about how they had yet another all-nighters, or how they sleep at 3am on a regular basis, or how during finals week they only slept 5 hours all week! Wow, what an accomplishment!

So we (Monkey especially) has no right to criticize, as we often fall into the sleep-deprivation-contest just as often as anyone else. After all, Monkey + Seal totally understand the deadlines and having to push through to meet a deadline, going without sleep for sometimes crazy amounts of time. However, we also usually don't talk about the hard crashes we have afterward.

After our most recent gallery show, we slept at 4am, then woke up at 12:00pm the next day to go take down the show. That's 8 hours of sleep, plus the 4 hour nap that evening, plus another 9 hours of sleep that night = 21 hours of sleep in 2 days. We're still tired. Usually after events, it'll take a full week or so before we start really feeling like we're rested again, and that's assuming we're not already going life again a few days later.

Seal read this article (although it's on cracked.com, it seems grounded in actual studies, etc.), where an hour less of sleep is basically enough to increase your chances of dying in a car crash. Luckily, we usually don't do a whole lot of driving, but the point is clear enough. NAPS SAVE LIVES!

In all seriousness, we do advocate for artist sustainability, so we do advocate for naps. While Monkey prefers to sleep early rather than nap, the concept is still the same. While there are times that you have to push yourself and drink loads of coffee or tea or energy drinks or water or whatever you drink to stay awake, make sure that you don't let it become too much of a habit and get some rest.

Interview with Seal!

Monkey here:

Seal recently got interviewed by Northern Forcus, a Norcal-art blog run by Shannon Dutra that also interviewed me a while back. While the interview online here is pretty great, the 6-page full interview by Seal is really, really amazing.

Granted, I live with Seal, and we create next to each other, and have long discussions about art and live and tons of stuff, so I might be biased, but damn, that was a good interview. You have to download the full version (since it's so long), but really, if you're interested in who Eve is, both as a person and an artist, you can get a pretty large glimpse into why she creates, the incredible hurdles she has overcome, and her wide breadth of inspiration.

So enough reading here, go go go over to Northern Focus now!

Alien/ation: an Art Riot Extravaganza - TOMORROW!

Today's post is a friendly reminder that tomorrow, July 10th, is going to be the event that Monkey + Seal (as Paper Hat Productions) has been working on for the past three months. We've been super fortunate to collaborate with the Hyphen Magazine team, and we are proud to bring you Alien/ation: An Illustration Show.

We are honored to be showing among some amazing artists such as Kim Herbst, Joseph To, and Yoko Furusho, to name a few, and our favorite vegan baker, Jen Chau from Black Orchid Bakery will be on hand with cupcakes that are really frickin' amazing.

A preview of what Seal will be showing

We also want to emphasize how excited we are about the raffle - there will be another collaborative Art Battle, but this time it'll be a triple threat match of Monkey, Seal, and Joseph To. Each will start a painting based on an audience-submitted theme. Then, they'll move on to the next person's canvas and start painting, then they will switch again so that everyone paints on everyone's piece. Finally, the artist will move back to the original painting they started and will finish it off. Exciting, huh? Even better, these pieces will be raffled off at the end of the night.

A free artist's reception is from 5:30-6:45, and doors open at 7:00. Admission is $5 (or $15 if you want to get a subscription to Hyphen). The first 25 paying guests at 7:00 will get a swag bag with some limited edition goodies inside. If you want the swag, we suggest getting there early.

A preview of what Monkey will be showing

Where else can you win original art, eat awesome cupcakes, get free stuff, and check out some cutting-edge illustrators? No where (at least no place that we're aware of). Thus, you should definitely come check out our show, and don't forget to bring cash if you want to drink since SPACE gallery (1141 Polk x Sutter) is a 21+ only, cash only venue.

Also, this is really the only night to be able to see all this fantastic art in one place, so we highly recommend it. Besides new work by Monkey + Seal, the other art being hung is really amazing and it should be a really awesome event. We hope to see you there!