Illustration, like many creative professions, is a hybrid discipline. Balancing the fire of creative expression with the boundaries of client-imposed constraints, successful illustrators often encounter a range of challenges--and opportunities--that their counterparts in the realm of fine art never see.
Rachel Salomon is, by all accounts, a success of this sort: her yearning, comfortingly melancholy images have illustrated articles for Spin, The New Yorker, and LA Weekly, among others, and she's created work for campaigns by Target, CD cases for Blue Note, and book covers for Penguin. More to the point, she makes a solid living doing something she loves. While a majority of illustrators go directly into the field, either through art school or through practice, though, Rachel got there on a more roundabout path through art school: prior to entering Illustration she earned a BFA at Brown University, never contemplating that the faster-paced, client-centered job she currently holds would eventually prove more satisfying.
Speaking with Rachel as she waits for a Boston-bound train at New York's Penn Station, several hard realities about this type of creative shift become clear. First off, it's harder than you think.
The tools and techniques used in art and illustration can be perfectly identical, of course. When she finally decided to go back to school to study Illustration at Art Center, Rachel found her expectation of applying previously acquired drawing and painting skills in this new discipline to be pleasantly correct. They were also only a fraction of what an illustrator eventually needs. The degree of reliance on rigorously correct technique is far greater in illustration than in fine art, where, as Salomon puts it, "You can pretty much stand on your head all day and say that's your art." Illustration programs place much more emphasis on technical skills, especially at first. Where a fine art department's oil painting class will often take the free form of a room full of students working at their own pace to recognize their own vision, a similarly titled class in an illustration program is usually more structured, requiring multiple iterations of a single exercise, and tightly constrained assignments whose success is judged as much on adherence to those constraints as expressive achievement.
Interestingly, she's emphatic that her current success owes as much to her fine art training as the ordeal she went through in Pasadena, though not in an obvious way. Rather than technical competence, the most useful skills many illustrators--Salomon included--say they have learned are a flexible creative process and an affinity for new skills, things that a strictly technical education may not impart. In this way, art school resembles a broader liberal arts education, in which critical analysis and a multidisciplinary curriculum give the attentive student multiple intelligences, that can be used to climb out of ruts when they become too deep.
This kind of flexibility can be a godsend in the increasingly competitive illustration game. With the amount of media and pop-culture attention being lavished on illustration-as-art in the past decade, an astonishing number of talented students are opting to go straight into illustration rather than more traditional artistic studies. While this tends to produce plenty of technically proficient imagery, it's also cut a lot of careers short. Young illustrators with mad skills and a finger firmly on the pulse of What's Hot Now sometimes find themselves out of work when fashions change, discovering too late that they've put much effort into perfecting a particular look, but not enough into learning how to build new ones. In this way, the artist-cum-illustrator can hold a distinct advantage, though she'll need to work harder at the outset to build a client base.
The specifics of making the leap to illustration are maddeningly non-specific. Because so much variability exists in fine arts education, some BFAs may find themselves taking to illustration like fish to water, while others couldn't take client direction if it meant the difference between a year-long migraine and a sack of gold. By all accounts, working under deadlines and constraints are the hardest things to learn, and there are plenty of fine artists who have shifted careers by simply using their existing portfolio to win gigs, then learning to view the time and subject matter constraints as challenges rather than irritants.
The flow of work differs in another important way: with the advent of digital media, many art directors have fewer qualms than ever about making last-minute requests for changes in color and composition. For illustrators relying heavily on more traditional media, this can mean plenty of late nights re-drawing or re-painting to make a deadline, or an alteration of technique to anticipate such changes. Salomon, who works almost entirely in paint and ink, has learned to digitize and layer artwork on certain pieces in progress for just this reason. Accommodating the caprices of clients while still allowing for the small unpredictabilities that make an image a work of art is one of the fine lines many illustrators walk, but those with fine art backgrounds especially so.
Despite these difficulties, and sometimes because of them, Rachel has never regretted choosing to change her career. She still sets aside time to work on personal projects, frequently exhibiting in group and solo gallery shows, and hopes to maintain this bilateral existence for as many years as she's able. Allowing the two sides to influence each other helps them both, she says, and proves that the difference between professional frustration and opportunity is often just a matter of interpretation.
