It’s National Illustration Day today.
As you may have noticed, illustration is a colossal part of my life. It’s practically part of my very self: I’d be at a loss to explain who I am, or what matters to me without it.
It hasn’t always been this way: for many years, I was a person who occasionally drew, alongside many other pursuits. But, over time, my focus has narrowed and this is what I have chosen to prioritise. I try to do something ‘towards comics’ every day, if possible.
Drawing, like most skills, is a craft at which you improve the more you do it, and I finally feel, after decades of practice, that I have reached the stage where I am mostly in control of what comes out (at the same time, one of the contradictory pleasures of drawing is that you can never quite predict what the end result will look like until it reveals itself on the page… this might not be true of everyone, but as we’ve recently discovered, people have differing degrees of ability to ‘see’ visually in their minds).
It has been frustrating, disappointing, tedious and sometimes even stressful to get to this point, and no doubt it will be all those things again in the future – but, weirdly, all those things are part of what makes it all worthwhile. Taking on the challenge, and meeting it.
The lovely thing about any form of artistic expression is that you never reach the end. It’s always a chance for experimentation, following new paths, building on what you have already learned, to go a bit further.
This is part of what I wish our politicians and the tech bros would understand, as they usher in a new age of generative AI, where all these pleasures are swept away for the ‘joy’ of pressing a button and instantly seeing an image on a screen. If I had five minutes with the Hove MP Peter Kyle, who is in charge of the government’s ambition to “mainline AI into the veins of the nation”, this is what I would tell him.
Unlike many of my artist chums who – understandably! – have a kneejerk distrust of any mention of AI, I have a day job in which I am very close to data and tech development, so I know what it can do in many other areas, and there are certainly benefits.
But generative AI, quite frankly, can do one.
And now, in celebration of National Illustration Day, I am going to share some of my own favourite recent drawings. Click any of them to see it at full size.
Myfanwy Tristram 