Terri, could you please tell us a bit about yourself and how you got into illustration?
I’m an artist living on the Canadian prairies with my husband, our kiddo, and one very fluffy cat named Frida. I’ve been a painter for a couple decades, but I’m fairly new to illustration. While I was studying painting in the early 2000s I really liked illustrative work but it was somewhat frowned upon for most students at my university during that time. I imagine this attitude has changed since then, but I strongly remember “illustrative” being used as a negative descriptor of one of my projects during my interview for the program. So I just sort of shut off that part of my brain for years and focused on my painting practice. My interest in illustration was re-ignited after my kid was born because that’s when picture books came back into my life. I was reading fun and beautiful stories every day and I really wanted to do similar kinds of work. When I started flirting with applying to a school and working on new portfolio pieces it felt really amazing to be creative but in an entirely different way from my painting practice. In the end, we completely uprooted our lives so I could go back to school! My family was incredibly supportive and the whole thing was a great experience, even taking classes through Covid. I’m so happy we did it, and I’m still feeling great about this new aspect of my creative life.
“My interest in illustration was re-ignited after my kid was born because that’s when picture books came back into my life. I was reading fun and beautiful stories every day and I really wanted to do similar kinds of work.”
Your talent for storytelling really shows in your work. What inspires these stories and the characters you create?
Kids. Definitely. Children are so goofy, and their imaginations seem limitless. And they have such a great way of seeing to the heart of things! My own kid is twelve now and they make crazy connections, tell silly stories, ask important questions… they are just awesome, and are always in the back of my mind while I’m working. I sometimes wonder/worry about the possibility of inspiration drying up as my child ages out of all the “kid stuff,” but I guess that’s just more reason to embrace my own inner child.
We love how varied your sketchbook is! How important is it to keep experimenting and do you have a favourite style to work in?
Thank you! This is a surprisingly tough question for me. I had to think about it because messing about in a sketchbook is just something I do. Not a lot of thought goes into it. I guess the real importance of experimenting with traditional media in a sketchbook is that there’s no “undo” button. And sometimes the happy accidents that come out of playing around are really important! You find great stuff that you start doing on purpose which leads to less expectation around what something is “supposed” to look like and that produces a deeper level of personal expression. There’s great value in low-risk experimentation.
As for a favourite style… I’ve certainly tried a lot of things, but I’m not sure I have one. I feel like I know more about what my style isn’t. Realism definitely comes to mind. I can do it, sure, but there’s no joy there for me. I guess that what I like best is doing work that pulls from reality but isn’t too fussed about staying true to it. More soft and cartoony. I’m told that my drawing style is pretty recognisable across mediums and rendering styles, so I don’t think much about it beyond that.
Talk us through your creative process; how do you develop your ideas into final illustrations?
I pretty much always start on paper because I know I tend to tighten up if I work on a screen early on. I also try to keep reference images out of my process wherever possible (they’re good starting points, but I like to leave references behind if a project allows it). Beyond that, my path splits between personal and client work. My personal work usually starts with a little sketch that I particularly like and scan into Affinity. Really rough little doodles always get a re-draw or two, but I basically like to get on with it and see what happens! Personal work often comes back to experimenting, I guess. I should also say that I’m shockingly cavalier about colour for personal work–I almost never plan it out in advance, though I’m always careful to build my layers to make colour easy to alter later on.
Client work or anything for my painting practice gets the whole nine-yards because there’s so much more on the line. I do word maps and research and lots of thumbnails. Character design too, if needed. I like to do line, line revision, value and colour roughs before rendering. Throughout, I put everything I do into a document to keep it all straight because I like being able to quickly look at the project as a whole, including older versions of each stage. I guess you could say I’m very particular when I’m doing work for someone else and rather laissez-faire for myself.
When did you start using Affinity Designer, and what are your thoughts on it?
I first picked up Designer in 2019, when I was a completely traditional artist. I was using my trackpad to do vector classwork for the first year of my design degree, if you can believe it. It was really easy to learn and use, so I kept with Affinity after I bought a Wacom that spring. I remember that I spent the summer drawing robots (one hundred of them, actually–my own drawing challenge, if you like) to get comfortable working digitally and it was a lot of fun, even if I wasn’t producing masterpieces. Strangely, it was classwork forcing me into working with Adobe programs that cemented Affinity’s place with me. Not going into great detail, I’ll just say that things I’d taken for granted in Affinity all seemed so much harder than they needed to be in Adobe. I was pretty outraged about it actually, and I’m sure my friends quickly got tired of hearing my rants! I made a point of working in Affinity whenever possible, which is pretty much whenever I didn’t need to animate anything. I’ve used Affinity for illustration, documenting my artwork, making product mockups, laying out books for print, prepping artwork for motion projects… So, yep. Affinity is my workhorse.
“I’ve used Affinity for illustration, documenting my artwork, making product mockups, laying out books for print, prepping artwork for motion projects… So, yep. Affinity is my workhorse.”
Do you have any favourite features?
The ability to work with vector and raster layers in the same program is an obvious one. I more often work just in raster these days, but I still love this about Affinity. When I couldn’t figure out how to do this easily in other programs, I thought I was surely missing something obvious, but no; it was just an awesome Affinity thing. Affinity’s also not subscription-based, which is another favourite feature, if you can call it one (I do). I cherished affordability as a student and that hasn’t really changed. Something I enjoy on a regular basis is the panorama feature, which I use to stitch together multiple close-up photos of my paintings for more detailed documentation. My most favourite recent addition is the layer brush history–I ALWAYS use it because it’s such a time saver.
We’re particularly fond of your paper cut effect illustrations. What inspired you to work in this style, and how do you create the effect?
In the last year of my design degree we were challenged to work in a medium we weren’t familiar with on a poster project with a pretty quick turnaround. While researching traditional cut paper, I found a few people that were producing super convincing (nearly photorealistic) digital work. What I achieved in that week made for a really sharp “cut-paper” Beetlejuice poster that I couldn’t have managed traditionally within the timeframe given, so I started using the effect for more of my work. That first attempt was a mostly flat colour vector, carefully planned out so that when I dropped a shadow from every layer, it would resemble something like a shadow box. I used a lot of varying shadow lengths with accompanying softness/hardness to convey depth. Then I roughed up the edges with a vector brush stroke and nested a paper overlay within each shape to help with the illusion. At the very end, I used a small, rough, white brush just along the edges in some places to give the impression of little tears in the paper. Voila: cut paper!
Lately, I achieve this effect in a more subtle way using raster brush-drawn shapes with a slightly rough, paper-like edge that I drop a small shadow or two from. I place my artwork within those layers, along with a paper multiplier (I have a small library of papers in a folder that I grab from). Sometimes I let it be sort of sloppy, with a lot of “paper” showing around the artwork, other times it’s very clean and tight, but either way I think it brings a bit of the artist’s hand to my work when I let the image hint at a bit of real-world media.
We noticed that you like to take part in creative challenges. How do you feel this benefits your work, and how do you decide which ones to take part in?
What I enjoy about challenges is looking at a prompt and trying to figure out how I can do something unexpected with it, and then I get to turn around and see what others have done with the same starting point. It’s a good exercise to think creatively about an idea and see how far you can stretch it. With that said, I actually haven’t done a ton of challenges (only two, really)–my schedule was always just too jam packed for them until recently. The Cat Days of Summer was a challenge I just happened to stumble across this June. I took part because it was an illustration every five days, which was reasonable, and everything was cat-themed (I love house tigers). It was a good chance to do a small series of work in a slightly different render style and have a bit of fun, which I did!
Peachtober last autumn… well, that was a whole other beast. I made the mistake of letting it become PUNISHING, ahaha. I’d kept an eye on that challenge in previous years and made a point of marking it on my calendar because the community looked so fun, which it was. I still love the super solid illustrations I produced, and it really got me feeling good about the way I’m currently working, but I’ll tell you honestly that producing one fully realised illustration a day for the whole month of October was a bucket load of just too much, and I doubt I’d do the whole thing like that start to finish again. My decision to go for portfolio-level work every single day felt okay in the moment, but was entirely unreasonable. I don’t know what I was thinking in retrospect. Hey, lesson learned, right? If I take part this autumn I’ll be doing some picking and choosing, and maybe keeping it to just one or two prompts a week.
“What I enjoy about challenges is looking at a prompt and trying to figure out how I can do something unexpected with it, and then I get to turn around and see what others have done with the same starting point. It’s a good exercise to think creatively about an idea and see how far you can stretch it.”
Is there an illustration or project that you’re particularly proud of? Could you tell us about it?
Yes! Last summer I had an amazing opportunity to design an animal I-Spy for a child advocacy group who were about to move into a new building. It was installed in their three-storey stairwell as massive vinyl decals this spring. I haven’t been there to see it in person yet, but the photos look great, and I hear that it’s a favourite spot in the building for a lot of people. The concept was based around culturally significant Canadian plants and animals, arranged from sea (on the main level) to sky (on the third). All the artwork was designed to be soothing for children visiting the building, with soft shapes, fun textures, and fanciful but calming colours. Everything was rendered in vectors to accommodate the large print sizes, which was a nice change of pace for me since most of the work I do is raster-based. My favourite animal is the bear, who sits over a doorway like one of the black bears I used to see hanging out in trees. So cute.
Can you tell us what you’re working on right now?
I temporarily set aside painting to pursue illustration, but I didn’t give it up entirely! I’m devoting most of my attention to that at the moment. It’s become a sort of regular summer activity for me to go on a painting frenzy, likely because this was the only season with time for painting while I was at university. Plus, summer is when all our road-trips through the prairies take place, so it’s prime inspiration season for my landscape-loving soul–the fields are all colour and pattern. Gorgeous!
“Summer is when all our road-trips through the prairies take place, so it’s prime inspiration season for my landscape-loving soul!”
What are your creative goals for the future?
My ultimate creative goal is to illustrate a picture book. If I’m really dreaming big, more than one, even! I have to make it happen, whether it’s for my own story or someone else’s. I’ve done a bunch of awesome things since stepping into illustration (including a four-minute long animated film, by the way, which I NEVER saw coming and is still a mind-boggling creative goal I didn’t even know I had but managed to accomplish anyway), but I haven’t done a picture book, and it’s what started me on this road in the first place. A more immediate goal is to start hawking my wares again as a small market vendor, and I’m making plans to get that happening. Experience has taught me that no-one is selling stickers and small prints at tiny markets to get rich, but it is a very rewarding and fun way to get my work out into the world in a way that’s accessible to a lot of people.
Finally, if you could go back and tell yourself one top tip or piece of advice as you started your creative career, what would it be and why?
I guess my advice has two parts. It’s something I see more clearly now that I’m older. And I know this is a bit of a generalisation, but a lot of creative dreamers experience this, so… First, remember that when family and friends don’t fully support your creative ambitions, it’s often because they love you. Try not to take your loved one’s concerns as a reflection on your work since that’s usually not what it’s about anyway. Chances are good that they just want you to experience financial security. They worry about you! Don’t brush off their concerns. Give them consideration. Tying into that is my second piece of advice: look at your strengths and if resilience isn’t there, start developing it, because people aren’t wrong when they say it’s difficult to make a living in the arts. You have to really want it, and there’s a lot more to the job than just making good work. Personally, I’ll probably be working on this one for as long as I’m an artist, and I doubt it’ll ever get any easier for me. But I’m hopeful!
To see more of Terri’s incredible work, head over to her website or check her out on Instagram.