In the field of advertising, when you find a means of connecting with people, you take advantage of it. So considering that my previous blog posting, “Thirty Years of Illustration,” got triple the readership of any of my former posts, I decided to write another article along the same lines—that is, looking back over my career as an illustrator. I promise not to repeat myself (the film Rocky was good and Rocky II was palatable, but then Sly made the disasters Rocky III, IV and V).

For the first 20 years of my illustration career almost all my work was done using an airbrush. Most people wait 20 minutes into my airbrush stories before politely asking what an airbrush is, so I thought I’d explain the tool. Listeners get hung up on the word “brush” when there isn’t anything resembling a brush on the device. Think of an airbrush as a tiny, highly accurate paint sprayer. It looks like a silver writing pen (see photo, above right). On the top, or off the side of the front end of the brush, there is a small paint reservoir about the size of a thimble. This holds the paint that is sucked up into a stream of air that is released when you push down and pull back on a lever mounted on the top of the device. The airbrush is hooked to a small compressor by a nylon-coated rubber hose, which provides its pressurized air source. You can spray the paint in widths from a pencil-thin line to an 8 to 12 inch swath of paint depending on how far you pull back on the lever and how high the airbrush is held from your working surface.

But for the most part you don’t just paint freehand. There is a time-consuming process of cutting both adhesive stencils (called friskets) and non-stick stencils (acetate, in different thicknesses) to mask off areas you don’t want to spray onto. Friskets give you a clean, sharp mask and acetate stencils give you a softer edge, since a bit of the paint will work its way under the non-stick acetate. Think of a car getting painted. You need to mask off the headlights, chrome details, windows and tire wells so you don’t get paint on them. For instance, if I were illustrating a person’s face I would mask off everything but the flesh-tone areas of the face, including the teeth, hair and eyes, since I wouldn’t want flesh-colored paint on them. After spraying the paint to get the desired result, I’d work back into the artwork in order to add highlights, define shadows and do other detail work. For that I would use fine-tipped paintbrushes and colored pencils. Sometimes I’d add highlights by erasing or scraping off paint with an Exacto blade. You can run several different kinds of paint through an airbrush but I always used gouache, which is a water-based paint resembling watercolor, but made more opaque with a chalk-like substance. Back in the day, I used to have four airbrushes hooked up at a time, each with a different color so I didn’t have to constantly spend time cleaning them and changing from one color to another.

Airbrushing isn’t for everyone. It requires a lot of skill, patience and concentration. And this is where it gets weird. Ask my family or fellow employees how tidy and organized I am. My work area is the messiest in the office. But for some reason, the minute I picked up an airbrush I became Mister Neatness and Perfection, with the patience of a saint.

Reflecting back on how challenging the medium was, for the first year I airbrushed I almost always walked away from client assignments secretly hoping that I could just pull off the illustration at all. The third year I remember congratulating myself for not messing up on a project for the first time. Later of course, I had total mastery of the medium.

Now that my work is digital it almost seems too easy. There wasn’t any Command Z with my airbrush, and today’s illustration work gets done much quicker. But I keep in touch with my past in that I work out all my digital illustrations by hand on tracing paper.

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Top: This engine and transmission was one of the highest paying illustrations I’ve ever done in my career. Originally created for inclusion in a GM brochure and trade show display, it was later blown up into an 8 foot poster and hung behind the desk of the chairman of the board at GM. Medium: Airbrushed gouache. 1988

Second: In my opinion, the most versatile airbrush is the Iwata HP-SB. It was a trusty workhorse that was good for both fine detail work and laying in broad areas of color. I painted the engine and transmission with this one.

Third: This painting was done for the cover of Jotham’s Journey, the first book in a trilogy I illustrated. The books were fictional adventure novels about three children who were present at the birth of Christ. I hired a 12-year-old model from Detroit to serve as the main character Jotham, and borrowed the period clothing from a local church’s theatre department. After publication, the book had a very loyal following and last year got republished after being out of print for nearly 10 years. Medium: Airbrushed gouache. 1996

Fourth: This is an interior illustration for the second book in the Jotham series, entitled Bartholomew’s Passage. I was given the manuscripts and asked which scenes I’d like to illustrate, which was very nice of the art director. This drawing shows Bartholomew washing the floor of his master’s house. Medium: Airbrushed watercolor. 1996

Fifth: This illustration was done for a book entitled The Forever Feast. I bought all the food items and photographed them together to get a sense of scale. I then shot each element up close for detailed illustration reference. The idea was to do a realistic illustration, but stylized in a way that made the image hyper-real. I had agreed with the art director to leave the top two-thirds of the illustration sky for his title type treatment. In the end the publisher decided not to use my illustration, but I got paid. Medium: Airbrushed gouache. 1995

Sixth: Although I did a lot of realistic work, I also enjoyed assignments that were more graphic. Here is an illustration I did for a magazine’s Questions and Answers page. The art director wanted a contemporary take on Rodin’s classic sculpture The Thinker.  Medium: Airbrushed gouache. 1997

Seventh: I ended up doing a lot of work for family magazines. This article, aimed at fathers, was about switching from work life to home life. Medium: Airbrushed gouache. 1997

Eighth: The cartoon on the left was done shortly before I switched from airbrush to digital media. The one on the right is a digital illustration with similar subject matter. I thought it would be interesting to show them side-by-side. Medium: (Left) Airbrushed gouache. 1997. (Right) Vector. 2000

When I was in graduate school in the mid-1970s, I began illustrating to supplement my poverty-level student income. Because of my fine arts background I moonlighted as a magazine illustrator—secretly, since we fine arts students thought creating commercial artwork was prostitution. Even though we studied art history, somehow we missed the fact that all the greatest artists from Leonardo to Velasquez were, in effect, commercial artists working for paying patrons (usually the church or rich noblemen). After graduation and a few years of living abroad, I decided to become an illustrator full-time. Needing to earn a living trumped my grad school snootiness.

When I started my business the personal computer hadn’t made a mark in the graphic design world (the tiny Mac Classic didn’t arrive until 1984 with its puny 2 megabytes of RAM). I remember in the early 1980s receiving a survey in the mail asking how I anticipated the computer would change my industry. I remember thinking, “What a bizarre question. What are they thinking?” My airbrush was all I needed, and I used it 8 to 12 hours a day, with semi-regular all-nighters thrown in for good measure. I stayed busy because I could illustrate in almost any style that my clients requested, from hyper-realism to New Yorker–style cartoons, to car engine cut-aways and romance novel book covers. Many times I was asked to “ape” someone else’s style, which meant creating an illustration that copied another illustrator’s work (usually identified in a dog-eared illustration annual). I’m not too proud to admit I obliged. I also provided airbrushed photo retouching, illustrated logos and black and white line art using Rapidograph pens. Finally, and perhaps most archaic by today’s standards, I created airbrushed color gradations which were color separated with production cameras, and used by graphic designers in their layouts (no scanners yet).

Illustrating was a physical function requiring natural hand-eye coordination, and because it was heavily based on realism, a lot of the illustrators working today in less realistic styles would have had a hard time of it. Everything had to be drawn from scratch, and once it was down on illustration board it was a pain in the you-know-what to make revisions. There were no graphics programs like Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop allowing designers to pull off passable illustrations by layering images and applying filters. For years after the computer made an impact in the graphic arts industry I continued my traditional illustration work, since a lot of the earliest versions of the software had artistic and technical limitations.

That was then and this is now. Today I wonder if I could even launch a career solely as an illustrator. Due in part to the explosion of low-cost stock illustration the market has deteriorated. I actually got paid more money for a magazine cover 25 years ago than I’m offered today. And there are just so many more illustrators out there vying for a shrinking market. Shrinking? Yes, print is shrinking. Magazines and newspapers, once the bastion of illustrators’ work, are going out of business left and right.

So do I think it was better in the good ‘ole days? No way! I don’t miss the all-nighters and the airbrush fumes in the least. Although the tools have changed, the talent level of many of today’s young illustrators is very high. In fact, there is a much broader diversity of illustration styles today than when I started, and I believe there will always be a market for outstanding illustration.

So to you young people starting a career in illustration I have some parting suggestions:

1. Define your illustration style; don’t have it defined by your digital tools.
2. Make sure you are communicating a concept first and foremost. That is the purpose of commercial illustration, not just making cool images.
3. Market yourselves continually. Today you can work for clients all over the world but you have to stay before your buyers continuously.
4. Aim for a signature style that is yours alone.
5. Be passionate about illustration. Without a total commitment to the medium, it will be difficult to make it for the long haul.

Production notes:

Top: This illustration (complete with airbrushed lettering) was inspired by the Raiders of the Lost Ark franchise. It was used on a poster that sold archival microfilm services to libraries. Even though there were drum scanners for imaging reflective art at the time, this illustration was sent to a prepress company in South Carolina and was color separated using a production camera. It was the last painting of mine that ever got color separated by a camera, and I remember the quality of the reproduction was superb. Medium: Airbrush. 1991

Second: I produced several paintings for cover art for a 3-book western-themed series of novels. This was the best painting of the lot, and as far as I can remember the series of paintings for this client was the last artwork I did using the airbrush. The author’s friend was the model for the lead character (who shot an awful lot of folks in the story). I used to do a lot of this kind of book cover artwork, but no more. Medium: Airbrush. 2005

Third: This illustration was used on a magazine cover for a religious magazine, and the lead article was entitled something like “Good Christians and Better Sex.” The publisher wanted a kind of Henri Rousseau look and feel. Medium: Airbrush. 1987

Fourth: Feeling I needed a  stylistic change for my cartoon work, this was an attempt to develop a more contemporary approach. I did a lot of this type of cartoon work in the early 1990s. Medium: Airbrush. 1993

Fifth: Entitled “It’s How You Play the Game,” this illustration highlighted a magazine article about how parents get overly passionate about their kids’ activities. Medium: Airbrush. 1992

Sixth: This was the first illustration that led to my current style. It grew out of a mid-life crisis, where I felt I wasn’t relevant as an illustrator and I needed a more current approach. The artwork accompanied an article about switching careers and was entitled “Could a Change Do you Good?” it was done as a two-color, full-page interior illustration. Medium: Vector. 1999

Seventh: This is one of my favorite illustrations in my signature style. This piece has been well received and won more awards than any of my other illustrations.  I’m sure this style will change with time, but for now I am very satisfied with continuing to explore this visual approach. Medium: Vector. 2007

Grasshopper has won many accolades including: “66th fastest growing company” by Inc. 500,  “Best entrepreneurs under 25” from Business Week, and “Top 40 under 40” from American Venture.

Hile Design: Roger, can you share a bit of your background and how you became a commercial illustrator?

Roger Xavier: I’m going to summarize this as much as possible: My earliest recollection of drawing was when I was 4 and started off with crayons. Then came my love of comic book art. The line drawings I grew up on in those comics would be ingrained into my psyche. I’d tried almost every medium used to create art, but pen & ink drawings have always been something that stayed with me.

Skipping ahead to college, I received my formal education in illustration, art history and design. In my senior year at college, I won a contest to create a poster for Molson Golden Beer. My entry became part of an exhibit and ended up gaining the attention of a book publisher in New York who not only hired me to do a couple of book illustrations, but also opened up an opportunity to work on a movie for MGM just 3 months after graduation. After that, I wanted to pursue the movie poster industry and started working for several Hollywood firms that specialized in entertainment advertising. During those early years, I tried everything from biomedical rendering to editorial art for magazines and working on any advertising job I could get. That was a time of growth and I didn’t really hit my stride until 1990, when I was awarded a project by Emmett Morava of Morava Design to create the annual report illustrations for the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power.  Emmett had great vision and instructed me to go bolder with my pen & ink drawings. He showed me how to design with ink and create something more than just a rendering.  The LADWP annual report went on to win many awards.  It was then that I started getting some recognition.

HD: Your medium is scratchboard. Can you tell us how you chose that medium, and describe your process for us?

RX: I started out working in a variety of media: charcoal, oil painting, acrylics, pastels, gouache and pen & ink. Out of college, I was just trying to make a living and see where this career would take me. I quickly learned that to survive you have to specialize in something (and be good at it). I thought I was good, but there were so many great artists/illustrators competing for a limited number of jobs. I could paint and draw. But many other talented people did it better. So I went back to my roots growing up on comic book line drawings. It was also an economic decision. Reproduction, sourcebooks and other expenses related to black & white advertising are less costly than color advertising. I was also faster at it since my mind was already comfortable interpreting a picture and breaking it down into lines and patterns. And after I had done the LADWP annual report, I realized that this style was where I could actually make a name for myself.

Scratchboard was the next best thing after pen & ink. It’s a clay-coated board that comes pre-inked or white, in which you can add the ink yourself (like a pen & ink drawing) and then take a knife to scratch back into the surface in reverse. I like working on the white scratchboards. It’s almost like painting with pen & ink. I apply the ink (or pigment) and then come back and paint back in by scratching into the black pigment (ink) and exposing the white clay surface beneath the paint. It takes longer than pen & ink but affords a lot more control over the drawing’s details and variety of textures.

HD: What is your favorite project, and why?

RX: My favorite project would be anything that gives me the chance to work with other talented people, in which the collaboration of illustrator, designer, art director and client produces something exceptional. Illustration is really a product of teamwork. It’s much like how an actor, if given a great script, director and production values, is able to elevate to the highest of his abilities. So much rides on teamwork. But in reality, what the client wants is paramount. I strive to surprise the client by exceeding expectations. I try to make the best of what I’m given.

HD: What are the most rewarding and most challenging aspects of being a commercial illustrator?

RX: Rewarding:  Seeing my work out there in the public eye. Having my art contribute positively to whatever its intended purpose is. Creating something that stands the test of time.

The challenging part is meeting deadlines, staying inspired even when you may be tired, and all the paperwork and marketing that is part of running a business. But even more important is the ability to stay in demand and to adapt to the technology and tastes of the times.

HD: How do you market yourself?

RX: First and foremost, I have a website. It’s the single most important advertising medium out there.  The website serves to showcase my body of work and is available 24/7. I have a web host that makes it easy for me to update the site myself. I also try to link my website with as many free illustration hubs I can find, as well as some others that I think are worth advertising in. The Workbook tends to have the biggest reach in finding quality work, so I always try to be in it and structure my annual advertising budget accordingly. I have also sent out postcards and printed mailers in the past to a targeted list of potential and past clients. Mostly I concentrate on agencies and design studios whose clients are either in the food and beverage industry or the financial, corporate and health care industries. My style of illustration tends to appeal to these industry segments.

HD: How have you seen the illustration business change over your career, and where do you think it’s headed?

RX: I’ve been in this business since 1985 and everyone knows how technology has advanced in the intervening years. I don’t believe the business of art has changed all that much but the way it is used, created and marketed has. It is no longer important that you live within a large metropolitan area with agencies that hire a lot of illustration. It is rare that you need to ever meet your clients or leave your studio. In many ways, technology has made things more convenient but it also has made the world a bigger stage in which to compete.

If you look back at history, you will see that technology is what drives change in almost everything we do. It opens up new markets and makes others obsolete. Tastes change, and change is inevitable. But overall, a basic, well-grounded understanding of drawing ability and design aesthetics will never be out of style. It’s how the artist uses those skills to relate to his world and adjust to market demand that will determine his or her ability to succeed as an illustrator.

I can’t say I know where the next big push in illustration will go. I know that cgi will be around for a long time and the new crop of artists who have grown up around computer technology will find it advantageous. There is a lot of need in advertising for digital enhancement, production and art. The entertainment industry definitely has a need for cgi. Conversely, I hope that traditional art will always have its place in balancing out the new with the old. I love almost all kinds of art but relate especially to print work—wine labels, packaging and the like. These markets, along with book covers and publishing, are markets that I hope continue to reside with print work.

HD: What advice would you give to a young person starting out as an illustrator?

RX: Look around and see what is being done. Study the works of great artists, illustrators and designers who came before you. Find inspiration everywhere. But then understand that this is a business and the goal of illustration is to reach out to people and get them to like what you do and what you can do for them. It’s great if you create art in the process but the reason someone would want to hire you is to get them the results they desire. In order to be successful you will also have to work hard, be professional, be consistent and be someone people want to work with. People skills are just as important as raw talent.

With that said, you should understand that there are a limited number of jobs out there and a lot of people who want to do art for a living. Try to find out what makes you special and unique. Find a niche in style or medium and then concentrate on being the best at it. (But keep in mind to develop a marketable style.) Believe in yourself and stay confident. Perception is very important in all things. We are visual people. Try to make sure that everything you put out there supports your image and the brand of art that you do. And one last thought: Do good work and the business will follow.

Interested in learning more about Roger and seeing additional samples of his work? Visit rogerxavier.com.