Finally an Update! (And Simone Legno’s astounding advice)

September 7, 2008 at 12:13 pm (Tokidoki) (, , , )

This is my illustration blog for when the opportunities for Anime blogging posts dry up occassionally, but also to share with you my experience of becoming an illustrator and improving my work over time. Now usually I’m drawing, and most of it is rubbish, but in a day I get about five good images I can either use as a reference for another illustration or the basis of a work I can polish off for a quality print or something, which I’m a long way off achieving at this point in my career. What I can tell you is that I’ve reached the point in my illustrating career where you realise you have talent but you also realise just how small you are in the scope of things, because you haven’t even made your first quality print yet but some of your sketches look great.

Sketch every day, jot down ideas, I came up with a few today for t-shirts that I’ll share with you later when the final drafts are done. Yet something entirely unexpected occurred in my inbox today which changed my day’s direction from a run of the mill day of study into something inspiring: I got an email back from Simone Legno, the tokidoki designer:

Dear Jacob,

hope you are doing well. thanks for your eamila nd sorry if I will be pretty quick since I am in san diego for tradeshows and trying to clean my ton of emails that accumulated during those days.
I think there’s not many secrets or tips to be a graphic designer. it’s  a matter of dedicating your lifre to it. it’s not a jobm, it’ sthe way you have to think watching things. even when I wake up I try to focus on new ideas or all the boring heavy things of the business, behind every simple object can be a great idea. i always used to work from morniog to night and even during weekends. outthere there’s so much compewtitiojn that you have to really be one of the bests to get far. it’s important to be humble cause you never stop learing asnd getting into a style perfection and evolvement.
Wish you good luck with your studies and lot of energy whn at the b eginning things will go pretty hard or wrong (happened to me a lot…it’s normal)
Ciao ciao
This is the same Simone Legno that appears in this video. So you can imagine my excitement when I recieved a reply from him (even Neil Gaiman, official Nicest Man on Earth, hasn’t replied to my fan mail), in a few days no less, record time for a response from a celebrity. I took on board his advice and started drawing, again. And this time I was being more relaxed about it knowing that even he had a difficult start to his career as a designer. I also learned from this experience that sometimes there are famous people in the world, particularly creative artists, who actually answer fan mail, so try and contact as many designers and artists as you can whom you like, you never know what will happen next.

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