Chasing my dream career, after a crappy day!
Hi there! I’m Anasabina Dys.
I’m an illustrator and graphic designer, working towards becoming a full-time illustrator. A dream I’ve had for over a decade, and on September 2023 I finally decided to do something about it!
I’m creating this blog as a way to record my journey: my progress as I work on my portfolio, trying to figure out what I’m passionate about, what I like to draw, the stories I want to tell – but also what it takes to get into a space I have zero knowledge of. Hopefully along the way if you decide to follow my journey, I can inspire you, relate to you, share something new, or simply entertain you.
I’ve been working as a designer and illustrator (mostly designer) for 20+ years. I love the design industry, and I’ve been lucky to have worked on some amazing projects. But as the years go by, and perhaps as I get older and I start to question my life, I’ve realized that I am most in my element when I’m illustrating. It brings me joy, and I can genuinely feel my spirit, my force, my being, whatever you call it, rejoice. In September of 2023 after a crappy day, dealing with the everyday mundane and whatever life was throwing my way, the yearning for something different had finally tipped enough. I just happened to see a post from an art agent I had been following for years, and her course for illustrating children’s books had just opened for registration. I grabbed my credit card and registered for the class without thinking twice. Now I have to be honest, after what I had done sunk in, I did start to freak out a bit. I mean, it’s been my dream after all, something I had thought ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if…’ What if I did this and found out I wasn’t good enough, or I couldn’t cut it? The stress was real! I know I’m not the only one who’s felt this.
After pulling myself together, my first challenge is to refine and figure out my ‘style’. Coming from a graphic design background, and by my natural instinct to experiment and try new things, I’ve purposely not stuck to ‘a style’. But if I want to be successful in this industry, publishers and art directors need to feel confident in my style and that I can carry a story from beginning to end. So before the course started, I wanted to do an exercise and revisit some of my illustrations from the past few years, with an emphasis on the ones I had the most joy creating. I wanted to see if there was a common theme, something I could start from and develop into a cohesive style.
These are a few of the illustrations that I reviewed and what I liked about them:
I started to see a pattern with all the illustrations I chose to review. They all have simple shapes and lines, they have an element of some type of texture, I like detail (but used sparingly). After going through this exercise, which I highly recommend (in fact I think I might make it into an annual reflection), I also looked through some of the artists I admire. I wanted to know what drew me to their work, what I loved about it, and what I might even do differently. At the end of all this, I felt pretty confident with how I wanted to move forward. My next steps… sketching, painting, rediscovering what I like and creating every day. Probably the most important part though – showing up every day and being ok with making mistakes and trying new things until I find my style.
Thanks for listening,
Anasabina
What’s next: I think I’ll highlight more of what I did to prep for the course. My experiments, revisiting gouache (I had forgotten how much I loved it), and some of the goals I set for myself to keep momentum. I also took a lot of Skillshare and Domestika classes (which might be a post all on it’s own).
I plan to post once on the last weekend of every month, so I hope you come back and join me.