Q&A with Jane Gardner: Getting Things Started
I’m spending this cold Minnesota winter—yes, far from the Hawaiian paradise above—revising projects started long ago. “Writing is rewriting,” as the saying goes, but I’ve been missing the fun jolts of creativity that come with exploring new ideas. To get the generative spirit back into my life, I started taking a creative nonfiction class. This week’s prompts are focused on ekphrastic writing, or descriptive writing of visual art. The idea is to engage in a literary way with non-literary art, and my attempts have me thinking a lot about how writing (like music) has a beginning and end but visual art is immediate—the whole story at once.
So, with visual art on my writing mind, I’m super excited to feature Los Angeles-based designer and illustrator Jane Gardner for the inaugural Q&A of Wild Minds! In addition to being, you know, my sister, Jane is a Senior Graphic Designer at Mattel, where she designs packaging for games including Rock’em Sock’em Robots, The Magic 8-Ball, UNO, and more. A graduate of Parsons The New School for Design, Jane also studied design at Central Saint Martins in London and her work is featured in the American Illustration 39 archive. Honestly, she’s been wowing me since she was two.
Jane and I were strangely nervous to talk about our creative processes, and it made me realize how little I communicate about this topic with other artists. For some reason, having to answer the question of how you get your work done can feel like being put on the spot. Compared to shiny finished projects, work is vulnerable, mundane, imperfect, and difficult to articulate.
Jane compares her designer/illustrator identity to my pianist/writer identity. Her design projects—logos, branding, packaging, and more—tend to require an “assignment” in the way that my piano practicing requires a composer to have written a piece already. But when she’s illustrating, Jane is the generative force and has more creative control, which is how I feel when I’m writing.
I’m fascinated by Jane’s simple division of her process into two parts—“starting” and “finishing”—and I wonder if this mental organization is related to the immediacy of visual art. As I’m slogging through my novel revision, I’ve been cursing how difficult it is to write the middle of a story. In the screenwriting world, writing second acts is a famously arduous task. But what if creative flow is only about getting something started and then getting it finished? Maybe both process and storytelling are as simple as that.
Q&A with Jane Gardner, designer & illustrator
Q: What’s your favorite part of your creative process?
A: I like to start things. I usually start new illustrations on the weekends that I can finish throughout the week. I can illustrate rough concepts and figure out layouts and color palettes pretty quickly (the fun part), but then finishing projects can get really nit-picky and takes forever.
Q: Do you consider yourself a perfectionist?
A: Yes.
Q: How do you decide what to illustrate?
A: I just see things I think are interesting and think “I’m going to draw that.” I take a lot of reference photos of things I want to draw, which I keep in a folder on my computer. When I want to start something new, I can look through those photos for inspiration.
Q: What do you use to create?
A: Illustrator, Photoshop, Procreate, and my Pantone notebook. Illustrator is usually my go-to. I can use it on both my MacBook and iPad Pro to create simple geometric designs. I use Procreate more to practice my drawing skills and play around with different brushes. When illustrating, Photoshop is usually the last stop when I tweak final colors and textures.
Q: How long does it take you to create an illustration?
A: Depending on the illustration, anywhere between 3-8 hours. I’m usually working on a few different ones throughout the week so it’s hard to keep track of time.
Q: Do you get creator’s block?
A: Yeah. Really all through last year because of the pandemic. I always have things I want to illustrate, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do anything. I fell out of habit.
Q: What is your ideal creative habit?
A: Dedicating two hours every day to personal creative time, and creating maybe 3-5 illustrations a week that I’m happy with. It’s hard though, because if I get really into something I tend to lose track of time. And sometimes I fall behind when work gets super busy. Also, I’d like to sketch every day even if it’s just for five minutes, but that doesn’t happen as often as I’d like.
Q: Any pre-creative work rituals?
A: I like to feel organized first. I’ll start by making the bed, opening the curtains in the living room for sunlight, and sipping some matcha (or iced coffee if it’s Saturday). I’m most productive in a clean and sunny environment, with music or a podcast playing.
Q: What kind of music do you like to listen to while you work?
A: Lately, mostly Hot Chip! Maybe because that’s the last new album I listened to that came out pre-rona and there hasn’t been much new music being released. Also, I don’t know how to explain this, but they sound like how I want my work to look.
Q: Let’s say on Saturday you’re hoping to do a lot of work but you feel a creative block. How would you get out of it?
A: I wouldn’t feel that way on a Saturday. Saturdays are creative days.
Visit Jane’s website, buy yourself some prints, or follow her on Instagram for daily design perfection.
Interested in ekphrastic writing? Here’s an Anne Sexton poem about Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night. (Anne Sexton once said about her poetry, “I mostly think of my work as a painting.”)
Finally, some Hot Chip to help your Saturdays be as creative as Jane’s.
Read more Wild Minds posts here.