What's going on here?

Book clubs befuddle me, but I'd join a sketchbook club in the next heartbeat.

Groucho got it right: I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member. The corollary trumps it: No book club would have me as a member — sitting snarky and sullen in the corner, muttering imprecations about why we're reading the same book at the same time and telling our synchronous thoughts in real time.

Besides, not three people in an hour's drive would read what I read, all how-to books and historical nonfiction. What's more, I'm a slow reader. A monthly book club would kill me. I'm not built for a book club.

A sketchbook club would be different. Instead of one book about which a group discusses, a sketchbook club would embrace each participant's book, and others would peruse your work as you discussed it with them.

It would have to have rules, mainly for me:

• No judging. The mission of a sketchbook club would be for members to come away from each meeting inspired and encourage by each other.
  
  For a brief while, the defunct Art Directors and Artists Club in Sacramento tried an illustrator's guild which quickly became the Vito Corleone School, its motto: "Keep your friends close but your enemies closer." It comprised illustrators from a wide range of experiences and backgrounds, from hobby scribblers to commissioned painters. The latter kept tabs on the former, decided they had nothing to worry about, and the guild soon collapsed.
  
  I'm aware of Sketch Bombs, and that Sacramento has one, but I prejudge them by not quite knowing what they are and whether I'd be intimidated, the resident old guy who needs validation. Somebody take me by the hand.
• Meet at least one new person each time. No cliques here; community.
• You could draw too, but draw with someone else drawing, and talk about what you're drawing, your media and method and madness. 
• Start the conversation. Our purpose would be clear: I'll show you mine if you show me yours.

So we'd sit on comfortable chairs or couches or at nice old dining room tables with a lot of warm lighting. We'd swap one of your sketchbooks — I recommend an old random one — and take turns looking at and talking over pages.

Just a few pages. You wouldn't have to go through the whole portfolio. Simply open up a few pages and ask:

What's going on here?

There would begin a conversation about process and creativity and failure and change of mind and more creativity. It's not your thinking, it's someone else's, but it would inspire you to think different and new about your next project and problem. Maybe someone else's creative process is so alien to yours you can't relate. That's OK; it would cause you to sharpen your own process.

All of this came to mind stumbling across the page above while looking for something else.

It's from an early, early sketchbook, a touchstone of transition in my life. I had not yet cut the tether of working for someone else, but I was close, doing small writing and design and illustration jobs, getting my name out there.

Soon I would be loosed from the security of a full-time job and go through a full-on "What the hell have I done?!" phase, driving the town without aim, watching with longing the delivery trucks whizzing past, thinking that might be a good occupation instead.

At this point and on this page, all was warm and safe. So much going on here:

• A dentist whose initials are W.M. wanted an identity and possibly a business system (card, letterhead, envelope).
  
  Here I'm playing with the letterforms as molars — even as fangs. Ultimately the solution evoked the architecture of his office, no teeth.
  
  It wasn't until sketches were made, solutions were approved, cards printed and paid for, that the dentist decided he didn't want it after all.
  
  Some clients are like that.

• The next Envision conference, Envision 22, was coming up and I was helping organize it; we'd eventually enlist a real designer to come up with the identity, but this is me, wonderng what I'd do with the opportunity.
  
  Envision was a lovely event run by a lovely club, the aforementioned Art Directors and Artists Club, which were halcyon days for me but dying days, it turns out, for the club.
  
  Leading design publications stormed their way into the design conference market, crushing our little club and our shoestring efforts (though we made an amazing much out of frightening scarcity), and the graphic design industry fragmented and democratized into what it is now, with no real center.
  
  I checked the ADAC Website in search of information for this post, and learned the club of which I had been president is now no more than the Website page announcing its board's decision to dissolve.
  
  Few traces remain of anything ADAC, which is a great sadness. It would be nice to have an online archive of ADAC Envision and workshop posters, to mark a time when the club made strides in advancing visual communication. At one time the club had a physical archive of shelves I helped build, heaped with a great history of material.

• A subsidiary where I worked at the time hired me to make line-art illustrations of agricultural safety practices, including demonstrations of the consequences for unsafe work.
  
  I think that's what's going on with this sketch of feet on a ladder rung. It's the only such sketch on this page, and more detailed drawings didn't show up until many many pages later in the book.

• I was still working on a name for my upcoming business, which became somerset words and pictures co. Among options such as Tyrant Design and Industrial Cumquat, I liked the idea of Banana Bone. This is as far as I got on that.

• The rest of the sketchbook page is a guess. I played with the word "exhibitionist," and the only reason I can think of is that for a couple of years I ran ADAC Envision's Exhibition, our word for the conference trade show; maybe I thought it would be cool to brand the event separately.
  
  I was designing some kind of portfolio, with a hunky Tab A for Slot A thingie. It never came to pass, whatever it was.
  
  Now with the miracle of the Internet I can see a lot of illustrators' sketchbooks in the isolation of my office … sketchbooks that in themselves are works of great art, some with fully formed illustrations that spill from page to page like sequential art — nothing like my randomness.

But it's not the same as a club, a time and place every rare often to share and think aloud and dislodge, person to person.

If you're nearby and have a sketchbook or two, let's talk. 

You win some

After all these years, my first kill fee!

Not that illustration jobs haven't ended awkwardly before, or disappeared without a trace. They merit their own posts someday.

But this is the first time a project ended prematurely in a purely professional manner — with the client calling it off and paying a fee for services up to that point.

The so-called kill fee! Sounds tough.

Funny thing is, I hadn't stipulated a kill fee. I stopped stipulating long ago because it never happened and clients don't profess to read the paperwork anyway. Which is obvious because my paperwork also stipulates a third of project costs before work begins, then a third midway, and the final third on delivery.

 
How many have paid that way in nearly 20 years? I can count them on one hand. I have long learned to live by 30 days net. Hurry up with the illustration, wait on payment.

(I know, I besmirch the professional standards for all illustrators by my actions. Or lake thereof. Branded. Break my pencils across your knee, kick me out of the club.)

This kill fee was happenstance, the client being one of the few to read and honor the third-third-third stipulation. A stand-up gesture.

No names here. It's a startup venture and the business partners want a mid-Century pinup girl to augment their ancillary promotions, tying into an overarching theme.

I had provided work before to Partner A in another venture, and this partner called me in to work on the new project.

Red flags flew from the start.

Partner A: This is a startup operation and budget is critical was the first red flag. Though frank and upfront, it's also code for "I'd like more than I can really pay you for." Better a client lays out a number at the start, and we figure out how to fit illustration services to it.

Next was when Partner 1 summoned me for an appointment on site to explain the scope of the project.

Except Partner 1 was late. And Partner 2 had never heard of me, didn't know why I was there. A sign painter? No. Partner 2's eyes clouded slightly when I explained. When Partner 1 finally arrived to reiterate this unilateral decision, Partner 2 shot Partner 1 sly sidelong glances while keeping composure with me.

Sexy redhead cartoonish character is how Partner 1 described the project to me at first contact. A vixen delivered from a Vargas or Elvgren painting is the way Partner 2 wanted it. In an illustration likely to be printed in two colors. I could feel the continents drifting apart.

A realistic digital line-art woman, with proportions edging toward Jessica Rabbit, and a few color options depending on budget — that's the project we talked out on the spot, the project we agreed to, the project I quoted in the paperwork.

A bit Scarlett Johansson. I'm never entirely sure
how drawings will turn out …

Proceed, said Partner 1.

So began a flurry of sketches. Though I proposed a short series of very quick poses for the first round of the project, I sent instead more developed drawings, fleshed out, you might say. It isn't really a matter of under-promising and over-delivering — a practice I endorse. It was more like me trying to prove to myself I can do the job.

I've done that before, told a client, "I can do that!" and once off the phone, "Can I do that!?" and proceeded immediately to sketch, full of furious hope.

To the Internet! That's my morgue now. Time was I used to collect all kinds of photo scrap as drawing reference, and put them into manila folders and into a four-drawer file cabinet, the "morgue." But the vast array of visual art available at my fingertips is breathtaking.

After looking over pinup art to see what I've gotten into, I found photos that inspired some of the pinup art. I even came across what appears to be a fetish site, of women appearing to have been x-rayed in softcore poses. Don't know nothin' 'bout fluoroscopy, but I'm gonna guess these skeletal images, with the faint outline of the body, are digitally rendered instead.

Nonetheless, I took the images as a challenge and drew a few of them.

Though no longer self-conscious about drawing in public, I was skittish again drawing half-naked
women, people looking over my shoulder or ask what I was drawing.

More than a dozen sketches later, I sent the first round to Partner 1. Partner 1 sent screen captures of pinup girls that Partner 2 likes. A day later, Partner 2 sent the same samples. Left hand, right hand, moving autonomously.

No comment, just the samples. OK … so I drew variations on those samples, cladding them faintly.

How's the logo coming? Partner 2 asks. We need it for the Website ASAP.

I need the logo so I can fit the girl to it.

You don't have the logo?

No.So it went.

A cell phone picture of a photograph of the logo painted on a wall appeared, and I drew seven more quick poses incorporating the logo.

Partner 2 picked a pose. After prompting, Partner 2 also sent a sample of hair and clothes to emulate.

I drew a tighter sketch, sent it, and waited.

Tighter sketch, version 1 … strange hand corrected …

It needs to be closer to the Vargas and Elvgren girls, said Partner 2.

Tighter sketch, version 2 …

By this point I had over-delivered, even for me. I asked politely for more direction, sent another sample of the same pose trying to hit the mark, and said I'd proceed with a new round after the first third of payment promised.

A day passes. Partner 1: We do not feel we are on the same track with this project. Kill fee to come.

Tighter sketch, version 3, never sent, post kill fee …

Forensics are futile. I don't think I'll really know why this job didn't finish. Opaque communication didn't help. I'll accept I need to attend anatomy class and hone my drawing. My gut tells me I didn't present my profession well, nor describe the process as clearly, that sketches would start rough, become refined and eventually lead to final art.

I think Partner 2 was counting on Varga paintings from the get-go.

Back to the drawing board. These sketches would otherwise go unseen …