The Perfect Book

My little brother bought this great little book of the internet, entitled The Perfect Bait. He’s studying animation, and loves to draw comics. He recommended I read it because he thought it was the best he’s read so far. In fact, this book is the ‘you can make it’ guide book and is so much more interesting than the ‘how will you pay the bills’ serenade. I thank my lil’bro for being so great to me by sharing his new found knowledge, which, in turn, I want to share with you. I strongly recommend you read this little jewel of a book, if you are a painter, a writer, a musician or any kind of artist.

The author of The Perfect Bait, Bobby Chiu, is a reknowned artist who has worked on many films and has initiated many artistic initiatives. His 75 page book is a no brainer. It comes with a little pep talk and a simple plan elaboration: 1) practice and hard work, 2) motivation, 3) get your art out there, 4) financial security and 5) finding and keeping your clients.

And how important are those 5 steps Chiu states !  You might want to catch on to his version of financial security and how to keep collectors interested (obviously the two last chapters of the book). These really had me thinking. His ideas are simple, yet clear, and to an extent obvious to anyone slighty interested in commerce and marketing of art. However, to be reassured I was on the right track and to see that the process is this simple is a great push to my motivation.  It got me officially started on the third step: getting my art out there.  

The great thing about animators and other ‘commercial’ ( this has no discriminating undertone to it, by the way, but for the sake of clarity, we need to use ‘the C word’ here – why is ‘commercial’ such a bad word in the field of  fine arts, anyway?) artists such as designers is their trade implies a business aspect  whereas fine art painters are often thought of as the clichéed excentric individual and indifferent to making money. At least, as I’ve said before, this romantic idea of art for art’s sake has followed me a long time until I realized we are not different from designers, but just have a different audience. Designers always made beautiful things too, there is no question about it. Therefore, their experience is often the best tool to adapt to our practice. This is as if you wanted to sell trucks, but learned the trade with a car salesman. This seems logical, doesn’t it?