I don’t know why but I sometimes find it hard to hand my initial illustration concepts to a client.

When I was studying I remember a lecturer forcing me to redraw my ink illustration 8 times. Every time I finished the piece he would say, “great! now do it again.”

It did my head in but I guess I learned a valuable lesson – that my first draft is never as good as my 8th. So ever since that freaking annoying lesson, my illustration portfolio has never contained the first draft of anything I’ve done.

I often work and re-work illustrations to death until I get the results I’m after. For example the hand drawn logos in my graphic design portfolio would have been created after writing the name in pen and ink at least 25 times.

But I’m starting to second guess my lecturer (It only took 15 years).

After reviewing last weeks post about CD music packaging, I went and had a look through some old design files at previous music related work I’ve done and then had a look through the draft folders to see what was in there.

I found some initial illustrations for some logo concepts and remember that at the time I was totally unsatisfied with them and re-worked the crap out of them late into the evening.

Funny thing is, looking at them now… I kind of prefer them to the finished illustrations. Or maybe that isn’t so funny considering the extra time I had put into the finished images.

There is something raw and honest in a first drawing that conveys whatever is being represented in a much purer form and it is extremely hard to re-capture and successive illustrations… unless you’re looking for clean vector illustrations.

Sometimes I think it’s a good practice to unlearn some of the things you have been taught and rely on your own intuition.

Although developing the confidence to trust your instincts and ignore your teacher is a skill you don’t tend to pick up in university.