If you’ve been following me on Instagram, you’ll see I launched The Secret Treehouse with a few picture book illustrator friends last week!

The Secret Treehouse is a project we’ve been working on behind the scenes for a few months. Right now it’s part community/part blog/part art collective and we’re excited to see what this little tree will grow into. We want It to be a place to talk about art and process and tips. A place to share resources and to talk about what it’s really like to be a professional illustrator. Is it really a dream career? What’s the money really like?

There are a lot of possibilities, but one of the first resources we’re excited to share are portfolio reviews. We were all lucky to get direct insight from professionals early in our collective journey to becoming illustrators, and we agree that it was one of the most valuable things we could do.

But it comes at a cost. Courses and conferences, not to mention travel, are expensive and out of reach for a lot of aspiring illustrators. We’d like to make professional feedback more accessible.

To celebrate the launch, we plan to do a drawing for some free ones (everyone who signs up for our newsletter will automatically be entered ), but we hope to make them available in the long term.

We also plan to add new artists over time. Right now, we’re starting small, but we want to include new voices and perspectives, artists whose work and spirit excites us and hopefully you, too.

I hope you will join us as we strive to make The Secret Treehouse a wonderful place to hang out!

I have a self-professed brown thumb. Or I did. I guess that might not be true anymore as I have quite the container garden on my deck. My crops are huge right now, and my neighbors are impressed, and I think a bit surprised when I tell them this is my first year successfully growing anything more than houseplants.

It’s all thanks to Monty.

Last summer, I was holed up in my one-bedroom apartment feeling absolutely miserable. Don’t get me wrong, it was a great apartment, top floor, lots of light, right in the middle of San Francisco’s Mission District. And because we got it in 2008 and it had rent control, we were paying about half what similar apartments were going for. It didn’t matter that it had no outdoor space, because the whole city was our back yard. But then the pandemic hit. And the heat waves. And the wildfires.

That summer, we couldn’t go anywhere because of lockdown. There was no place to go. And even though we could have gone camping, we chose to heed the guidelines of no unnecessary travel. It wasn’t all bad. During nicer weather, we could bike to the park and have a distanced picnic with friends. But when ash from the wildfires lingered over the city making the air toxic, we couldn’t even open our windows, much less go outside.

So, like a lot of people, I resorted to escapism. I spent a lot of time dreaming about a home with some kind of outdoor space where I could have a garden. That meant looking at homes on Zillow and watching A LOT of gardening shows.

I suspect Monty Don is a household name in the UK, but I’d never heard of him until last summer. I learned a lot from him and his gang on Gardener’s World. I also learned a ton from a show called Grow Cook Eat, which is nicely organized by crop. Even though I had no way to apply what I was learning, it surprises me how much I soaked in. I can identify way more plants now. I even know the latin names for some of them. And the difference between espalier and fan-trained trees. And what stepover apples are!

So when my Zillow journey led us to buy a house back home near family (for less than we were paying for our SF apartment), of course I started a garden of my own. Our yard is by no means expansive, but I’m happy to start small. I put a few containers on the back deck in which I’m growing lettuce, cherry tomatoes, tomatillos, five different peppers (including two we inherited from our neighbors), and a whole bunch of herbs. It’s basically a salsa garden.

I’ve been planting, watering, pruning, and tying back plants for months and now it’s finally harvest time! It’s a nice feeling going out to water the plants in the morning and coming back in with a colander full of produce.

Next year I’m definitely adding more fruit. I want to have a few different berry bushes, plus some kind of fruit tree. My neighbors have figs, and I kind of want one, but maybe I’ll go with a plum and see if they’ll trade.

Do you have a garden? If not, what do you wish you could grow?

This post is for me, but also for all of you who tend to overthink things. Even now, not even two sentences in, and I find my mind wandering off, evaluating if this is really how I want to begin this post. But nope. I’m done with that. I’ve let it get in the way of things I want to do for far too long.

See, I want a blog. I have so many ideas swimming around in my head, and they all want out. I mean it’s completely crammed in there. Like sardines. Little swimming sardine ideas. That’s no way to run a brain. An aquarium? Sure. But not a brain.

So here I am to share my fishy little brain with you, in all its overthinking weirdness. AND, I want to be a good example, because I want your little fishes to get out, too. I know for a fact that I am not the only one who over-analyzes things into oblivion. I’m not the only one that will come up with a solid idea and then think about it so much, trying to make it just right, that eventually my inner critic will talk myself right out of it.

So I’m back. I’m here, I’m gonna share. And I want you to share, too. Give yourself permission. Don’t do it for the ‘gram. Don’t do it for ‘tok or the ‘book or the ‘ter (that’s how that goes, right?). Do it for yourself. Get your thoughts and your ideas and all your lovely, brilliant, psycho weirdness out on paper or text or what have you, and set them free!

I hereby grant myself permission to share imperfect artwork, tutorials, insights, etc. I do NOT give myself permission to chicken out. This isn’t about chicken anyway. It’s about fishes. And the fishes need our help.

You wanna know something? I still struggle with style. I’ve been illustrating professionally for over two years and I don’t feel like I’m anywhere close to figuring it out. Of course, I have pretty conflicted opinions about style in general, so it stands to reason. How are we supposed to do work that truly reflects our artistic core if we don’t have a clear vision of what that looks like?

Case in point: I was working on an illustration that was all set up for smooth sailing. I’d worked through my thumbnails in black and white and color, I had my lines tight, my perspective right, and I’d even made new Procreate brushes to get exactly the soft pencil look I was going for. But then I hit a wall. A rock wall.

The image in question features kids at the top of a steep ravine looking down, and for the life of me, I could not get the face of the cliff right. No matter what I did, it just felt off. It wasn’t bad. It just wasn’t what I wanted. I tried to tell myself it was okay…that people draw things in different ways and maybe this is just how I draw cliffs. But I wasn’t happy.

So I stepped back a bit. And I tried to draw a rock. And then I drew another one. And another.

And you know what? I realized I can draw rocks fine! Just maybe not with my soft pencil brushes.

So I made some new brushes, and I painted some new rocks.

I’m happy with the results. But it got me thinking.

Perhaps I’ve been struggling because I’ve been forcing myself to use the wrong tools—maybe I’m just not a soft pencil kind of gal. I’d gotten it in my head that that’s what I’m supposed to be. And not even for a good reason…because an art director said something about someone else’s art two years ago that made me rethink my own.

I’ve had cause to look back over my art since then and I can see how it has edged away from what truly speaks to me. I’ve been forcing myself to use tools that make it harder to do some of things I really love (like dramatic lighting!). Don’t get me wrong, I’ve learned a lot as a result. It’s all part of the journey. But I’ve lost some stuff, too. If drawing rocks has taught me anything, it’s that it’s important to step back from time to time and focus on the simple things.

So I’m gonna let go for a bit. I’m gonna stop worrying so much about the final look of a piece and start focusing on the process.

In the meantime, here’s a tutorial of how I draw rocks. I hope it shines some light on your own process!

A certain billionaire just raised the ire of the Twittersphere for his blatant refusal to credit an artist’s work. The offending tweets have since been deleted, so I can’t link them, but it was a flimsy attempt to justify laziness and only conveyed a lack of empathy for the work artists do. My own feelings aside, I thought it would be a good time to discuss your artist’s signature, or in far too many cases, the lack thereof.

First things first, as the title of this post suggests:

1) Sign your work

You simply can’t guarantee that a piece you post will always show up on your portfolio or instagram feed where it can be closely linked with your contact details. If you’re lucky, and your piece is popular, it’ll wind up on pinterest, tumblr, twitter, etc, and rest assured, you can’t trust anyone, certainly not billionaire philanthropists, to assign proper credit.

And the rationale that “any fool can find out who an artist was in seconds” doesn’t always work, even if you are a master of the reverse image search. Sometimes, things don’t turn up in the results. And that’s putting a lot of faith in the viewer to actually take the time. More often than not, they’re going to move on to the next thing in their feed. If they really like it, they may even share it…uncredited.

Which leads me to the next rule:

2) Use your full name

Whatever name you use needs to be searchable, so Chris S, J Hernandez, or VNH isn’t going to cut it. And if your full name is common, use your middle name or initial, like I do. If you prefer to use a pseudonym, that’s fine, but make sure it’s unique. With every piece you release into the wild, you should be prepared for an art director to come across it, see your signature, and easily search and find your portfolio and contact details. When I do an image search for Jennifer Potter, I get a sea of faces I don’t recognize. But when I search for Jennifer M Potter, I see my art. Try searching your own name to make sure your work is showing up.

3) Write legibly

Make sure your signature is legible. I mean really legible. Every character should be clear and impossible to confuse for another, especially if you’re one of those lucky people with an unusual name.

4) Keep it small

I see some of you with signatures that take up an eighth of your image. I applaud you for your commitment to branding, but it detracts from the art. The fact is, your signature doesn’t need to be that big. It should be just readable at 72 dpi. Keep it noticable, but unobtrusive. People know how to zoom if they want a closer look.

Now, signing your work won’t always guarantee you get the credit you deserve—there will always be unscrupulous people who crop your signature off of your art—but it’ll protect you most of the time. And it’s much easier to do a reverse image search on the cropped version if the full, signed one is already out there.

On watermarks and buried signatures

So what about using a watermark or putting your signature somewhere within the art itself, somewhere less easy to crop? The answer is that it depends. You can add a watermark or logo as long as it’s done in a tasteful, unobtrusive way. But what constitutes as unobtrusive may vary from buyer to buyer, so I’d use caution. If someone wants to steal your art, they’ll steal your art. A watermark won’t get in the way of someone who’s really determined.

As for putting your signature somewhere within the art, I see this advice a lot, and it’s not bad per se, but be cautious. Just as with a watermark, it needs to be unobtrusive. In fact, a signature within the art will generally need to be much smaller than it would at the bottom. And people are trained to look for your signature at the bottom. If it’s buried in the art but no one notices, do you actually get the credit?

On signing physical pieces

For this section, I’m talking about hand-signing pieces…when to do it and when not to. Let’s face it, unless you are extremely famous and/or dead, your autograph probably isn’t worth that much. But signatures do imply value in the art world. This doesn’t mean, “if I sign it, it’s more valuable.” Instead, it means “if it’s more valuable, I sign it.” Don’t get those two confused!

If something is unique, it’s more valuable, so sign your originals, and sign and number your limited edition prints. By limited edition, I mean a planned series that you will never replenish. This might be a series of 10 lino prints or 1000 risos, but it’s most certainly not the giclées you’ll restock when the first batch sells. You can release another signed series based on a previous series, but something–typically the colorway–has to change. Keep in mind, just as with your digital pieces, your name should be legible.

This is a good guideline to stick to, but feel free to sign something for someone you know personally or met at a signing. A signed print for Mom or a signed dedication in a book you illustrated can make a piece feel more special to the people who support your work. Just be mindful that you don’t mislead someone into thinking they’re getting something they’re not.