Enough About Me. Let’s Talk About You. Talking To Me.

By Mark Kaufman

Ladies and gentleman, I present illustrator, proprieter of Escape From Illustration Island, entrepreneur, and a truly patient man, Thomas James.

I had a rambling, shambling interview with the very gracious Thomas James from Escape From Illustration Island yesterday. Thomas was very patient in allowing me to blahblahblah all over the map, talking about illustration, design, art school, working hard/hardly working, business, and this very blog. I’ll post a link to the Podcast interview when it is up at the Escape From Illustration Island web site. If you haven’t been there yet do check the site out, it is one of the most valuable resources for illustrators, designers and art directors around, lots of great content, business tips, inspiration, tutorials, advice and yes, a growing library of interviews with illustrators, art reps, and art directors, all of which are more interesting than me.

The Drawmark blog came up at the tail end of the interview and I started yakking away like an hopped up schoolgirl, because frankly I have been thinking about refocusing what goes on here in just the last week or so. This originally started out to as an outlet to showcase my work, yes, but more importantly to feature illustrators and designers I admire, new/old work that I think my small but dedicated audience should see, and the bitter, sad commentary I specialize in. It has sadly drifted away from that original intent and the focus of late has been on me, me, me. So with that in mind and as a big thank you to Thomas, today is the first day in the rest of my blog.

OK. In order to ween myself off talking about myself I have to talk about someone who took the time to talk to me…it’s a start.