INTERVIEW WITH JAKE PARKER

"The hardest part of creation? Creating something from nothing."

I talked about creativity with Jake Parker, bestselling illustrator, educator and entrepreneur. Here's what he had to say.

Greg Cohen: So we'll start out with questions about you and just general questions about you personally. So, in your own words, what do you create?

Jake Parker: I kind of divide my time between a few different pursuits, and one of them is comics. I've made a few graphic novels over the years, currently working on a couple of graphic novels. 

The other pursuit is svslearn.com, which is an educational platform teaching people how to do art, comics, things like that, illustration, children's books. And part of that is also running a podcast called Three Point Perspective, which is a weekly podcast where we teach people, we talk about illustration, and our tagline is how to do it, how to make a living at it, and how to make an impact in the world with your art. And so it really is a reflection of my career in art. 

So I do those and then I'll take on freelance jobs here and there for clients. Currently on a project for a startup designing some stuff for them and then an established company. You may have heard of Disney, doing some illustrations for them.

You're not kidding.

So what I did over the years is I had to develop my own planner system where I just kind of figure out how to manage all these different projects and put them into a way that my feeble brain can keep track of everything without exploding. 

Wow. So what are you working on recently that you're super excited about?

So I launched a Kickstarter about six months ago as a book all about robots. And it's this new format of book that I've been working on. I did a spaceships book last year, and this year I did a robots one. And what they are is they're part art book, part comic book, and part visual dictionary, like the ones you would see for the Star Wars universe, where you can look at the characters and what's in their backpacks and utility belts, and it breaks that out and there's some cross sections and stuff like that. So that's the project I've been working on. 

And then, because I'm such an advocate and I love doing self-published projects like that, I teamed up with a couple of other illustrators to make a course where we teach people our process for self-publishing through the lens of an artist illustrator type of creator and how you take drawings that you've done or an idea that you're kind of thinking there could be more than just pages in a sketchbook. And how do you develop that to where it's a finished product that someone's holding in their hands and flipping through and reading it.

Oh, that's cool.

Yeah.

So what would you say is your signature or what distinguishes your work from everybody else's?

My style would be like a mix of Calvin Hobbes meets, like, French ligne claire design, which is like Mobius or Tintin style. So if you mix those together, you throw in a little Toriyama, Akira Toriyama, who did like Dragon Ball and Sandland. You mix in cute with technical and edgy, and that would be my signature style. I draw a lot of robots, a lot of sci-fi type of things. That's where I'd put me.

And when do your most creative work, and why do you think that is?

I did a time audit several years ago where I recorded, and this is, it became a part of my process daily. And what that is every time I would work on something, I would write down how long it took and when I did it. Even if I took a break and surfed Twitter for 30 minutes or watched YouTube videos for a half an hour, I'd write that down, too. And if I took a lunch break that was 15 minutes or an hour, I'd write that down. 

And I did this for two or three weeks, and I went back and looked at when I was most productive and when I was most distracted, and I found that I was way more productive in the mornings and way more distracted in the evenings. And I was typically this guy who would try to work late, and I would realize, like, oh, late night, the kids are in bed, no one's calling me, no one's texting me. This is a perfect productivity time, and it used to be pretty productive. But as I was getting older, I was finding that I was just tapped out after about 08:00 at night. And so what used to be really productive hours were becoming very high distraction hours. And what I also found was early in the morning, I was getting the same kind of distraction less time to myself, but I was much better able to focus. 

And then reading some research on how creativity works and how brains work, I came to realize that your brain actually just gets filled up with thinking chemicals, to put it in the simplest way. Thinking chemicals all day long, and by the time you get… And also there's a book called Atomic Habits where it talks about how it's more towards the end of the day, when people are more likely to indulge in things that are bad for them, where they have less control over what they do. And I was finding that, okay, at the end of the day, I'm more likely to veg out, eat snacks, watch YouTube videos. So I shifted my whole schedule to go to bed early and wake up early so that I could be more productive in the hours that I was ready to rock and roll. And in the evenings, I would feel way less guilty just saying like, “Oh, this is my time to watch a YouTube video or to read comics” or whatever. And then I could do that and go to sleep and try to get a good night's rest and then feel refreshed in the morning. 

Going back to how your brain thinking chemicals work at night, sleeping is essentially your brain flushing all those chemicals out, so in the morning you're fresh and ready to go. Because ideally, if you've gotten a good night's sleep, it's essentially like scrubbed your brain clean and now you can think straight again.

That's cool. So how much of your day are you actively engaged in your creative work?

One third. So about a third of the day is either doing creative, I would say creative administrative, and if we're going strictly creative, probably four to 5 hours, and then there's 3 hours of administrative stuff that goes along with that, just organizing and getting back to people and doing stuff like this, meetings and phone calls and stuff like that. And then another third of the day is family time, exercise time, just getting stuff done in life, relaxing time, and then ideally, another third is sleeping.

That sounds perfect.

Yeah.

Moving on to questions about your process and specifically about getting started. So when you're creating something from scratch, how do you start?

This kind of gets into some of my understanding of how creativity works. There's this phase where you're just collecting ideas and you're collecting thoughts, and that's usually where it starts for me. The collection phase, where I'm going through and I'm reading stuff that I'm really interested in, looking at what other people are creating in the same field, I guess, or the same genre, and seeing what's really appealing to me and having experiences where I'm going out and going on a hike or going on vacation or something like that. I'm doing all these things, and I'm just collecting little bits of experiences and information and stuff like that. 

Then I have this connecting phase where I start connecting all these little pieces. Right? And so that phase is more like, that's where it's working in the sketchbook or working in a notebook or something like that, and it's thinking, “What if I put this with this? What would that be?” You never know where any of these ideas are going to go. And so then there's a curation phase where you have to figure out which one of these has the most legs. And a part of that connecting phase is also just kind of throwing stuff, showing to friends, posting online, just seeing what the reaction is, and you kind of get a feel for where the overlap is, what I'm interested in and what other people are interested in. And that's when you can kind of curate and realize, okay, this is an idea that needs a little bit more attention, a little bit more love.

And then you move into your creation phase, and that's where you start taking it to the next level. What's the story behind it? How does this become something more tangible, more real? What are the production steps to make it happen?

Okay. Do you begin with the end in mind, or do you kind of let it evolve organically?

I do get a lot of mileage out of this idea of writing. The headline in my mind of “Artist creates robots book, Kickstarts it, and it makes $100,000.” If that's the headline, how do I make that headline come into actual reality? Right? I'm very motivated by having something finished. Do I know exactly what it's going to be or how that process is going to happen? Not exactly. 

But typically what I do is I come up with an idea. I have pretty good. Maybe it's like, 30, 40% there of what I think it's going to be. And then if it is a book, I'll design the cover of it. And that usually gets me excited. Like, doing that cover first gets me excited about, okay, now I got to make the interior match what this cover is. When I'm creating a course, I like to think about what are the outcomes for the student? What are they going to have in their hands when they're finished? Or what are they going to be able to know when they're done? And then try to build something that's going to match that. 

When I'm making a YouTube video, it's a lot of times, what's this core idea that I want to get across? Or even so much lately, it's like, what is a really good title and a really good thumbnail that seems engaging that matches what I'm thinking about, and then designing a video to really support that core idea that's encapsulated in a title and a thumbnail. 

So beginning with the end in mind...yeah, that happens a lot.

How do you set up your environment or conditions to create? Chefs call it mise en place or fertile soil or getting in the mood. How do you set up your environment?

So I have a long desk here, and one side is for traditional, non-digital work, and the other side is for digital work. So just having my space squared away and ready to go with tools, easily accessible, everything in their place, that's really good. And usually the night before, I'll make sure. It's like, sometimes I'm good at this, sometimes I'm not. 

But when I'm good at it, I'll make sure everything's tidy and ready to go first thing in the morning, so that when I come in here, I sit down, and I usually have, like, 30 minutes of reading and studying, where I'll read and study and have this moment of self-reflection. And then I get into the work, and I go to my planner, look at what needs to be done today, what's on my to do list. 

Every day, I set what I call an MIT. It's the most important task, and that's the thing that needs to get done either before anything else or by the end of the day. Right? And I have a friend of mine, and every morning, we text each other what our MITs are. And then at the end of the day, we tell each other whether we accomplished them or whether we got sidetracked and it was a fail, MIT fail. And so that helps me stay on target and stay on track of things. So that's really like my MIT. Having the space ready, priming myself for creation by getting into that sort of mode, by doing the research and the study and the centering are what really get me going.

That's cool, having an accountability partner. Moving on to questions about evolving your work, what is your process for nurturing or coaxing or interrogating or cultivating your ideas into a finished product?

I try to get feedback from peers and from fans, and if they're responding well to something I'm enjoying doing, then I know I'm going in the right direction and I kind of work accordingly. So if I'm not getting response and I'm not enjoying it, then I'm like, I don't go down that path anymore. 

But it gets a little tricky. If it's something they're enjoying but I'm not enjoying it, then usually, typically, I'll do it for a little bit, but it won't be sustainable. And if it's something I'm enjoying and they're not enjoying, that also is not super sustainable as well. And so I usually try to find it where I'm enjoying it, feels like it's pushing me a little bit farther, and also my peers and people who like my work are also enjoying it. That's like the recipe for me finishing a thing.

You mentioned it earlier that you have a 30-minute self-reflection/research phase at the beginning of your work. Are there any other building blocks or algorithms or legos of your creative process?

So, the research phase is usually creating a couple of folders where I just fill them with sort of mood board stuff. I like the vibe of this, I like the colors of this, I like the design of that, and I put it in there. I'll also make a Google Doc where I just write down links or typed in links or ideas or anything, where I'm just capturing sort of free form thoughts. Sometimes I'll do it in a notebook, write it down in a notebook. That's somewhat what's happening in that regard, but more so that 10 minute or that 30 minutes is a lot of times something totally unrelated to what I'm actually creating that day. 

So it'll be like I bounce back and forth every morning between some sort of spiritual study and some sort of stoic study. And I really feel like those two things get me grounded for the day so that my ego is in check. And I know that I'm creating more balance for others, but also for my needs as well, but not for, I would say, like, pride or for likes or for notoriety, but to be very honest in my creation. And so doing that kind of study and a little bit of journal writing as well will give me this baseline ego check so that I can go forward and create in a way that's humble and for the right reasons.

Awesome. What percentage of your creative time is spent prototyping or experimenting?

That's not a daily thing. That's like a seasonal thing. And so there'll be several weeks where I am prototyping and I'm exploring while I might be in the end stages of another project or the middle stages of another project. So there'll be stretches, months, where I don't even open my sketchbook, because I'm executing on something that I've already developed. And then there'll be stretches where I'm partially finishing up something and spending a couple of hours every day in a sketchbook and just figuring things out. And so, that's more based on the needs of a project than any sort of daily routine type of thing.

Similarly, how much of your creative process is routine or habit, and how much of it is spontaneous or improvised?

Yeah, it's a good question. I'd say it's like 75% routine. I made a video last week for YouTube, and I was like, “I'll post it on Tuesday.” And today I was looking at it again, and I realized I needed to redo the intro because the intro was kind of, like, boring. And so that was not on my schedule, wasn't planning on doing that. And then in the middle of that, as I was recording the intro, I was like, “Wait, I'm doing this drawing here. What if I made a digital download for people to download the pencil drawing and they could ink over top of it?” Because in the video, I'm inking over it. And that was something I hadn't really thought to do before. 

And so that was, like, super spontaneous, and I just was like, “Let's do it. Let's make a little PDF download. Let's put it up in my shop. Let's make a little code so people can get it for free from YouTube.” That was like an hour and a half, two hour sideline in my day, from what I was planning on doing. And so that happens every once in a while. Usually what happens is, I've got stuff to do. I've got a to-do list, I've got an MIT I've got to accomplish. But then every once in a while, there'll be like this, “Oh, I should do that.” And sometimes I'll follow that, and other times I'll say, “Okay, there's a time for me to do that. I'll get to it after this.”

How do you think of one idea being more promising than another?

Well, like I said, it's this mix between, am I super interested in it? Is it something that I can't stop thinking about? That's a good sign. Like, if it keeps coming up, especially if I think about it a lot for a month, and then it goes away, and then it comes back up again, like six months later and I think about it again, I'm like, “Oh, it's back. Maybe I should really pursue that.” Or that could be. That's more of a yearly timeline scale. It could be even in a daily or a weekly scale, something I keep thinking about. And then there's usually this, like, let's share it with my group of people that I bounce things off of, see what they think. And again, if they align, if they think that, “Oh, that's kind of cool. Yeah, you should do that.” And it's something I keep thinking about, then I know I should pursue it. 

Somebody, I forget who, said this. I believe I heard it from Cal Newport, but he said that money is, like, a neutral indicator of if something is worth pursuing, if something's good or not. The reason is you can create something and share it for free. And it might get 100 likes, but you still don't know if it's something super viable. 

And this is in the context of not just creating for the sake of creating, but creating for the sake of, like, this is a career, and you need to support yourself on your creations, right? So there is value in things that don't necessarily make money because people might enjoy them and they might like them. Not to go on too far of a tangent, entire businesses, like social media itself, is based off of people liking things, on things interesting and valuable enough to grab people's attention. 

And attention, they say, is more valuable than oil. Now, it's a bigger industry than oil is mining people's attention. These social media companies have figured out a way to monetize that. Like, we have all these eyeballs. And this is something that started back when newspapers started putting advertisements in their newspapers because they knew we have attention. Let's charge for this attention from people who want that attention. So in that sense, you could create something that gets attention. And if attention is something valuable to you, then it has value. But in the context of, “I need to pay rent”, right? Then it has to make you some money. 

When I create something, I might make a very low price, smaller version of it. So, like, say, if someday I want it to be a $25 book that you could buy in my shop, well, let's see if people will buy a $5 or $3 PDF of it. And if someone is like, “Oh, this is really cool. Here's my money for it”, then okay, judging on how many people have done that, you can kind of gauge whether this is going to be successful or not. And I did that recently, too. 

This last year. I've been using this planner that I've designed for six or seven years now. And every year I modify it and evolves a little bit. And I think now it's finally in this really good spot where it's just the right amount of organization and just the right amount of free form. Use it how you want. Whereas in times past, it's been very organized, very rigid and strict, and here's how you fill it out. And other times passed, it has been very loose and you could use it in lots of different ways. But I think I found that balance. And every time I post online, “I made the new planner”, I always get people like, “Oh, are you going to print that out for, are you  going to make that available for us? We want to try that out. We want to try that out.” 

And so I've always resisted a little bit because I didn't know if that was one person, if people really would put their money where their mouth was. And so this last year, I made a $5 PDF version of it that people could download if they wanted it. And over 200 people paid for it. Right? And so that kind of exceeded my expectations of who would be interested in this planner I designed. And so now I know maybe I could pursue this year making something a little bit more substantial, a printed version or something like that for people, not just one they could download.

Sounds interesting. I'd buy it.

Okay.

At what point in your creative process do you challenge your creative choices?

So let's see. It's usually at the beginning, when it's still half baked. That's when I start challenging it. I always do show my kids a version of it as I'm making it, and they're really honest on their feedback. They never tell me it's good. They're always like, “Oh, you should fix it. You should do this, you should do that.” Very rarely have they said, “Wow, dad, good job.” And when they did say that, I was the most excited ever been. 

I am not the greatest at drawing faces. That's maybe the thing I struggle with the most. And I designed this character, and I was trying so hard to give it the best face ever as this woman character. And usually I make them look a little too goofy or a little too wonky. And this one, I was like, “No, we're going to really dial it in because my kids are always giving me crap about faces”, right? And so I did it, and I was like, hey, guys, check out this comic page. And every single one were like, “You actually did a good face.” So that way I knew I was in the right spot, so I challenged myself. But part of it is also showing people who are very honest, brutally honest. And that's another way to challenge my work.

Honing your craft is a nonlinear process. For example, sometimes you make leaps and bounds. To what events or practices would you attribute your greatest gains and skill?

Every time I've leveled up was when I had access to another artist's working methods. Either they showed it to me directly or it was indirect. And I remember one time, this is 25 years ago, this is my biggest level up, I think. I was working for this company. It was a Korean company, video game company, and it was like my first concept art job. 

And they had this incredible illustrator based in Korea, and we had this FTP sharing system, and he would just always upload his PSDs of concept art raw. Right? And I would go through those PSDs and just layer by layer, what do you do here? What do you do here? What is this layer doing? And I took that information and applied it to the work I was already making. And you could see, like, night and day the stuff I was making before I worked for this company and after I worked for this company. It was like an incredible level up. 

And then anytime after that, for twelve years, I worked in the animation industry. And the second best thing, besides a steady paycheck, was maybe even better than that. Now that think about it, because it's served me longer, is learning from other artists in the art department about how they worked and watching them and seeing what they did. And so that has been absolutely huge, is just straight up seeing someone, how they do it, and me trying to replicate that in my own work.

Okay, moving on to questions about finishing. How do you know when you're done with something?

Well, my whole thing is finished, not perfect. So you know you're done usually when it's time. Okay, so this is a bigger thing. If your projects are open ended, right? So I look at my health, trying to learn how to run better and get a better PR in a race or whatever, right? Or just staying healthy. That's a project. There's no endpoint on it. And oftentimes as creators, we have these versions, creative versions, that are like health. 

Like, I'm going to do an art challenge. I'm going to make a graphic novel someday. I'm going to world build and develop this thing, and they become this project. But it really isn't something finishable until you give it a deadline, until you could say, like, this is the finite thing that it needs to be at this point in time. And I think that's like, one of the biggest problems I've had in the past. 

But I see a lot of amateur and even professionals where they have this idea, this thing that they're working on, but they don't clearly define its finished state, what it should be finished and when it should be finished. And so it can always be like, moving along in some stage of not finished because they haven't set that deadline. So the reason, you know something's finished is because it was due. You had a due date. And you read about interviews with Steven Spielberg or even James Cameron or big name creators who work on very complex projects, and every one of them will say, “My film was never finished. It was just released.” And there's things that they go back, and if I had more time, I would have fixed that. If I did this, if we had a little bit more time here, if I had a little bit better resources, I could have fixed that, right? 

But there's no end to that, really. You could keep on fixing. You get better as an artist. Your skills improve. If it's a graphic novel, page 99 absolutely is going to look better than page two because you've gotten better through drawing it. And so then there's this temptation to go back and redraw pages two through ten because you know you're a better artist now. So then you're at page ten and you've redrawn them, and you realize now you're better than you were at page 99. So now you got to redraw 99 and the cycle can repeat itself, right? And that's how these things can really become something that's never finished. 

But if you have a deadline and if it's like, well, this thing is due the end of May, then it's going to have some bad pages at the beginning, but it will be finished, and it'll be put out there, and you want to have something finished. You want to have something finished that's not perfect because it shows you what you were able to accomplish at that point in your life, and you can see the progression as you move forward. And that's actually one of the most endearing things about following an artist for a long time. 

Like, one of my favorite artists is Mike Mignola. And you look at his comic style that he did now versus what he did in the 90s, and I love what he did in the 90s, but he really has grown and evolved, and it's been really satisfying to see him develop his style. Every comic that comes out… And he wouldn't have been able to develop his style like that had he not been putting out comics regularly.

For you, what makes a creative project successful?

If I enjoyed working on it, if I leveled up on it. So that's sort of like the interior success, and I think the exterior success is like, did people like it? Was it financially success? Did it meet my financial goals? So it's like a mix between those four things. Did I enjoy it? Did I level up? Did people like it? And did it make money? If it is a project made to make money, right?

Moving on to questions about outside sources of inspiration and collaboration. I've heard you call it your creative bank account. But where do you find inspiration?

Like me personally, where do I find inspiration? Or where is inspiration found?

Well, I mean for you.

Know, in my thing, there's two avenues for inspiration or for collecting, what I like to call it collecting dots, dots that you eventually connect. And I took that from a Steve Jobs quote, that all creativity is connecting. So the way I collect dots, there's indirect experiences. All dots are experiences, right? So there's indirect experiences and direct experiences. 

And so indirect experiences, I'm getting a lot of mileage out of Flickr, which is free. I would say it's like a stage two social media web platform, right? It doesn't have algorithms, but what it does have is a bunch of people on there liking and favoriting things. And so the way I use it is I find a cool image that someone has liked. I see the five other people who have liked that image, and I go look at what they liked, and now I'm seeing essentially the Internet through the eyes of another person. And the whole Internet today, as it stands, is designed to see the Internet through the eyes of yourself. That's what the algorithm wants. It's designed to do. Oh, you like soccer balls or you like soccer, right? Okay. So now we're going to show you 20 different things about soccer, and, oh, you like Formula One. Now we're showing you a mix between Formula One and soccer. And then it's just you keep going down these narrow, narrow avenues of what you're interested in. 

And creativity, I think, happens on the edge of what you're interested in and what you find uninteresting. Right? And that's where you're always, like, treading new ground. And I worry that with the algorithm that we have today, it's always going to show you what's safe and comfortable for you. And so that's why I go to Flickr, because I'm always being exposed to stuff that I wouldn't have searched out myself. I don't know how that would apply. I don't know where you would go, what would be like the musical version of Flickr or the movie version of Flickr. But the point is, try to find stuff that you wouldn't think you'd be interested in, because there you'll find things that collide with your interests and you're going to develop something new and interesting. So that's indirect experiences. 

Direct experiences are, I get a lot of inspiration out of experiences with my family and the people around me. I have this philosophy that you should have a friend, and a friend could be a relative, it could be a neighbor, it could be someone that you interact with a couple of times a month. Right? Or someone that's regular and active not once a year, but frequently. 

But you should have a friend in every sort of age category. So you should have friends that are ages one to ten, right? And that could be a nephew or a niece or something like that. You should have a friend ages ten to 20, and then you should have 20 year old friends. And you should have 30 year old friends and 40 and 50 and 60 and all the way up to 100. There's not very many people after 100. But what's cool is every time you talk to a five year old, you're going to start seeing the world through the five year old's eyes. Every time you talk to 100 year old, you're going to see the world through 100 year old's eyes. And every time you do that, it just gives you a new way to see the world. And I worry that a lot of times, if you're 40, you just hang out with 40 year olds, and if you're 20, you're just hanging out with 20 year olds, and all you're going to be exposed to is point of views of people in that same age. Right? So I get a lot of mileage out of making relationships with people outside of my age group. 

And then anytime I travel, anytime I leave where I'm living, and even when I'm going outside of my neighborhood, I try to pay attention to what's the style of architecture? What are the people wearing? What are the modes of transportation? What plants are around me? All that kind of stuff. And that's all feeding into my creative bank account.

OK. When and where do your lightning bolt ideas occur?

They occur when I'm doing something that is not creative, essentially. So I try to bake into my day things like repetitive tasks that keep my hands busy so that my brain can just go. So it's showering, it's making the bed, it's doing the dishes, it's cleaning up the yard, yard work. It's all those sort of… It's driving. Turn off the radio. Turn off the music. 

And you just let your mind kind of start taking all these different experiences, the indirect and the direct ones, and banging them into each other and seeing what sticks. But you can't do that if your head is being fed something, you have to starve it for a little bit in order for it to have those lightning bolts.

When you collaborate with others, how does that work? Or what's that like?

I really like people being able to do the thing they do best. So I have a colorist for the comics that I do. I can color just fine. But these colorists, specifically the one I've been working with on the robots book and the spaceships book, his name is Anderson Carmen. He just brings something to it that I wouldn't have thought to bring the colors that he brings. Every once in a while, I'll give him direction, like, “Oh, this character is going to be these colors”, but then he'll do stuff that I didn't expect. 

So my main thing with collaboration, SVS is the most collaborative thing I've ever done, because it's three different illustrators. And then we have a team built around that do all kinds of things, marketing and emails and social media posts and video editing and all that stuff. And the best thing about collaborating is letting people bring their experiences into the creation and making something that you would never have thought to have done.

Okay. Moving on to questions about challenges or obstacles and overcoming them for you. What is the hardest part of creation?

The hardest part of creation? Creating something from nothing.

And?

And I know we come into it, you have your inspiration, and what's kind of inspiring you and things you want to put together that you didn't think to before. But at some point, if you're writing a comic book, you have to figure out what that character wants, what's stopping them from doing it, how they're going to accomplish it, each stage. So you figure out the story, and then you figure out how to turn that story into images. Each step of the way, it's just fraught with the nothingness of the blank page, right? And it's really hard to go from the zero to the one. 

Once you have something down, it's super easy to fix. And so I have to keep reminding myself, it doesn't have to be good. It just has to exist. And then you can fix something that exists. You can't do anything with something that doesn't exist. And so that's really where I always get hung up, is staring at the blank page, trying to figure out what to put down. Because part of me is like, “Well, I don't want it to be bad. I don't want to have to go in and fix it”, even though everything's going to get fixed. But once things start getting laid down, then you can work off of that. 

A friend of mine was upset. He's a screenwriter, and he was just telling me “This whole day, I have nothing to show for it. I just sat there at the computer, and I couldn't write anything, nothing to show for it.” And I responded to him. I was like, “Creating something from nothing is legitimately, it's magic. And writers are doing that all the time, so don't feel bad if it's hard.” Some days it's the same thing for artists, same thing for musicians. 

Making something exist that never existed before is maybe the most... It's the original magic trick. If you think about existence, our universe, the big bang, there was nothing. And then there was something. I don't know how that happened. Scientists can't figure that out. Our instruments know that it did happen, but we don't know how or why or anything. And when you're taking part in the creative process, you're essentially doing that same thing. You're putting something into the world that never was there before, if it's truly creative.

What stops your creative flow faster than anything?

Maybe self-doubt. For me, I've got to believe in myself. Sounds kind of dumb or trite or whatever, but as soon as I'm doubting it, that's the death of it. And I have to take a break and pump myself up again and get back to it.

You have an amazing YouTube video about battling creative block, but I want to ask a very closely related question. How do you make progress when you feel like you're at a dead end?

I think, well, I think there are legitimate dead ends. And I'm trying to think what I do usually when I hit one. That's why I have a lot of projects going on. At the same time. If I hit a dead end one, I'll go work on another one. Until there’s a solution to that, how to get out of that dead end presents itself. So that way, I'm still being productive. I'm still moving forward on something. And oftentimes working on something else can give me a little bit of an “Aha” moment, and it might even be just calling it quits for the day, going and doing something else.

How do you avoid ruts or preconceptions?

Give me an example of a preconception.

Sometimes you'll do the same thing over and over again, or you'll rehash your own work, so to speak. And how do you get into new avenues as opposed to retreading the old avenues?

When that happens, it's usually like a symptom of not getting out and exposing yourself to new stuff. It's a creative bank account problem, I think, is what's going on there. And so usually you have to mix it up. For me, it's like, “Okay, let's try a different medium. Let's try a different genre. Let's try a different subject matter. Let's try different tools.” And when you switch it up like that, you have to draw from different resources to create the thing. Right? So I think that's maybe the best way to do it, is to, number one, recognize it. Number one, recognize that you're in a rut. 

Number two, exposing yourself to different experiences, whether they're indirect or direct. And then I think switching up your environment is another good thing to get you out of there. Switch up the environment. Sometimes I'll rearrange my studio. All of a sudden, I'm like, “Oh, everything's different. I feel like I'm somewhere else”, or I'll leave and go create somewhere else. I'll work at the dining room table or go to the library and work. I think that helps, too.

Can you think of a time that a constraint was beneficial to your creativity?

That's what I said in the email, right? It's part of the equation. It's constraints. And I forget how many different constraints there are, but it's like, time is a constraint. Tools are a constraint. Medium is a constraint. Genre is a constraint. You take away constraints, and then the freedom can kill a project. It's like what Syndrome said, “If everybody's super, nobody's super.” 

If your project can be anything, it's nothing. Constraints are part of the flint and steel of the spark of creativity. You got to have a constraint. You got to have accountability. And then the third part of the component of that equation is creativity. It's constraints, its ability, and its accountability. Right?

What's a telltale sign that it's time to abandon an idea?

If it's not doing those four things. If you're not excited about it, it's not pushing, you're not leveling up, people aren't interested in it, or it's wasting your… It's not making money or it's wasting time. Those are the reasons to stop.

And what kind or type of work would you like to do that you haven't done yet?

I kind of think it'd be cool to make a documentary film just to find a subject that I’m really interested in that hasn't been explored and go interview people about it and go to the source. See what happened or how it came to be. I know documentary films are like, that's something you do when you don't have a family to support, probably. I don't know how many documentary films actually make their money back. So that might be a post-retirement project. We'll see.

You have multiple different creative skills and interests. What do you think that different creative fields have in common? Is there anything universal to most or all of them?

I think, like I was saying, with that equation, it's accountability, it's like skill, right? And it's constraints. If you're making an album, the best albums all sort of have that alchemy. So think about Miles Davis Sketches of Spain...he had the skill. He was on the line to make an album, and then it was jazz, right? So he couldn't do anything outside of what jazz was. Right? So it was like a genre constraint. He probably had a deadline. 

And you take away any of those three things, and now all of a sudden you don't have one of the greatest albums ever made. You look at the graphic novel of Hellboy by Mike Mignola, and he had four issues to tell a story. He had the constraints of his style, the inking style, but he had a great style, right? So he had the skill to do it, and then he also had a deadline. He committed to a publisher to have a book done by a certain time. And if one of those things is taken away, you don't have Hellboy. 

It's the same for movies. It's the same for play productions. The same for video games. Take away those three things and you don't get them. You get like an inferior version of it, or you don't get anything at all.

What skill or technique from a different field would you like to bring into your own work?

That is going to change at different stages of my career. And early on it would have been, I wish I was a better storyteller, and later on it'd be, I wish I was better at drawing people or whatever. But I think for me right now, ultimately, I wish I was better at selling myself and selling my work, like marketing it, because we live in an age where you have the tools and the access. If you're really good at selling your stuff, there's nothing stopping you from connecting with the widest audience possible, right? 

And there used to be all these gatekeepers keeping you from your audience or potential audience prior to the Internet days. And so essentially, creators could just not have to worry about marketing and just leave it to the publishers. The people putting this stuff out, they would hire their marketing teams, and that was the thing. And now it's sort of on our backs that we have to market ourselves as well. Unless you want to go down that, even if you go down a traditional publishing route, you still have to be able to sell yourself to get the deal, to get people excited at the publisher about what you're doing. And then once the book's published, it's not all on the publisher's shoulders. 

You still have responsibility as a creator to market it as well. And so I think that's probably just as important as creating. In fact, I think of it as like a bicycle pedal. Have you ever tried to pedal a bike with one foot? How'd that go?

Not so well.

Not so well. You can get one good push, then you have to hook your toes under the pedal and pull it up, and then you're not going to get very far with one pedal. So there's two pedals and I look at in that analogy or metaphor or whatever. One pedal is the act of creating and of making it, and the other pedal is the act of marketing it. And those two go hand in hand. If you just have marketing ability, but you don't create anything, it's very hard to pedal as well. 

But you need both. You need something to market and then a way to market it. And if you're going to take that analogy even further, of the bicycle, the wheels are where the rubber hits the road, and that's your skills. It's your skill level. And you have different skill levels or different skill abilities depending on what kind of creator you are. And there's different tires depending on what kind of terrain you want to go on. And then your steering the handlebars. That's how you know where to go. That's how you know what direction to take your work, whether you should go up a hill or down a hill or whatever. And then the frame that keeps all this together, I would say, is like your habits and your schedule. 

It's all these things that you do to make sure that everything else is able to operate together. And so then all of these things working together is what makes the bike move forward or it makes your career move forward. And so you can't really take any one of those out without the bike falling apart.

That's a very good analogy. I like that.

Thanks.

I have three miscellaneous questions remaining. Okay? Who do you think of when I say most creative person?

Most creative person. Who do I think of? Like a child. They're uninhibited by anything. If you're able to keep a child away from straight entertainment screens and they're just left to the environment around them, they're going to do some really creative, wacky stuff to keep themselves entertained. That's what I think of.

That's a good one. Is there anyone else you can think of that we should talk to for this project?

Kazu Kibuishi. He's a graphic novel artist.

Okay, that sounds good. I'll have to dig him up and get in contact with him somehow.

Yeah.

Lastly, it's difficult to choose between your children, but what is your favorite work that you've done so far in your career?

My favorite work would be my two Missile Mouse graphic novels. And because they really were the culmination of a lifelong dream. I created Missile Mouse when I was 14 years old, and I was like this big fan of Disney afternoon cartoons. Chippendale, Darkwing Duck. I was a big fan of Calvin and Hobbes and the Spaceman Spiff comics especially. And so I created this character, Missile Mouse, that was like a version of Spaceman Spiff and a version of a Rescue Rangers type of thing. 

And I drew him growing up, like, I did little comic strips for the school newspaper and stuff like that. And in 2008 or 2007, I made a 20 page Missile Mouse comic that was published in anthology, and Scholastic was made aware of that, and they really liked the character. And they offered me a book deal to do a Missile Mouse graphic novel. And I got a two book deal. And this is the most comic pages I had ever done. It was the project that pushed me the hardest. I did it while working a full time job at Blue Sky while also having a baby in the middle of it. Most of the project was done between 08:00 p.m. and 01:00 a.m. in the morning for the span of a year. Right? And I made something I was really happy with and proud of. 

And there was a time period where I was embarrassed by it because it wasn't as good as I wanted it to be or thought I could do. But then looking back at it now, 13-14 years later, I'm like, this thing really is special and unique. And I stand by that work as the work that a 33 year old or 32 year old Jake Parker was doing the best that he could. And I think 14 year old Jake absolutely would love that book. It was a book made directly for him.

That's awesome.

My child.

I want to thank you so much for taking time out of your busy schedule to talk with me. And you've been very articulate about the creative process and illuminated a lot of things for me. So I want to thank you so much for your time.

Hope that was helpful. I hope got you what you needed. I can't wait to see the finished version of all this.

Yeah, we're set to release the transcripts of the first ten interviews by this Thursday. And then I'll get to putting together the transcripts of this interview and the other couple I've done since then. And we're putting up more of our own personal content on the Distilling Creativity website as well.

Cool.

Thank you so much for everything and have a nice evening.

Yeah, you too. 

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