Edited excerpts
He got an idea when he forgot his sketchbook
I used to go to a coffee shop and just draw in my sketchbook. One day I forgot my sketchbook. I left it at the office and I couldn’t be bothered going back to get it, and I didn’t want to not draw.
I had some business cards on me and I just started drawing on them. It sounded rather fun. So I drew a couple dozen of them, thinking I would draw a couple dozen of them and try something new, but you know that was 12 years ago and I’ve been doing it ever since.
It wasn’t about making money
I felt like if I started doing it for money — at the time anyway — it wouldn’t be as much fun, and it would kind of dilute my day job. I was kind of interested in my day job at the time. It was just a hobby. I still try to keep it like a hobby, although now, with the book deal, and the prints I’m doing, the hobby moments are fewer than they used to be, but that’s OK.
He lived by the “Sex and Cash Theory”
The creative person has two kinds of jobs. The first is the fun, sexy kind, and the second one is paying the bills.
Sometimes the task at hand covers both bases, but not often. And there’s always going to be a tense duality between the need to make a living and the need to maintain one’s creative sovereignty. Now that’s easier to understand when you’re young, and you’re just starting out, and you’re waiting tables even though you want to be a famous writer or whatever, and you have to wait tables. The sexy bit is being the novelist and the cash bit is being the waitress or waiter, we all understand that.
When you get a bit older and a bit more successful and you make it, that tension doesn’t go away. Just because you’re successful, there is stuff you have to do for money, and there is stuff you do because it’s fun. In the book I said that a good example is John Travolta. One year he’ll be in a movie like Pulp Fiction, just to get his street cred back as an actor, and then next year he’ll decide he wants to buy a new airplane so he’ll appear as this character in a very forgettable big budget spy thriller.
It took “talent, stamina and discipline”
Robert Hughes, the great art critic who I quoted in the book, always said, “talent, stamina and discipline” that’s the way you develop as an artist.
The little bursts of creativity propel you a little bit forward — but being a successful artist is day in day out, day in day out, day in day out. You have these occasional breakthroughs, but really its about turning up everyday and just doing it, day in day out.
How many successful people do you know? They all turned up everyday. They made the phone calls, day in day out. And next thing you know, they’re rich and famous, or rich anyway. And it wasn’t an overnight success. It was turning up everyday and putting on a shirt and polishing their shoes and turning up even when it was raining, even when it was boring, even when they were tired, even when nobody was buying, even when nobody was giving them money, and they still turned up everyday. That’s talent discipline and stamina.
Drawing on business cards helped him work in the moment
I admire proper painters, but that isn’t what I was doing. It was almost like a kind of photography for me. That’s what I wanted, something very spontaneous.
You know what, here is a drawing I did just yesterday. [He held one up in the video.] Is it good? I don’t know. Is it bad? I don’t know. But you know what, if it’s bad, it doesn’t matter. It took me two minutes to draw. If it’s good, that’s cool. I’ll take good care of it.
You never notice one of your good drawings right away. They kind of have a life of their own. After you finish them, go back to them and go “Wow, that’s pretty good” or “Oh dear, that kinda sucks.” I used to say by keeping everything small I’d avoid making big mistakes.
A bad economy helped him discover the power of new media
I had a couple of years, maybe two to three years, where I was not making any money and not doing anything very interesting. But then that’s the bad news. The good news is I started reading blogs like BoingBoing and Jeff Jarvis and Gawker. I remember when Gawker was just starting out. It was great, really interesting.
This new media, this 2.0 media, was just starting to reach adolescence and it was a really interesting time. So, I had to write brochure copy in the daytime, which kind of sucked, but at night I’d be like “wow, this whole new world is emerging.” I wanted to be a part of it, so I started putting some of my thoughts and my cartoons online.
If you stick around long enough, you’re always going to have a few fallow years. But I did some of my best work during the fallow years, so it paid off.
His new media reputation led Stormhoek to hire him
Stormhoek is a bottle of South African wine. It’s a small wine brand out of South Africa.
Jason Korman, Stormhoek’s Head of Marketing, was reading Seth Godin’s blog, and then one day Seth Godin wrote a blog post about me and so he clicked on me and found my work.
He used what he learned about new media to market Stormhoek
I start writing on my blog about a new client called Stormhoek and I noticed that it was kind of like talking to a vacuum. People didn’t know what I was talking about because they couldn’t experience it. So we decided to just send a bottle to any blogger (this is in the UK in England) who wanted one. It wasn’t so they could really advertise it and pimp it. You know buzz. It was so they knew what I was about because they actually tried it, when I talked a about it, I didn’t feel like an idiot.
How many people in the wine trade knew what a blog was five years ago? Three people? So they’d write about us and we got a lot of trade press. So when our salesmen would go to supermarkets and introduce themselves as being from Stormhoek they’d go, “Oh yeah I read about you. You guys seem kind of cool, why don’t you come on in.”
As opposed to the people who buy wine for the supermarkets, the big clients, the big customers. They hear the same crap every day: “Hello, my name’s Jose, I’m from Argentina. Please buy my wine: good price, good quality.” That is what they hear every day.
Today, his “Sex and Cash” are merging
Andrew’s Note: I couldn’t find the perfect quote to illustrate how they’re merging, so instead, I’ll point you to 2 links: If you go to Stormhoek’s site, you can see how much art he’s bringing to his work as CEO of Stormhoek USA. And if look at the gapingvoid gallery, you can get a sense of the revenue behind it.
Full program includes
– How you can pursue your passion and earn money.
– How new media marketing techniques (that you can use) helped Hugh grow Stormhoek’s revenues 5 fold.
– Andrew’s failed attempt to find out how much money Hugh makes with his art.
