As
an illustrator in this day and age, releasing work onto the Internet is not out
of the ordinary, it is essential to keep a blog as part of illustrative
practice. By keeping an online blog it allows you as an illustrator to interact
with the outside world and gain work from that. In opening up your work to the
Internet, you allow it to be seen by various readers and interpreted through
them “the reign of the author has also
been that of the critic” Barthes, R (1968). In saying this Barthes implies
that once your work has been published, your work and yourself are open to
criticism. In his book The Death of An Author, Barthes explores the idea
of authorship and how it affects the world. Illustrators today can create an
online identity so Barthes idea’s surrounding authorship are still relevant “conceived of as the past of his own book”
Barthes, R (1968), meaning that unless you are anonymous people will judge you
based on previous works. Having a blog online doesn’t exclude you from this but
anyone can run a blog. There are many people on social media sites such as
instagram who will tag their works with the words “illustration” or “art”
underneath but very few of them are actually specialized in that field of
study.
Some may argue that these tags on social media are a claim for
authorship on the internet, by presenting your work so it is attached to an
account and tagged within a community “some
claims for authorship may be simply an indication of a renewed sense of
responsibility, at times they seem ploys to gain proper rights” Rock,M (1996). By
presenting your work and associating it with your name allows for potential
employer to trace it back to you however this might not always work in your
favour. If an illustrator produces a new style of work that is significantly
different to their previous works, tracing this new piece back to their blog
might off put future employers who see their previous illustrations as a risk
factor.
Barthes addresses the positives to being an anonymous author “The hand, cut off from any voice, borne by a
pure inscription, traces a field without origin” Barthes (1968), expressing that sometime anonymity is
the key to success as people are intrigued. With the introduction of the internet it is
hard to tell where illustrative works have originated from, leaving
illustrators to reduce their file sizes down or watermark their work in order
for it to remain recognizable as their own “attempts
to exercise some kind of agency where there has traditionally been none” Rock,
M (1996). This is a sad prospect of the
up and coming illustrative practice of keeping a blog, it is hard to keep your
stuff original and to keep track of what has and hasn’t been done before in the
field. If you do not check creative blogs constantly you stand the risk of
creating something similar or the same as someone else but if you do check
them, then you stand the risk of sticking to what is popular in the industry “the writer can only imitate a gesture that
is always anterior, never original” Barthes, R (1968).
