Illustrator Daniel Salmieri on keeping a cool head while drawing a final version

Looking through Daniel Salmieri’s portfolio of lovely, laid-back illustrations, it’s hard to believe that he struggles to “keep it loose” while drawing, yet the Brooklyn-born artist says it’s a recurring issue in his creative process: “It’s always a difficult thing for me, trying to make the finished piece as good as the sketch,” he tells It’s Nice That. “There is always an immediacy and freshness in a good sketch that is really hard to get across in a finished piece, so I have to try and trick myself into not tightening up for the final.” He says it often takes several attempts to create a version that he’s pleased with, and each time, he usually has to pretend that this draft isn’t the last, in the hope that he won't feel the pressure. He goes on: “I try to make sure not to over-draw figures and forms, so a lot of the time I use ‘badly’ drawn elements from the original sketch in the final piece, to keep some of that immediacy.”

The first book Daniel ever wrote and illustrated, which was published in 2018 under the title Bear and Wolf, produced similar problems. Recalling the experience, he says it was “very challenging”, taking him years to find a style that felt right and to eventually complete. “I tried collaging it, painting it in gouache, watercolour, and acrylics, but nothing was working,” he says. “The sketches for the book were just so much better than any of the tests I had been doing, because they were soft and sort of undefined – in a really nice way.” As is often the case, his experiments gradually brought him back to square one – to his beloved pencils that he uses to sketch with – at which point, he finally had a breakthrough: he realised that he could add coloured pencil to the paintings he had for so long been trying to get right. Not just using the pencils to draw with, but also shaving the coloured wax “right onto the page” and rubbing it with his thumb to get a soft, textural appearance. “That little discovery really brought everything together for me.”

Another more recent project that challenged Daniel’s approach (and patience) was the Call for Entries poster that he was commissioned to create for the Society of Illustrators. His friend and fellow artist Ping Zhu brought him on board for the project and explained to him that the brief was very open – it just needed to be “fun and inviting”. At first that seemed like a dream commission to Daniel, but he quickly realised how difficult it was going to be, purely “because of how open ended it was”. He went through “tons of ideas for it” – from fish in a reef to a sculpture garden – before eventually reaching a point of total burn out.

Stuck for inspiration, he did what he does best (and what has served him well in the past) and took it back to basics. He began drawing with a tongue-in-cheek mindset, and “as a goof”, decided to draw a dog on a skateboard with the words Illustrators 64 underneath. “It was silly and it made me smile,” he recalls. “I had been struggling so much with overthinking the concept up until that point that I had lost all the fun of everything and this silly drawing brought it back for me. So that’s what I went with and just expanded on the idea, trying to have fun and keep it loose.”

And “keeping it loose” has certainly become Daniel’s motto as an illustrator. It informs not only his overall aesthetic, but also the process he goes through to create each piece of work. As well as making sure he draws the finished product from memory – leaving behind visual references that helped him in the earlier stages – he also frequently changes mediums, preventing himself from becoming bored and ensuring that this does seep into the work itself. “I like surprising myself and drawing in ways that I haven’t before – if my work becomes too formulaic it feels lifeless to me and it loses all the fun,” he says. “When that happens, I don’t like it personally, and I think that comes across to the viewer as well.”