Accidentally On Purpose

How to accidentally start a creative studio and become an international artist

In 2020 I was locked up in Melbourne like everyone else in the depths of COVID. My job as a Digital Producer was a good one, working to create small web builds for different clients. I’d taken a design class to up my skills and tapped into some more advanced coding.

As an outlet and a way to practice my new-found skills I had decided to build a website but didn’t know what I wanted to make. I had the time and was looking for a little sanity project. A search on some design portfolio sites led to the work of Matt Stevens and his amazing series ‘Good movies as old books’.

Matts incredible imagination triggered the exact thing I was looking for; a graphic exploration of a fun idea. His site seemed straightforward enough and I the idea of figuring out how to make something look like an old book in photoshop appealed more than making sourdough (remember that?).

Cricket is a huge passion for me. I love the game but never really had the capacity for the stats and a lot of the tedium that accompanies its endless rules. I knew that I loved cricketers for their energy and not their average or strike rate. They were heroes of epic stories for me, always, from Bradman to Hazelwood.

Friends of mine had become cricket journalists but I’d lacked their diehard specificity for numbers, dates and averages.

With movies on the brain and images of cover drives in my head I wondered, if cricketers careers had a title, what would they be?

So after stuffing about a bit and some incredibly clumsy work between Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, I had my first image.

The good news was that I had a huge amount of time to refine the concept and the presentation. A friend with some contacts helped me to nut out the commercial viability of selling posters and asked a bunch of questions I didn’t have any answers for.

‘How are you going to sell them?’

‘How can people find you?’

‘How are you going to print these?’

Some Instagram stalking of similar illustrators and graphic artists allowed me to figure some things out. I’d need a site with a payment gateway, shipping materials and a printer. All the while I was taking photographs of books from my fathers library and learning how to isolate their shape and feel in Photoshop.

The learning curve was incredibly steep. I had spare COVID income so I sound a second-hand printer that I had no idea how to operate (I cannot ever recommend doing this by the way). Before I knew it I was deep in manuals and ICC profiles and printer queues. Test prints were a bit of a disaster and the pressure of the lockdowns was starting to get to me a bit.

It was time to focus on something that I felt I could see improvement in; I got busy creating artworks and kept refining. I had at least 8 artworks I was happy with and a workflow that worked.

I’d sent some test images to an incredibly entrepreneurial contact in London for a bit of advice. He provided an excellent sounding board. It was at the end of a Zoom call with him that the name came.

‘A good thing to think about is how you are going to describe these so people know what they are’ was the question.

‘I dunno mate we’ll just call them something like Fisher Classics’ I blurted out.

Fisher is the name of a bat latherer in Melbourne that made iconic hand-crafted cricket bats in my youth. Classics was the nod to the literary monolith Penguin Classics that these book covers are modelled of. Boom; it stuck.

A follow up meeting explored the branding further. By then I’d whipped up a logo, fonts and a style treatment for the whole brand. The website was underway and I’d got under the hood with some coding.

It’s hard to understate how crucial this project was to my mental health at the time. We were into our 100^th day of lockdown and there had been some grim, grim times for Melburninans. I prepared for these Zoom calls like a job interview. I was nervous but prepared.

The creative fun pixel-pushing stuff was coming to a point it was ready to publish and a new dawn was approaching. This is one that no arts school ever tells students persuing a creative career; its about spreadsheets, bottom lines, relationship management, marketing and negotiation. A healthy dose of luck is also handy, too.

An artist friend urged me to publish the site and put it all out there. I’d been seriously faffing about and asking obscure, perfectionist questions about the site padding and colour scheme.

Fisher Classics first published work in a national paper.

‘Mate, done is better than perfect. Do it or you’ll never get it out there.’

I hit the big green button at the start of cricket season 2020. I flicked some emails off to people who’d given me a hand, made a cocktail with Adelle and went to bed pleased to have completed a job well done.

I awoke to an amazing amount of emails and messages via Twitter. A few people in cricket had given the whole thing a bump and Fisher Classics had its first orders. There were orders from Holland, India and the UK as well as Sydney and Perth.

The new dawn had arrived. I had to figure out shipping internationally (never done that before) and a client had put me in touch with a reseller in the UK. My accidental career as a working (and amazingly, International) graphic artist had begun. My creative synapses were firing off like New Years fireworks and I was furiously googling how to negotiate a deal.

The whole thing had gone off in a way that I hadn’t anticipated and I was on a totally unexpected career divergence. Here I was with something that had happened organically that people seemed to respond to with a bit of change in the pocket.

That was until it all just stopped. Interest died down and orders dried up. The next phase of the creative mission was a learning incline in promotion and business that made Everest look like a foothill.

The journey from there to now is legitimately one of graft and education; plenty more on those many, many misses and occasional hits another time, but the upshot is simple; Fisher Classics is now mostly graft and a tiny amount of my time is spent making nice pictures.

So I’d created this thing, that I’ve discovered is now called a creative studio, and am persisting with it. This little creative project has artworks with athletes across the globe and in iconic sporting clubs. It’s introduced me to top athletes and incredibly talented artists.

Hope you’ll hang around for more stuff from the studio.

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Thanks for taking a read. Field Notes is the journal of things that Fisher Classics Creative Studio investigates - the intersection of sport and creativity; notes about design and culture in sport and the creative stuff we get up to.

You can check out our artworks in our online store.