On a perfectly typical late spring day I was sitting in Milk Bar waiting for my interviewee, alternately watching the rain bucket down on the Prospect Heights street outside and looking at the bright, cheerful, poppy illustrations on her website. At the appointed time Maggie Cousins, illustrator extraordinaire for GNYIPA, bustled in with her flyaway curly hair and appreciative smile. “Thanks for coming all the way here, especially in this weather.” As we settled down for the interview, with our flat whites to drink and hours to use, both of us followed the twists and turn of Maggie’s life as she reminisced about the unconventional path that brought her to New York and her career.
How did you become an illustrator and designer? I realized from the beginning that I wanted to be in this career. I first went to college in Bournemouth for graphic design because I was working a typical office job, which I didn’t like. After graduating I went freelance in Bristol, and gained an awful lot of experience freelancing for a husband and wife who taught me so much. So after 2-3 years I had enough experience to set up my own design company. I worked as part of an interdisciplinary office where we functioned both individually and communally. Very unconventional for the time and it influenced how I approach clients and how I chose to do my work when I had my own company. Eventually, however, I woke up one morning and realized I had an office job again. So when McCann Erickson approached me saying they wanted to buy the company, I sold it and walked away from it entirely.
What brought you to the US (or Brooklyn, more specifically)? Did you find more opportunity here to pursue your career? I was done with businesses and technology so I got a studio and started painting in England. Now I was not a painter before, this was just me experimenting and playing with art. For instance, I liked sculpting plaster on a canvas and painting on the plaster. I was able to sell some of my art but I still needed to make some money. An opportunity came up to consult a few days a week for a community arts project in Bristol so I was doing that for a couple years as a way to give back to the kind of community I myself grew up in London. After a life changing event I decided to travel for a year. While in Central America I met some Italians who happened to live in NYC. They encouraged me to move to NYC. It took 6 weeks for me to go from saying yes to actually landing in the city. This was in 2007. At first I was meant to stay with the Italians but they ended up moving to Toronto 2 weeks after I arrived! They were the only ones I knew in the city, I didn’t know anyone! I just knew I wanted a life change and wanted to make my own memories and a second home for myself. I originally moved here to be a fine artist and painter, it wasn’t until 2010 that I started doing illustration.
Your art is very bright and poppy. How did you develop your distinct style? I was making little money doing painting so, in 2010, I decided to come back full circle to drawing. I taught myself to use drawing programs. [Looking at examples of work on her website: http://www.maggiecousins.com/Maggie_illustration/Home.html] Those illustrations look like my older design work. They have a very vibrant, playful feeling to them. I’ve always had that style since college, even though I have worked to refine it. My style is a reflection of my inner self and my bonkers life. It’s just me basically being 2 again and drawing.
Client: Park Slope Reader – NYC (Summer issue)
Copyright: Maggie Cousins
How do you mostly find your clients? Are they mostly authors or businesses? With authors, do you find they are mostly children’s book authors or other types of authors? I found it very difficult to build a client base here because it’s very much about who you know and I knew noone. Through a combination of networking I’ve built up friends and people who in turn recommend me. Some work I’ve found on craigslist, doing work for people in GNYIPA and I’ve done quite a few children’s books and covers. I even do a lot of logos. It’s really such a mix. Like this month alone I’m working on a game, finishing up a book cover for an author based in Chile, doing the cover and illustration for the third book in a series of traditional fairytales with a modern twist set in NYC, creating a logo for a mobile home company in England, and illustrating and hand lettering large wall panels for a company. I’m also working on post-production for a film, which is a lot of fun.
What is the process you go through with authors to help them develop the illustrations for their work? It depends if it’s their first book or if they’re experienced. Some people have a general idea and then let me do it. But, like with the author in Chile, they just gave me a title and the general concept of the book, so I did the research and presented them with ideas. They, in turn, came back and asked me to tweak it. Working with clients is very much a partnership for me. Sometimes there can be no changes or sometimes a concept might go through several different rounds of refinement. If an author has never done it before I explain to them how it works and what we’ll do. Once we’ve prepared the complete cover I’ll upload. For book covers I can use both photographs and hand-drawn illustrations.
How do you find that balance your style and what you want the works to look like and what the author has in mind and what they want their works to look like? It’s really just trying to work out the client. I have years of experience in knowing which questions to ask and taking the right brief from the client. You have to gauge what motivates them, where they’re coming from and what’s important to them. I really have to read people. I’ve been doing it for so long so, at this point, it’s really just experience to the point where it’s now intuition. I want to keep the experience demystified so that, at the end of the day, I want it to be a joyful experience. They are trusting you with something they worked hard at, my job is to bring that to life in a visual form and that’s magic. It’s not just work for me─I want to do what’s best for them.
How do you hope to grow your career in the next few years? What I would really like is to have enough work so I can just do creative work all the time. I have a few things I want to do in the next couple months to hopefully facilitate more work, like developing a new website, setting up a business Pinterest account and getting on Instagram. I also want to stay in New York and sell more of my own artwork.
What do you like working on most? What has been your favorite project so far? I love doing hand lettering. My Illinois panel was such a fun project and a good example of the naive colorful style, I love to do.
second largest European Aerospace trade show.
Client: State of Illinois (IL) Copyright: Maggie Cousins
If you wish to view more of Maggie’s work, feel free to visit her website here.
GNYIPA 