Tim Lillis, a fantastic illustrator for MAKE, wrote to me about a neat project he’s working on: “I’m speaking at SXSW Interactive on the subject of Indirect Collaboration and Collective Creativity. My fellow panelists and I have put together a blog where we’re collecting lots of thoughts on the subject, and my esteemed colleague Joe Alterio has just posted a Q&A with Charles Burns and Gary Panter where they discuss their collaborations with each other.”
CB: For me doing a collaboration is taking “time out” from my usual work. It’s actually fun to do and I think part of the reason is there are different expectations and less control. It’s like letting go of the tight control I always maintain on my writing and drawing and allowing myself to work on something with no “rules”. For it to work there has to be a mutual respect, but you also need to be aggressive enough to alter (fuck-up?) the other persons drawing.
GP: Projects do need leaders or cheerleaders. Often one person will push the project harder. There is the danger of people getting too knitted together. We have to learn to easily move from isolated creative vision and consensual ideation and work. I am interested in the strength of little things and little things as prototypes for bigger things, so a team of one or two or three appeals to me. Vermeer would’ve done one t-shirt in his whole career and he would’ve known it was the best t-shirt Threadless ever had.