Tess Smith Roberts

0:07 Hi I'm Tess this is a terrible gift I made yesterday for you all I'm an illustrator and here's some examples of my work I really like drawing dogs and food and fruit and silly people with silly outfits and bright colors and obviously as you can see see lots of smiley faces it's a bit of an obsession. And I just can't stop drawing them on everything I use a lot of bold shapes and bright colors and I think in general I just like making happy things I've been freelanced for like five years now which is I think I might have got that wrong but I study illustration at Kingston. And I graduated in 2019 and I was really lucky because I started freelancing in my final year of uni basically just because I didn't want to get a job with set hours because I wanted to be able to go to the pub of my friends whenever I wanted to because I just wanted pints all the time. So instead of getting a job like that I decided to try freelancing and I basically just drew a lot.

1:23 And I drew and Drew and Drew and kept posting stuff everywhere. And I was really persistent in sharing my work mainly on Instagram because it was I think it was in its Heyday then. And I emailed art directors and made like a nice website and stuff and it. Actually worked and it was crazy but it did I think I was also lucky that I could do it because I had the maximum student loan and I just kept maxing out my overdraft sometimes but it worked out and yeah the work here is stuff I did when I was kind of in my final year. But also just after I graduated the one on the top left and top right were for the New York Times which was like mindblowing that I got to do that like then I like just couldn't believe it it was really cool and yeah I'm just really grateful that I got to do that and that I'm still doing it it's crazy and yeah I still love doing editorial these are some of my favorites from the past like year or so and maybe longer past couple years I've worked for people such as Vogue the LA Times the New York Times The Wall Street Journal just loads of random news places it's really satisfying doing editorial because it's quite instant and I can be quite impatient and here's some more of my work.

2:53 That's kind of like other stuff I've done top left was for comic relief and then we've got Sydney Opera House and Bon epati and chabani on the bottom right was like the back of a cal box which is like a dream I didn't know I had until they asked me to do it. And I was like wow this is so cool but I did eat the cereal and it didn't taste good so I was very sad about that it was so bad anyway. That's enough about me I'm really here to talk about my book disaster dates and lucky escapes it came out last year in October e time.

3:35 And it was published with octopus. And it's just a story about a girl who goes on loads of dates and has a time. That's pretty much the premise she doesn't have a happy ending well she does kind of but she doesn't like end up with someone because that would just be really annoying if you like read a book about someone dating having a terrible time.

4:00 And then they got a boyfriend or girlfriend or partner or whatever I would have hated that.

4:03 So I didn't I didn't write that yeah she basically joins a bad daters group to talk about like kind of like Alcoholic Anonymous Vibes but for bad dates and they like talk about to talk about her experience and she thinks it's going to help her. And it kind of does the opposite it kind of gets a bit weird there's a witch involved but you're going to have to read it to find out what happens I don't want to spoil it.

4:31 Anyway it all started in the summer of 2020 when I was going on load of bad dates and I think there was something in the air because it was lockdown or it's just after lockdown that summer and I think we were all a bit nuts and I was also really lonely and depressed so I thought what can fix it definitely a string of unsex unsuccessful oh my God I can't believe just said that okay defin yeah I thought a string of unsuccessful weird and silly tapes would fix it it didn't but I tried yeah anyways I had loads of dates sometimes they were good but then I get ghosted I remember someone ghosted me so bad that me and my friends thought he was dead and he wasn't he was still alive and he added me to his close friends list on Instagram so that was confirmation that he was still living and I remember another time I went in for a kiss and our nose rings got stuck together it was so awkward and we kind of like pulled it apart.

5:50 And then we were there like oh God and he just left and I never saw him again it was really aw but yeah I went on loads of bad dates and I had loads of funny stories to tell my friends and sometimes I'd be on the bad dates and I'd be like I was a but at least I've at least I've got a good story to tell my friends afterwards so maybe I kind of egged myself on a bit to make them weird so I had something to talk about I don't know.

6:19 Anyways it was fun to laugh at myself and I remember one of my friends I can't remember who or maybe it was a few of them said I should make a book about all these stories and thought that was a pretty good idea. So I started drawing comics of them.

6:35 But I started it by asking my Instagram followers for their stories because I thought they might be funnier and I was right they were way funnier than me. And this is one of them.

6:45 This is maybe I think my most popular one I could hear everyone laughing yeah there.

6:55 I think it's definitely a lie I just don't believe it happens but I don't care I thought it was really funny so true it.

7:01 Anyway and yeah I'm assuming that you guys have read it.

7:03 But it's just a a guy who was obsessed with orange juice and then he serves it for dinner on their date and she's like okay I mean it's delicious but what and then she just leaves and steals it all. And this is another oh wait this one also made it into the book. And then this one didn't make it into the book.

7:21 But it was someone is isn't good enough for the book.

7:27 But it's still funny so I put it in her presentation it's about someone getting broken up withing McDonald's and to console herbody as a conditioner which is lovely and then this one also made it into the book it's a triangle player who on the date gets into a fight and jumps out of not one but two caps which sounds great and yeah this series kind of became really popular online for me which is nice and my aim was like to make a book.

7:59 But I just didn't get around to doing it because I was scared and it seemed like a lot of work. And I didn't really want to do that.

8:09 So I just kept drawing the comics because they're short and quick and I'm impatient and I want instant results but to remind myself I was writing in the caption one day these will be a book.

8:21 And I think maybe I was also trying to like fish for Publishers maybe I don't know see and it worked cuz I got a publisher asking me if I wanted to make a book I actually had two in the space of a couple weeks which was like one that's crazy but two people asking me to make a book was just like I don't know very weird but very nice and I went with octopus and yeah it was crazy I couldn't really imagine doing it.

8:47 But I did it. And it kind of coincided with a trip I had planned of my boyfriend for 6 months which is just like backpacking around the world. And I was like oh my God how am I going going to do a book and go traveling when I just want to like be chilling on a beach and I just thought I can't say no to a book because that would be like really stupid someone's going to have to do it.

9:11 So I did it. And I did most of the kind of like planning and writing kind of the more thinking stuff before I went away.

9:19 And then. I just got to color it in when I was traveling and I found out that the best place to work is on a plane because there's no distractions no internet so yeah most of it was colored on a plane and these are my favorite panels from the book Olive on the toilet that's her name Olive the orange juice guy her alone on the dance floor yeah just her being silly really yeah this is some of my process these are my kind of like initial sketches of the characters Olive is the one with the bun and the Heart on her top and then the guy next to her is a guy called Toby I called him Toby baloney cuz I thought it was a really funny name.

10:06 And then I called her friends Cindy Mindy and Lindy because I just thought it sounded really stupid and it made me laugh and her name's Olive Pit. And I also called a Olive Pit. So that someone in the story could say Olive you as in like I love you that was mainly the main reason I called it that.

10:26 Anyway Olive is anyone who's like ever been on a bad date and I guess in some ways she is me because I wrote it. And it's like my experiences and my thoughts and feelings and like she kind of talk like the way it's written is kind of how I talk and I guess I put did put a lot of myself in there but she isn't just me she's also like any of my friends that I talk to who had bad dates my sister who had bad dates like anyone who's ever been on a bad date is who she is yeah this is how I wrote it I basically the page on the right.

11:02 I just like made like a script of every date I wanted to put in it. And I did that first and then. I went on my phone and on my notes app I typed up like a rough plot which is very professional and then I wrote it in bullet points and I kind of just was just getting my ideas onto the page and then I typed it up on pages to make it look better and I added in like numbers to reference the script on the other side to kind of like weave together all the stories that I collected cuz I had a lot of bad dating stories collected from people.

11:40 And then weave it with a narrative so it like made sense and I also needed to send this to my publisher.

11:44 And somehow they understood it and yeah these are some of my sketches as you can see on the big one it's way more kind of legible and like just looks a lot better cuz I think by the end on the two on the right I kind of gave up because there's like no faces or like actual like any detail and the drawings just got like worse and worse throughout the draft I basically had like an A4 Sketchbook and yeah just drew it all and kind of made up the story more as I was drawing it because it kind of came to me as I was like putting the characters on the page and it felt I don't know it's just how I did it and yeah we kind of like did this.

12:27 And then once I did that I did the one on the bottom there like a Neer version where I basically imported the sketches that I scanned and traced it and made it look neat and like could put text in like properly to have like just a full mockup before we added color so I could send it to my publisher to get it approved and then I added the color by doing it panel by panel and the designer then put it into the kind of like page format for Resturant in design but yeah.

13:01 I just wanted to show how the page kind of like I guess grows from the sketch to the final color and this date was quite funny this isn't all of the date if you buy the book you can read the whole date it's a guy or girl who orders like everything on the menu at a Pancake House takes one bite of each thing.

13:24 And then doesn't want the rest of it and tries to split the bill and it's like7 $70 which is just so weird this one is is actually based on something that happened to me I remember I asked a guy in a club for his number and he said no he didn't call me ugly I just added that in because I thought it was funny if you called me ugly I probably would have had a mental breakdown in the club this is another one just two people really like they're two separate dates but just two people being kind of presumptuous on the left side and on the right side just being a bit of a and here Olive kind of alone on the Dance Floor I've been there.

14:06 That's maybe one of my favorite drawings and then on the right it's her swiping on Tinder or hinge or something and the one on the bottom I kind of missed the cold war is actually from my friend I think it was my friend hell or I can't remember who but we were on her hinge at the pub one day and that someone had that on their profile and we thought it was really funny and this one is based on that Meme of the dog in the room where everything's on fire saying everything's fine I also thought I'd shared this because it kind of changed my life I wanted to make a font for the book because I thought it'd be hell of a lot easier than hand drawing all the text so I just Googled free handwriting font maker and this came up and you just like draw onto it on your iPad or whatever drawing method you could also print it off.

15:01 And then send it on to them it's called calligrapher and super handy if you want to make a handwriting font these are some of the first cover sketches it was originally going to be called I'm going to die alone but if you Google that it's not the best if you're trying to sell a book.

15:19 So that idea was scrapped I also wanted to call it a series of unfortunate dates like a series of fortunate events but I didn't want to get sued so we scrapped that one as well we ended up calling it disaster dates and lucky escapes which I didn't actually think of someone else did and it's kind of like Angus fongs and Perfect Snogging Vibes in my head you know like a silly kind of teenage book from the naughties that's what I think of anyway and yeah these are also some other color cover drafts we ended up going with olive being chased by loads of bad dates and then the final one was obviously in red and pink because it's the best color combo and these are some end page drafts on the left end pages is something I never thought about.

16:14 But it's actually really fun to do and we went with the middle one which is just kind of like sketchy scribbles of hearts and stuff and then we turned one of the cover design like the previous cover designs into a title page which was like I think like the second page on the book.

16:30 And then yeah once the book was done I wanted to have a party so we went to I had it at peek and Pelican it was like a book launch kind of vibe with a little exhibition on the wall.

16:43 And it was really fun I just got really drunk with my friends and I made some like merch for it some postcards and a bookmark and I made an extra comic date comic book of dates and a sticker sheet too it was cool here some pictures from that I made some giant cardboard cutouts of Olive and Toby And I also made a like face in the whole thing like the things You' see on bright and sea front which is in the top right. So people could put their head in and act like they were on a bad day as well with olive and then yeah that's a picture of the match and stuff and then.

17:20 I also signed those of books which is was really funny cuz I felt like a celebrity and yeah that's it thank you for listening oh thank you I forgot to say something if you want to buy the book it's for sale next near the tequila stand in the bar yeah please buy it