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How To Become An Illustrator, Canto IV

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Step Four.  Promote.

Once you’ve got your portfolio together, you want people to see it—specifically people who can hire you.

Let’s make this an assault on multiple fronts.  You young illustrators have many media available for self-promotion.

The world-wide web. Get yourself a website.  It doesn’t need to be fancy, just a place to put up some samples of your work and your contact information.  Nowadays everybody expects to be able to find you on the web, so make sure you’re there.  Because we live in an age of technological marvels, you can build a website yourself, for free: http://www.moogo.com/.  Here’s a review.

I’ve noticed illustrators have been posting their samples on flickr, which doesn’t cost you anything, either.  Same with Facebook.

Print media. Even though I have a web presence, I rely on print media to let potential clients know I’m there.  I strongly recommend that you consider a postcard mailing campaign.  This will cost you a few skins, but I’ve found the return on investment to be worthwhile.  I go to Modern Postcard to print my postcards.  They’re in California and all they do is print postcards.  A batch of 500 will set you back around $120.00.  Once you go to their website, they really take care of you.  There are downloadable templates so you may design your postcard to fit US postal requirements.  You may submit everything to them electronically.  They’ll turn your job around in less than 2 weeks.

Put a show-stopping four-color image on the front of your postcard, and tell everyone how to find you on the back.  If you can afford it, consider sending a series of postcards that tell a story. I did this and I got a great response from art directors—and a couple of jobs.  I told a story in four images, and mailed my postcards every Monday for 4 weeks.  By the time the fourth postcard was mailed, the ADs were waiting for it.

You’ll need a mailing list of people who might hire you. When I began, I wanted to break into children’s publishing, so I needed a list of art directors who work for children’s magazine and book publishers.  I transcribed my list from Children’s Artists’ & Writers’ Market.  If kids’ illustration isn’t your bag, a more general list can be gleaned from the 2009 Artist’s & Graphic Designer’s Market Of course you can buy mailing lists, but I prefer to build and maintain my own.  Don’t forget to send a postcard to every member of your family and everyone you’ve ever met.  You never know who may turn out to be an important contact.

Creative directories. These are catalogues of illustrators—you buy a page, put your images on it and the directory is sent out to zillions of art directors.  This can get pricey.  I stick with Picture Book only. I’ve tried some of the others, and I’d never been able to establish that I got a return on my investment; that is, the page didn’t generate more fees than I paid for it.  Picture Book is a small slice of the illustration market—children’s only—which is the more effective way for me to promote myself.

Competitions. Don’t necessarily generate sales.

All your promotion should be run at a profit.  If you spend a dollar on promotion and don’t get more than a dollar back, stop doing that kind of promotion and try something else.

Get this book and read it: Your Marketing Sucks.

DON’T e-mail art directors with unsolicited samples.

Pierre le chien

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Besides picture books, I’ve done a couple of chapter books that were lots of fun for me.  Chapter books are for an older audience (9-12) and the ratio of words to pictures is very different!  There is typically one black & white image per chapter, plus a color image for the cover.

Pete and Fremont and Pete’s Disappearing Act, are both circus yarns starring Pete the poodle (or Pierre le chien, as he’s billed on the posters).  Both are written by Jenny Tripp.  Jenny is a fantastically good author and it was a treat to work on her stories.  She creates engaging characters and writes dialogue that perfectly expresses those characters—which shouldn’t be a surprise since she’s a screenwriter.

Here are some sketches and final images from Pete’s Disappearing Act.

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Rough sketch of Pete—who finds himself far from the circus— dancing on a barrel in a barn.  To the left are the lady who owns the farm and her menacing dog, Buck.

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Samantha McFerrin, my art director, decided the image was too crowded.  Here’s a revise:

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Yes, this works better.  That’s Quackers the duck on the left.  Now I do the finished drawing, which is linework in black Prismacolor pencil and tones done with brush and India ink washes.

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Here is one of Pete’s new friends he meets while trying to get back to the circus—El Jefe, the one-eyed military macaw who is slightly dotty from having spent too much time with ‘humming beans.’  He suffers delusions of revolución.

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Prepare to repel boarders!

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A pox on’t! Henry & the Crazed Chicken Pirates is finally here!  Just click on the title to get a copy of your own.

As Drake said to his men before Nombre de Dios in 1572, ‘Blame nobody but yourselves if you go away empty!’

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How To Become An Illustrator, Canto III

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Anyone left in the room?  If you read Steps One and Two and you’re still here, you must really want to be an illustrator.

Okay.  You have a day job, you’ve begun the process of organizing your business—now let’s move on to

Step Three.  Build a portfolio.

Who is your market?  Figure out who your potential customers are.  Take a hard look at the work you like to do and honestly determine where it would fit—editorial, children’s publishing, game animation, corporate, advertising, greeting card (just naming these off the top of my head).

The Society of Illustrators publishes a catalogue of their annual competition.  It’s divided into sections: advertising, corporate, publishing, editorial.  Looking at the different styles of work in those categories may help you choose your market.

Do the research.  For instance, if you want to do kids’ books, go to a bookstore and see how compatible your illustrations are with what you find in the kids’ section.

Now comes the tough love.  If you want to sell illustration you’ll need to stick with one style and market that style exclusively.  Don’t make your portfolio a mixed bag of styles.  It’s really difficult to sell a portfolio like that, simply because an art director wouldn’t be sure what you’d deliver if he gave you an assignment.  You may have to choose between two favorite styles—and say good-bye to one of them.

Put together a portfolio of 6—8 samples of your very best work.  They don’t need to have been published.  Get your samples scanned.

Invest in a professional-looking portfolio case.  Put into it prints of your work—not originals!  They should be in poly sleeves, or get them laminated. Every sample should have your contact information on it somewhere. Get extras printed as leave-behinds.  On the handle, put one of those name-tag thingies with your business card—because sometimes art directors ask that you drop off your portfolio.

I was tempted to suggest burning a cd of your samples, but I don’t feel comfortable with the idea of making your images as accessible as clip art.  And even in this digital age, ADs like to see printed samples they can hold.  When I visit clients I take a portfolio with printed samples because often the meeting is in a conference room with no computer handy.

All this is just one guy’s opinion; these suggestions have worked for me.  I’d be interested to hear if any ADs or illustrators want to weigh in.

Paper/Pencil/Brush.

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My pal Margeaux Lucas has a blog, Paper/Pencil/Brush.  She shows a lovely example of underpainting in a gouache illustration.

Her style reminds me of picture books I read when I was little.  It’s all too easy to become heavy-handed with gouache, especially when you’re piling paint on top of paint, as you’re obliged to do with an underpainting.  Margeaux has kept this enchanting little image light and fresh.  Also, look how much information she gives you: time of year, place, who the main character is, anticipation of some future event—all important to an audience who is just learning to read.

Two Bad Pilgrims’ progress

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Here’s the big scene from Two Bad Pilgrims, where Francis and Johnny nearly scuttle the Mayflower when they fool around with their father’s fowling piece.  First the thumbnail sketch:

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Then the tight sketch:

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There was some squeamishness about showing two boys firing a gun in a kids’ book, so we tried a different approach.  Sometimes you encounter this kind of snag in the creative process.  Kendra Levin, the editor and Jim Hoover, the art director worked with me to find a solution.  How about if instead of the gun, we show the boys playing with squibs?

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What the heck is a squib?  Here’s where my dad, and the Company of Military Historians really came to the rescue.  My dad posted the question in the forum page of the Company’s website.  Turns out a squib is a thin tube of paper or a hollow quill filled with black gunpowder—homemade fireworks.  When you light one it zips around the room.

But, this isn’t really what happened aboard the Mayflower.  More important, it’s not as interesting to look at.  We ultimately struck a compromise and decided to show the boys with the gun, but not actually firing it.

Here’s the inked in version.  Squibs, a barrel of gunpowder, straw ticking on the bunk, old wooden planking—all the ingredients for setting a ship afire.

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It seems nuts to have gunpowder just laying around like that, but according to Mourt that’s the way it was.  I know that British warships in Nelson’s time stored all gunpowder in a special room, the magazine.  It was lit by a lamp on the other side of a glass window.  Anyone in the magazine had to wear slippers, because the nail of a shoe grating across powder on the floor would cause a spark, blowing up the ship.

Here’s the color sketch.

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And Vince Dorse’s colorization.

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Designing a cover for the new Henry

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Sponge out your cannons!  Prepare to repel boarders!  Henry & the Crazed Chicken Pirates will storm bookstores on August 11th!

Many eager customers are even now camped out in front of those bookstores, awaiting the big day.  For those of you with internet access, here are a few visual bonbons to take your minds off of how hard a concrete sidewalk  can be.

The cover of a picture book is hugely important.  It’s the packaging that gets a casual browser to pick up the book and look inside.  The cover image has to give you an idea of what the story is about.  I also wanted to get a bit of action in there, to appeal to boys.

As usual, I began by drawing little thumbnail sketches.  These are very rough sketches, indicating the idea and where the title type will go.

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Bird's-eye view, looking down on Henry from the top of the Black Yolk.

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Version D is the winner, with some changes.  Henry will be flopped so he’s running left-to-right, the Black Yolk (the chicken pirate balloon) will be moved to the left, and the title type goes in the space made in the upper right.  Here’s the tight sketch incorporating the changes:

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Art director & editor liked this much better.  One last change:  show Henry carrying his book.  Here’s the layout they sent me including both drawing and type:

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Finally, the title type.  We were able to pick up the word ‘Henry’ from Henry and the Buccaneer Bunnies. Here’s the sketch for the rest of the title.

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Then I enlarged the sketch, and inked in the lettering using a lightbox.

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How To Become An Illustrator, Canto II

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Step Two. Organize your business.

The very idea of organizing a business bores the pants off us creatives.

But, illustration is a business.  We create something people want to buy, and sell it at a profit.  That seems fairly straightforward, but let me tell you that many illustrators sell their work at a loss—and don’t realize it.  How can that be?

Those illustrators haven’t taken the time to calculate their expenses, or overhead.  They don’t know how much it costs them on a daily basis to run an illustration business. They don’t know how to calculate a price for their work based on the cost of doing business.  They haven’t gotten themselves organized.

Even if you’re running a bare-bones illustration business off of your kitchen table, you’ll need to spend money on equipment and supplies.  If you work traditionally, you’ll need art supplies: paint, board, brushes, &c.  If you work digitally, you’ll need software.  Either way you’ll need a computer, printer, scanner, bookkeeping software (more on that in a moment), office supplies: stationery, packing materials.  You’ll need a filing system and storage.  Add onto that a phone and internet access. Also figure rent and electricity.

Those are your operating costs.

Here’s the formula.  Add up all your business expenses for a year.  For your big ticket items like a computer, add up your credit card payments for a year.

Add your salary onto that.

Divide that total by 230 working business days per year (52 weeks minus 6 weeks vacation, sick time, and holidays).  Even if you’re illustrating part-time, use 230 days.

Add a 10-15% profit margin.

That’s your day rate.  That’s how much you charge if an illustration takes you one day to do.

Now, how do you keep track of all that information?  I recommend QuickBooks Pro. This is software that allows you to set up your books, write checks, create estimates and send invoices.  I use it to keep track of and categorize all my expenses.  It has a feature where you can record the time you’ve spent on a project.  Of course, you can do all that by hand, but if you’re as bookkeeping-averse as me, this really helps.  It also has fun charts and graphs to tell you if you’re making any money.

The other bookkeeping software I find indispensable is Now and Up To Date. Basically it’s calendar for your computer.  There are other calendar programs that probably work just as well, I happen to use this one.  It allows me to plan my time for projects and keeps me on track with deadlines.  Also I can see how much time past projects have taken, so that I can estimate time needed for future ones.  As with QuickBooks, it’s visually fun, making me more inclined to use it.

Once you’re ready to keep track of your business you can start going after illustration projects.  Let’s be honest, because you’re just starting out you’re going to accept work that won’t make you any money.  But at least now you know how much you should be charging.

By the way, I look like a genius when I talk about this stuff because I own a copy of the Graphic Artists’ Guild’s Handbook of Pricing & Ethical Guidelines. If you join the Guild they’ll shoot you a copy for free.

How To Become An Illustrator, Canto I

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I received an e-mail from Jim, who recently graduated with  a bachelor of visual arts from Boise State University in Boise, Idaho.  He asks: how does one go about becoming a professional illustrator?

That’s an excellent question.  I’ve been asked that question by more than one art school grad newly saddled with five-digit debt and no indication from his professors about how to make money with his skills.  Art schools: would it kill you to include a couple of business courses in your curriculum?

So anyway, since there may be others asking Jim’s question, I thought my response would make excellent blog fodder.  I’ll respond in several posts.  Illustrators/Designers: please comment if you have additional thoughts.  I’m just one guy; I can’t know everything.

Step One.  Get a job.

Being a professional illustrator means you’re a freelancer, you work for yourself, you own your own business.  There are very few staff jobs for illustrators.  If you can find one, fantastic, you’ve hit the jackpot.  The vast majority of illustrators are self-employed.

In order to be self-employed you need to have a clientele, a calendar full of jobs, a portfolio full of samples, a business checking account, a studio, studio furniture, computer, printer, scanner, phone, art supplies, office supplies and a coffee maker.  When I graduated from art school I had none of those things.  Moreover, I had no clue how to conduct an interview, so I was no good at prospecting for work.

Don’t fret—if you’re serious about being an illustrator, you will acquire all these things.  But that’s going to take time, and all the while you’ll need to buy groceries and pay rent.

Get yourself hired on staff somewhere.  Ideally, you’ll find an entry-level position with some connection to graphic design—a printer, newspaper, Kinko’s, quick sign shop, whatever. Getting an entry-level graphic design position would be ideal because that job will bring you into contact with other working designers, who may become part of your client roster. Since illustration is a graphic design discipline, you’ll be learning skills that will help you to illustrate.  But if you can’t, just get a job. Rent and bills come along every month, and you need a paycheck that comes along just as regularly.  If BSU has recently thrust a new batch of grads onto the unsuspecting businesses of Boise, you may find more opportunities if you relocate.

The main thing is, once you’ve secured a job and have a regular paycheck, you can get started building your business after hours.  This is called moonlighting.  Illustrators see a lot of moonlight—while their friends are partying or asleep.

La Serenissima

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Today I’m working on a night-tme scene: a lady holding a cat in 1890s Venice.  Here are the thumbnail sketch and the comprehensive sketch.

Thumbnail sketch for pp 30/31. The opera box scene was dropped.

Thumbnail sketch for pp 30/31. The opera box scene was dropped.

Comp sketch for page 30.

Comp sketch for page 30.

I’ll start by blocking in the dark areas in Burnt Sienna.