Art by Norman Morana
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SHOW LINKS
JAKE’S INKTOBER TRAVELERS POSTER
What do you do after you graduate from Art School? There are so many ways to use your time, and making the right choice and committing to the right path can seem like a huge decision -- until you realize there is no single “right path”, but rather a framework you can adopt to make sure you are always moving towards your goal. Jake Parker, Lee White, and Will Terry provide that framework, and discuss the different ways you can level up your art career and move closer to being a professional working artist.
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INTRO
We gotta have some banter first! The 3 Point Perspective guys got an email -- what do you have to keep your sketchbooks and artwork safe from floods, fires, and other natural disasters? Lee’s answer: have homeowner’s insurance, or have renter’s insurance if you don’t have it! Log everything, take pictures, keep receipts. Especially focus on original art. Have a dropbox or an electronic backup that is offsite -- don’t just keep hard drives on site that will get destroyed in a flood or fire. Try to save stuff if you can -- if it’s a threat to your person, like a fire, just get out. But if you can safely save stuff, do it! Lee had a tree fall on his studio, and all his computer stuff was in the path of the collapsed tree. He ran in and saved it all. Not a great call maybe, but he saved it!
JAKE’S INKTOBER TRAVELERS POSTER
A while ago Jake did his first Inktober Travelers poster, with 31 different characters on a giant sheet of paper. He scanned it in, and then spent a week coloring it and adjusting the scans. He put it all in a folder, got it all printed, and then put the project away, completely finished. He put all the files into an external drive as well as his dropbox. After a while, he went to make DRAWINGS V and went to find the folder on his drive, but it was gone. He then checked his Dropbox and it was gone as well -- they only keep deleted files for a month. He called his Printer and they had a copy of the PDFs, and was able to get the files back. It’s a scary story!
Will has lost files in the past. He has a subscription to SYNC for his working files, and also has a subscription to CARBONITE. The online services have multiple redundancies in multiple cities so that the backups are extra safe.
Flattened images and lower res images saved over the originals are a real problem too.
If you have a question for the podcast, use the Contact Us section on the SVSLearn website!
If you have something urgent, email one of the guys directly!
WHAT DO I DO AFTER I’VE LEARNED TO ILLUSTRATE?
What do art students do after they graduate? They don’t have the skills to do art right after graduating, should they just get a day job and work on their art in their spare time? Or should they seek out a low-tier art job?
This is something that every art student wonders about. As an art student, you have to defend your choice of major. Will remembers wondering what he would do after graduating.
LOW TIER ILLUSTRATION JOBS
Should students try and find art related jobs right out of college? When trying to just pay the bills and so forth.
Jake goes back and forth on this: do what you want to do. What do you want to work on? Do that thing. If you can find an entry level job that is close to that, where you are doing a small portion of what you want to do, do that. If your final goal is to art direct video games, you should find an entry level job in the games industry somewhere. If it’s illustration and you want to do book covers, there are no entry level book cover jobs. If there are, they are usually self-published and don’t pay much. You will probably have to take a job doing something else while you take on these entry level jobs. Be cautious of taking jobs that sap your creativity when working on your own creative projects. You might not have the creative energy left to work on your own craft -- you may have poured it into your tangential job. Maybe finding a job that takes no creative effort is wise in this instance -- something that takes no responsibility or effort or creativity. Your main job is mastering your craft, the other stuff you are doing is just for rent and food and stuff like that.
If you want to be a children’s book illustrator, build out a great portfolio while doing your menial job. If it’s a job within an industry that is made up of companies that hire people (film, animation, gaming), the faster you get into the industry the better.
Lee thought that any art job would be a good one when he was in college. But it can be exhausting. Doing art jobs that are totally separate from what you want to do can be horrible and use up your creative energy.
Art adjacent jobs: making signs for grocery store chains, illustrating for museums or malls, and amusement parks. A lot of big companies have art departments that hire illustrators.
Nathan got his start making signs for a playhouse and then a museum. He then worked his way into publishing.
Will started in the art department at the University of Maryland, who needed an artist to do signs and menus for the dining hall. It was a great job for Will to learn, but he did not want to come home and draw. But that job got him a job at BYU doing the same thing, making posters and flyers for concert management. He had to do multiple flyers in a single 4 hour shift. He worked as fast as he could without any art direction, just making calls himself.
Will had a student who was making $80k a year working at Home Depot as an assistant manager, who wanted to quit to work on an art adjacent job. Will told him not to walk away from the money and just do art once he comes home. Will gives this advice, but he didn’t take it. He learned so much doing thousands of flyers and posters in his job, and a lot of that translated to his illustration career.
Jake took a lot of odd illustration jobs and everything made him the artist that he is today. Lee did architectural design that paid well, didn’t take a lot of time, and gave him a lot of free time. It was a good gig for him to build his career around. If your job truly drains you and you can’t work on your own projects, then maybe the job is something you should walk away from.
There isn’t a singular path. If you interviewed 100 children’s book illustrators, you would get 100 different routes. You would find people who worked art adjacent jobs and others who didn’t. Will’s journey took a long time. He did a lot of jobs that he hated. He was excited to get paid for illustration assignments, but he was making crappy art, so the excitement faded fast.
If you’re looking for a path to follow right out of school, that’s the wrong mindset -- you want a map of the terrain. What’s the lay of the land? What is the destination, what are the various obstacles, and how can you find the path to the destination yourself? The path shifts constantly. Figure out what you want to do, figure out the skillsets you need to do that, and then decide if each step is the right one for your path.
When Will did menu and poster design at the University of Maryland, he was genuinely excited about some of the posters that he made. Some of them were genuinely really exciting. He would look forward to some of the more exciting projects and would try and clear his schedule to give himself more time for them. A different artist might not have provided the same creative output for the same projects.
Children’s book illustrators are usually isolated and work from a home studio. Leading up to the point where you are working in an isolated setting, it might be smart to work in a larger studio setting. You’re learning from what your fellow artists are doing and are surrounding yourself with creative types.
Will wishes he kept a journal of all the art things he learned during his freelance career -- it would be so valuable to go back and look at all the lessons.
FREELANCING
Will knows an individual who makes a solid living off of self-published children’s books. Self-published projects are looked down upon by most artists because the author is usually trying to do everything, and it sometimes doesn’t work too well.
There are freelance projects and crowdfunded projects that need illustration work that could be worth pursuing. You could ask local restaurants if they need illustrations for their walls or artwork for their menus. There is a certain amount of mileage that you need to get. Before Will was doing well-paid freelance work, he had to do thousands of pieces of bad art just to get it out of his system. His first five years make him cringe now as a professional illustrator. The fear is that if you don’t get an art adjacent job, you won’t be able to purge those bad illustrations from your system.
It depends on your personality as well -- Lee was fired from a lot of jobs. Almost all of them except for pizza delivery. He was a disaster at the other jobs, working in restaurants and clothing jobs. His personality is such that he is not good at the work unless he is really interested in it. He was bad in high school but great in college for this reason.
WILL’S ARTIST LEVELS
Elementary School
Junior High
High School
Intermediate College Student. They would be looking for small gigs and would be beginning their career here. Will always had 3-5 students each semester that definitely wanted to become artists.
Artists that impress their friends and family, but cannot yet take on professional projects. May disappoint clients when the work requested is above their level of ability.
Artists that struggle to find good freelance work but can find poorly paying or smaller jobs consistently. They often rely on a spouse and have to expect months of no work. Their main focus should be moving up.
Artists that have to work harder to find freelance work, and take on projects that pay moderately. They have to fight for jobs at times but can pay their bills. They have to hustle pretty hard in their marketing.
Artists that can easily find freelance work but that need to advertise for it. They can have thriving print or original art sales. Can find success in unconventional avenues like Kickstarter.
Artists that are approached by companies for work. They can easily sell prints at conventions and online. Often teach at art schools and are asked to speak on panels. Can sell their original artworks at galleries and reach their goals easily when crowdfunding.
Artists that have companies competing to get them to work on their projects. They sell out of their prints and books, and are often asked to teach at conventions and are flown over the world to present. Their name is often recognized by non artist fans. Examples:
James Jean (Editor’s note: I’m not an illustrator and I LOVE this guy’s work!)
Jake’s Level 11: Only one living artist is a level 11. At this point you start defining popular culture, like Norman Rockwell.
Back before our media was compartmentalized as much as it is now, you could have a Charles Schultz or a Norman Rockwell that could create artwork that was universally known. That is largely because the medium was the magazine, and there was much less content being produced.
If you see yourself as a level 3 or 4 or 5, just know that every level 10 was a level 1 at one point, and had to work their way up. Everyone started at the beginning. It’s also possible to be at multiple levels on different things. Some artists might not have the strongest art chops but are extremely talented in business and marketing, or writing. Some of these artists use their writing as their main product, or have excellent design. Examples:
WILL’S SIX POINT GAME PLAN
These are Will’s guidelines for recent art graduates when looking for work or a start to their career.
Try to find work that you don’t hate.
Do something that pays the bills that you don’t hate. That gives you the chance to come home and work.
Work on your portfolio and never stop.
Getting to a level 10 is a lifelong pursuit. It is something that never stops. Never get into the mindset that you’ll get your portfolio figured out before you go out working, your portfolio should always be shifting and changing.
Share your work constantly on social media.
Piper Thibodeau. Piper just sharing her work on social media got her a career.
Constantly network.
Get out there and meet new people. A lot of opportunities come from a friend of a friend of a friend, so you need to be connected.
Contact companies that hire illustrators and be on their radar.
Let them know you are looking for work. Digital games, board game companies, textbook publishers, children’s book publishers, magazines, graphic novels. Contact them and let them know that you want to work with them.
Always be working on a personal project.
As long as you’re always working on these six things and constantly improving and trying to get better, you will find work. Will has gotten more work offers during the partial lockdown than he ever has, and has had to turn work down and give highball offers to certain projects. When he looks back to his time as a level 4, 5 or 6, the struggle was real and getting work was incredibly hard. He doesn’t advertise anymore and it just happens. Work comes when you work on your craft and you become the best artist you can be. Lee is constantly getting pestered to do children’s books. It’s a great place to be, but it wasn’t always like that for Will.
Be gentle with yourself, becoming a professional artist is a lifelong career. After school, you’re just beginning your journey. Accountants get out of school and get their jobs right out of school. This isn’t the case for artists. It’s a long time commitment and there is no easy path, but there are things you can do to get to where you want, if you stick with it.
Easy choices, hard life, hard choices, easy life. If you always choose the easiest path, your life will be harder. If you choose a harder path, you will grow and develop and eventually have an easier life.
Will remembers when he was a Scout Leader, camping with his scouts. He would suggest that they collect wood to keep the fire going, away from the campfire, and teaching kids that getting colder in order to eventually get warmer is really hard. It’s an important principle.
LINKS
Jake Parker: mrjakeparker.com. Instagram: @jakeparker, Youtube: JakeParker44
Will Terry: willterry.com. Instagram: @willterryart, Youtube: WillTerryArt
Lee White: leewhiteillustration.com. Instagram: @leewhiteillo
Alex Sugg: alexsugg.com
Aaron Painter: painterdraws.com. Instagram: @painterdraws
Daniel Tu: danieltu.co.
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