I was invited to participate in a daily sketch blog, called the Month of Love. Each day, 20 different artists post a sketch or drawing about love. Sometimes there is a challenge for the day, sometimes it’s up to the artist. It’s a pretty fun exercise in creativity and makes sure you spend some time each day, drawing.
Here are some of my sketches:
Playing well with people might come easy for some, and for others it was something they had to learn. However you get there, as a freelancer if you want to have a successful career, it’s something you have to do all the time.
This just doesn’t apply to clients, or the moment you finally quit your day job. If being a freelancer is something you hope to do one day, you should keep this in mind, because today’s annoying co-worker/friend can be tomorrows art director.
I worked as a production artist for years. One company I worked for had a lot of issues. There was fighting going on between Editorial and Design/Production, and then within our own department there was a war between the Department Manager and the Design Director. As the guy making the stuff, I was at the end of the line for everyone: Writers, editors, designers, artists, marketing, and manufacturing. Any mistakes made along the way, ended up on my plate.
It builds up and you get frustrated, and you want to say something to the people you feel are making your job harder. As tempting as it was to vent on those people, the chances are, they aren’t intentionally trying to make your job harder. I kept my frustration in check at work.
Since then, two of the people I worked with have moved on from the company as well, becoming art directors with companies that use illustrators. I’ve kept in touch with them via facebook. They have seen my work as an illustrator, and have given me work.
I doubt that either of them would have thought to use me as an illustrator, if I had given into the moment and vented for my own emotional satisfaction. Even if it wasn’t venting about them, you can still be seen as a difficult person if all you do is complain.
A friend recently graduated art school and I was doing my best to lend him a hand. This was anything from answering questions about freelancing (as best I could), being encouraging when he was facing hard times, and even sending work his way, when I had too much.
At one point I was trying to get him in at a company I was working for. At the same time, the company started having lots of issues, and the project spiraled out of control. Lots of yelling, finger pointing and high stress levels. I decided that it was time to go, and did so professionally. Unfortunately this meant that my friend missed out on work he could have used.
My friend took it personally. He wrote me an angry email, furious that I would leave this job when it meant not being there to push a referral for him. He made clear that he no longer wanted to be friends, personally or professionally.
I completely understand his frustration. You try to hold out from getting a crappy survival job, and rely on your skills and talent. Along comes something that might not be the ideal type of work, but it’s a thousand times better then retail or waiting tables. And it falls through. Right back to where you started.
But, you don’t take that out on someone that has been trying to help you. More so, you don’t burn your bridges.
My reason for not inviting him had nothing to do with him hurting my feelings or for disrespecting all the help and favors I gave him. I didn’t invite him simply because I couldn’t trust him to act professionally.
He may have been frustrated at losing a short term opportunity, but what he really lost was long term opportunities.Sometimes building your network is the main focus of your freelance life, as you get started. To tap into an existing network can often make a huge difference in how long it takes to get your career on its feet.
We all make mistakes; we all get frustrated at other people. If you are going to let your personal frustrations guide your actions, it’s going to make it all the harder to get anywhere.
In the world of the freelancer, your attitude is the grease to make the gears turn. You can’t control other peoples attitude or how they react. So control yours and it can make all the difference in how fast your career grows and where it goes.
I love doodling. I find it to be a great activity that allows an artist to let thought flow more freely. Whenever I have the chance to doodle in prep for an illustration, I always find the end results to be richer and more detailed. Story elements also creep in. My visual language to express a character expands.
For cartooning, I think doodling is a valuable exercise. Kool Aid Gets Fired came from a doodle of Kool Aid having a moment of existential crisis. Many of my background characters come from doodles in sketchbooks. I doodle something that I feels really captures the visual essence of what you might think such a person looks like. When I drew the little guy down in the right hand corner, I thought he looked like an everyday background office worker, someone who pretty much comes in, does their job, and goes home.
His final incarnation in Kool Aid he had glasses. But the basic idea for what many of my office workers would look like came from this doodle. To me (and everyone is going to see different), it says, he’s been at his job not just years, but a few decades. Not fully beaten down, but definitely a corporate cog that knows his place.
As contrasted by this doodle, who I always thinking of as Ken Newman, bright, shiny, energetic, looking for ways to make a change and improve things. Often I will take a doodle and expand on it, working out how the character might look expressing different emotions.
Sometimes a character from a doodle ends up in a full illustration. I’m not sure if I specifically used the person on the left in the drawing on the right. The one on the left was a women who got onto the train with her chello and bags and insisted on squeezing into the space. I was trying out some new brushes in Painter for this. Clearly the way I drew the head stuck in my head for the crowd scene I drew.
When I worked in offices, often my meeting handouts would end up covered in doodles. Often they were of co-workers.
I think that moving forward, I’m going to devote some time to just doodling each week. No specifics, no goal, just a journey.
I came across a bunch very old illustrations the other day, and thought, man, I would not recognize this as my work, compared to what I do today. Here take a look. (Happy Reed? Pictures! Also forgive any formatting issues. Since these blog entries are as I think of them I don’t take much time to try and re-size images and such.)
These are part of a series done for Reeling, the Chicago GLBT film festival. They got a lot of attention and people really liked them. So much that someone ripped off the style for several brochures, and people thought I had done the illustrations. To bad I didn’t, because more then likely, the person who ripped me off got paid. I did this for free for the exposure. I didn’t get any work from this.
I was very proud of these at the time. They were the best work I had done at the time. I can still see elements of these in my current work.
My friend was working at Chicago Magazine, handling the entire online website. This was back before the internet started killing magazines and newspapers. Chicago Magazine didn’t support the online site then. It was just her, and she had no budget, no direction to take the site. It barely served as a, whats happening. So she asked me to do these tiny illustrations for the site. For free. I thought, at least I can say I have worked for Chicago Magazine, and maybe I might get to network to get some work in the actual magazine. But that didn’t happen.
For a while I worked at a company that did corporate communications, mainly newsletters, brochures and more. Sometimes, they wanted illustrations. My boss never wanted to spend money of art and graphics, which was good for me, since it fell to me to come up with illustrations.
I really don’t know what I was trying to do with the shape of the heads. These were for a brochure about hospital credentialing. Back then, computers had these giant, thick monitors, that took up your whole desk!
Oh hey! One of the first illustrations I got paid for. For Lakeland Boating (I still do illustrations for them). It was about how the head (bathroom) on boats often can be left…messy. I wrote a dirty limerick on the wall, and thought I had smudge it enough. I didn’t, but thankfully they caught it before it went to print. I don’t do that anymore. (Here I sit, broken hearted, came to shit and only farted, in case you were wondering.)
Back then, I did lot of work with actual materials, and would have to send them in to be scanned. The good thing about that, is you can work in different ways. Like this for an article about Morse Code.
I did it on scratch board. I really liked it. So did the editor. So much he kept the original art and never sent it back. Nor did he offer me any money for the original art. Yeah, people actually do that. A contract prevents that.
However, this did lead to me doing a series of these of skeletons. A friend of a friend opened a small knick knack shop, and wanted artists to put their work up for commission. So I did a bunch, and they sold. The first few that sold she gave me my share. The rest, she kept all of it, because her shop wasn’t doing well, and needed the money.
Come to think of it, she was friends of the editor that kept the image above. Another good reason for going digital, or at least only delivering digital. And contracts
These are some images that I did that were not for clients, but just myself.
It’s always interesting to look back. I also found a disk with all these illustrations I did for this interactive CD a bank put out to help people prepare to take a test to get their real estate license. There were 3 of us doing the illustrations, and a 4th guy doing all the photo researching. I think there was over 500 illustrations that were needed. I was working for a company that was doing the CD for the bank. I never dealt with the person at the bank, but we always got to hear her feedback. Like, I don’t like the color green. So what about the illustrations about lawn care and such? She also didn’t like red. Or bright blues. In fact, she doesn’t like primary colors.
So the color palette eventually became grays, beiges, purples, light baby blue, and where appropriate, some greens. She also so everything as sexual and violence towards women.
I honestly can’t say what I think about my old work. I can say my skill has improved a lot.