Freelance Illustration: Develop Your Portfolio And Find Your First Clients

1. Introduction: In this course, you will learn how to make a varied and interesting commercial illustration portfolio that will be suitable for lots of different kinds of projects. You will learn a simple strategy that you can use to find new potential clients, and the most effective ways to present your work to them. We'll talk about some of the different areas of illustration and what you can do with your skills. But more importantly, you'll go from no portfolio and no clients, all the way to finding your first paid projects. The strategies you'll learn in this course can be repeated and used for as long as you need them. We're gonna talk about social media and self-promotion. I'll share some thoughts on portfolio websites and some tips on writing to prospective clients. This course is for new illustrators that are finding their style and want to go freelance for the first time. Or artists that have taken their first steps, but want to find more clients. I don't get into the creative part of your illustration work. I'm not an artist, but I do know what makes a great portfolio, and I know how to make your hobby into a career. Later in the class we'll be talking about the importance of getting feedback on your work and your project throughout this class will be to post your new illustrations in the class as you make them, or even works in progress, where your classmates can share constructive comments to help you along your way. I will be checking in and giving feedback on as many projects as I can. I'll also be available to answer your questions in the discussion. My name is James, and I'm an illustration agent at one of the world's most established agencies. I also have a YouTube channel and blog called The Illustrators Guide, where I share useful tips and ideas for new and aspiring illustrators, and answer specific questions on the problems they have in the illustration business. I had a very short career as a freelance illustrator where I learned a lot about what not to do, but I also learned that my skills are far better suited to the business side of illustration rather than the creative side. My goal is to help illustrators, get to where they want to be in their careers and to guide them through some of the common problems and pitfalls I've seen in the freelance illustration world. I've made this course because I know from personal experience and hundreds of interactions with new artists that starting on the path to becoming a freelance illustrator is hard, and a lot of illustration degrees and courses don't teach you what you need to know to actually start making money from your creative skills. I have answered countless questions from artists trying to find their way and I see a lot of the same problems coming up again and again. I've consolidated what I've learned into actionable steps to take you from being a student to a professional. By the end of this course, you will know how to spend your time most effectively to find your first paying clients as quickly as possible. You'll know what your most important tasks are when you're first starting out, and out and what the non-essential, time wasting activities are. If you post your work here, you'll also get feedback on your illustrations from me, and hopefully from your classmates. If you follow this guide, you'll have a list of verified clients that your work would be a good fit for that you can contact on a regular basis to show them new work. I can't make them hire you, but I can help you become more hireable in a few simple steps. We cut out all non-essential distractions and focus on the most efficient way to start making money from your illustrations. 2. How to approach your portfolio: Illustrations are used for all kinds of purposes, but the common theme is that they all have a purpose and a job to do. Sometimes that job might be to simply make a product to look nice and pretty, but far more often, illustration is used to tell a story, help explain an idea, or to sell a product by attracting the right kind of customers. If you think of any illustration you might find in a magazine, very rarely will the illustration be there just to decorate the page. Is there A: to attract the reader's attention to the article and B: to visualize the idea or to highlight an aspect of the narrative to make it easier for the reader to understand. Book covers are exactly the same. If you're anything like me, you've bought books based on their cover before. Even though we're not really supposed to do that. But publishers know that we do, and take great care in designing covers that look good on our bookcases. And that's where you come in. Illustration isn't just pretty pictures. So we know that approaching our portfolio in a way where we simply make whatever comes into our head, or whatever we think looks nice, might not be the most sensible way to do it. Illustrations always have a job to do. You need to keep that in mind when you're building your portfolio. For every illustration you make, whether it's for practice or with a real client, you need to know what the purpose of the illustration is before you set pen to paper. When you're working with a client, that purpose is often defined by the brief, but not always. Your job as the illustrator is to think about the purpose of your work. At each stage of constructing an image, you can measure your progress by how well it does its job. This kind of strategic approach to illustration means you won't ever have to ask yourself: "is this illustration any good?" Because you'll know if it does what it's supposed to. If a potential client can look through your portfolio and interpret the meaning or narrative behind each image without reading an article, then you are doing a great job. You don't need to waste words explaining what each illustration is about. They speak for themselves. Style and technical skill, or obviously a huge part of illustration, but the substance, the meaning and the purpose are parts that are often overlooked. Whenever we're creating new work, we should think about the purpose of the illustration. What job is it doing? What problem is it solving, and who is it for? 3. What can you do with illustration?: There are a lot of different types of Illustrator. Some specialize in different areas like character design, children's books or storyboarding for film and TV. But at the start of your career, you aren't a specialist, and that's not a bad thing. You're at a stage where you can try out different kinds of work and see what you like, what you don't like and find out what you're actually good at. A lot of new artists at the start of their career have a very clear picture of what they want to do with their illustration work. That's completely normal. But if you focus on one area exclusively, you will miss out on a whole load of opportunities to try out different things, learn new skills and work on different kinds of interesting projects. I would encourage you to keep an open mind about the kinds of projects you work on at the start of your career, and if you naturally gravitate towards a specialism later on, That's great. By that point, you'll know what you're good at and what you enjoy because your clients will be hiring you for it again and again. It might not be what you set out to do at the start. Some other specialisms might be painting murals are doing live events, drawing comic books, designing patterns for textiles or packaging, or working in an animation studio. Some illustrators continue working on all different kinds of projects throughout their career. To me, that seems the most interesting thing about being a freelancer. You can work on all different kinds of projects with all different kinds of clients. And have a really interesting and varied career. There's no rush to choose what kind of Illustrator you want to be. Chances are what you want to do now won't be the same as what you want to do in ten years. If you work in a very specific corner of the illustration world now, it'll be harder to move into other areas when you decide you want to change. As well as different areas you can work in. There are different ways you can work. You can freelance on Upwork or Fiverr and you could stay fairly busy. You don't need to market yourself or put yourself out there in front of clients, but you're not really in control of your own career by doing that. It's very passive. You're putting yourself in a position where there's a lot of competition to be the cheapest or fastest option for clients that are looking for design work on a budget. That's no fame, no fortune, and no power. There are other illustrators that are able to work in lots of different styles doing all different kinds of projects and these kinds of illustrators are very convenient for clients. They say: "I want you to copy this style" and you say: "No problem". You could stay very busy and make a good living. But you'll never be known as a great illustrator, no matter how technically skilled you are, because you're not really contributing anything original, you just convenient. The illustrators that really leave an impression and are sought after by clients are the ones that are unique, in their style and the way they think. They've mastered their craft and their style is really recognizable. Maybe they've specialized in a particular area of illustration, but maybe not. Clients seek out these artists by name. They get a following and they get famous. By being unique you probably won't be everyone's cup of tea. You won't have that same mass appeal as someone that does a little bit of every style. But that's a good thing. The clients that do like you, will find projects for you, and will pay you well for them. They'll talk about you and there'll be proud to work with you. 4. Goals: Goals are a great way to measure progress. When you're a freelancer, you're not getting promoted or being offered bonuses or pay rises. It's important to have an idea of where you're going. You could call that a goal or a career plan or whatever, but it's very easy to stay in the same place for too long if you don't have a rough idea of where you want to go next, you might have a financial goal, and that might mean you can quit your day job and become a freelancer full-time. Or maybe you have a list of clients that you really want to work with. If you know what kinds of work those clients commission, you'll know what kind of work you need to put in your portfolio. As you tick these short to medium-term goals off your list, you can add new ones, bigger and better goals and bigger and better clients. As well as the shorter goals, it's important to think about a longer-term vision for your career. Where do you want to be in ten or 20 years? If you know roughly where you want to be long-term, then you can think about every project you're offered and ask yourself if it will help you get to where you want to be. That goal is very likely to change over the course of 20 years. So you don't need to be too specific, but without thinking about it early on, you might find yourself working aimlessly on low-level projects and not pushing yourself to improve and reach those bigger and better projects. 5. Being a beginner: If you're watching this, you're likely at the beginning of your career. And with that comes all sorts of shyness and insecurity and fear of putting your work out there into the world. I know this from my own experience just as well as anybody else. But I want to tell you that there's nothing wrong with being a beginner. The illustration industry, and any creative industry, thrives on new talent emerging regularly. It needs creative people like you to put themselves out there and take a chance. If you're feeling like you don't know what you're doing, and you're not good enough, Welcome to the club! Because just about everybody feels like that at times, no matter what level of skill or success they get to, Not everybody can make it as a successful freelance illustrator. And that's not down to skill, because skills can be learned and it's not about talent because there are plenty of talented people that don't make any money from their work. A lot of people realize they don't actually want to enough. That was certainly the case with my freelance illustration career. Others don't have the self-awareness to judge their own capabilities realistically and spend all their time illustrating work that they like, but nobody wants to pay for. Others simply aren't patient enough and give up before they reach their goal. So if you're a beginner and you're too scared to get your work out there in front of people that can help you, and pay you, Maybe you don't want it enough. But maybe you'll always regret not taking the chance. I think it's far better to try it, even if you don't ultimately make it, then at least you won't always be wondering. I tried it and I realized after a couple of years I wasn't cut out for freelancing or being creative on demand. I gave up trying to be an illustrator pretty quickly and I'm very pleased with that choice because I tried it and it led me to the path I'm on now. 6. Freelancing: Being freelance in anything is a high-risk, high reward game. You are responsible for every aspect took your career good and bad. At its worst, you're barely scraping by and you're struggling to find work, thinking you're not good enough and not knowing how to fix it. But at its best, you've been sought out by clients that are desperate to work with it. You've got more offers than you can physically do. You making great money and you're working with some incredible clients with freelance in both of these scenarios can happen in the same six month period is a roller coaster. Even the best illustrators in the world can have months where they're not getting any work. You won't know if you cut out for it unless you try, but you're not failing. If you try it out and you realize it's not for you, that is a successful experiment as far as I'm concerned, the only way you fail is if you don't try. 7. Luck: Luck is a massively underrated factor in a lot of creative careers. Being seen by the right people at the right time can have an enormous impact on the trajectory of your career. But it's mostly out of your hands. What you can control is your work ethic. Are you showing up every day and putting in the effort? You don't get to be a huge success without showing up and doing the work. It can be really difficult to motivate yourself in the early days of your career when you're not being hired and you're barely, making a living. You have to be able to work hard, even when you don't feel like it. This is where those goals come in handy again, if you know where you want to get to, you know what you have to do. The more work you put in, the more you improve your skills, the more likely you are to be lucky. Some artists do get genuine lucky breaks, but don't count on it happening to you. Consistent, smart work is a much better strategy, and you have complete control over it. 8. Developing your portfolio: Developing an illustration style is a long process. It has to be that way. It involves experimenting with different techniques and different materials. You have to learn not only creative techniques but technical skills too. It means you have to find out what you're good at and what you like doing. You need to research what works and what doesn't work in other artists work and try and learn from that. It means you have to show your work to people and ask them for their advice and then either incorporate or ignore it, because you also have to be able to discern good advice from bad advice. A unique illustration style is a very personal expression of your unique experience and taste. That doesn't happen overnight. You try all these different things, keep what works and get rid of what doesn't. It's a process of evolution. Studying illustration at college or university gives you the time and space to go through this process. But not everybody does it that way. And even for those that do, not all students graduate having found their style. For a commercial artist, you are not the only one that needs to like your style. If you're the only one that likes it, you're never gonna make any money. It's very important through this process to ask people that know what they're talking about for feedback. I can't help you find your unique style. I never found mine, but there are plenty of other great creative teachers that can guide you through it. It takes as long as it takes, but it should be an enjoyable process. If it's not, maybe you're in the wrong business. What I can help you with is applying your style in a strategic way to make your portfolio the best it can be. Most likely if you've been at college, you have a portfolio full of illustrations that are in different styles, which makes sense because you've spent the last three years experimenting and there's nothing wrong with that. But your next challenge will be taken the best parts of those styles and using them in a coherent, unified way. If you can get some feedback on which styles are working in, which aren't, you'll soon know which styles people like and which ones nobody has much to say about. You can't be too precious about things at this stage, you'll be developing so fast that you'll make something one day that you love and a few weeks later you won't like it anymore. That's a good thing. It's proof that you're improving. The difference between a student portfolio and a professional portfolio is that the student portfolio is full of experiments. And the professional portfolio shows the results of those experiments. When you're a beginner, you're not getting any real work from clients, so you have to make up your own projects. A lot of artists make whatever comes into their imagination with very little consideration for the job It's supposed to be doing and who it's for. The purpose of your portfolio is to attract clients and make them want to hire you. The only people you should be making your portfolio for are those potential clients. It's your shop window, so you've got to like what you put in there, but it's not for you. We have to try and think like a client. Think about what kinds of work they want to pay for. The easiest way to do that is to look at the kinds of work they already pay for. Look through some magazines, look through more established professional illustrators websites and see what they've been hired to create. If you look through 20 illustrators portfolios, you're bound to see some recurring themes and subjects. People, for example, will come up a lot. Clients have all different kinds need illustrations of people because they're selling products or services. And all those products and services are used by people. They need to show the interaction between the product and the person. You might find a lot of conceptual illustrations for science or finance magazines. And those kinds of subjects can often only be visualized by an illustration because they use abstract ideas and theoretical concepts. The good news is, a lot of the work in this part of the process has already been done for you. If you visit a few illustration agency websites, they will often have search categories with a list of different subjects you can search for. Those agencies haven't picked those subjects out of thin air. They've picked them because they know exactly what their clients are frequently looking for, and paying for. You can use those subjects as a kind of checklist for your portfolio. I'll let you do the research for yourself. But here are a few common subjects to get you started. Portraits, maps, animals, food and drink (my favorite), sport, (my least favorite), science, technology and transport. When you're setting yourself projects to fill up your portfolio, don't just rely on your own imagination. Look at what is being searched for regularly by paying clients and start ticking off some of these subjects. If you only make what you like, you might end up drawing a lot of dogs, who doesn't love dogs. But there's only a very small section of clients that are gonna pay for illustrations of dogs. If you have illustrations that relate to the eight subjects I just listed, you're opening up the possibilities of what kinds of clients can work with you massively. If you've got a couple of examples of food and drink in there, you could attract food magazines, recipe books, cooking blogs, restaurants, or packaging for just about any kind of food product you might find in a supermarket. If you don't have any examples in there, all of those clients are pretty much not going to be interested in your work. They could use their imagination and think about your style applied to their food product, but nobody's taking the time to do that for the most part, they're just hiring some other Illustrator that does have food examples in their portfolio. The strategy for your portfolio should be to apply your style to a range of different subjects. You might have a very clear idea of what you want to do with your illustration career. But at the start, the goal is really just getting your first clients. You can choose where you go with it later. But for now, you want to appeal to as many different kinds of clients as you can. If you only work on a few subjects that you are interested in, you are cutting out so many opportunities for different kinds of work. Maybe you think you don't want to work on illustrations about technology, for example, I would encourage you to challenge yourself and step out of your comfort zone and try it. Because if you don't try it, you'll never know what opportunities it could lead to. I worked in a studio with a very successful illustrator about ten years ago and he said that he drew some salmon once, and that illustration got him more work than any other illustration in his portfolio. He's not particularly interested in salmon, but he understood why it was a good idea to have it in his portfolio, and it served him very well. Keep your options open. Don't close yourself off to opportunities. Being a beginner is about taking all the opportunities you can and seeing where it leads. Just to recap, think about what a client wants to see in your portfolio. Look for the subjects that are frequently been commissioned and searched for. and apply your unique style to a range of popular subjects. 9. Evolving your style: Your style will evolve over time naturally because clients will recognize their favorite parts of your work and we'll ask you to make more work like that. Chances are, if you've got one aspect of your style that's working really well, more and more clients will want that thing, whatever it is, and you'll end up doing more of that thing and less of the other things that aren't so popular. Letting your clients tell you what you are good at is really useful information. And they tell you what you're good at by hiring you for that thing. However, longer-term, you could find yourself in a position where you're being hired for one thing over and over again. And then all of a sudden that thing goes out of fashion and you've got a portfolio full of work that nobody's hiring you for anymore. As well as listening to your clients, you have to actively review the direction of your portfolio and develop your style consciously to stay relevant. There are many artists that used to be famous for one thing, incredibly famous in some cases; The style goes out of fashion and the work dries up and they're starting from square one again. To avoid that, you need to carry on learning new things and adding new facets to your style. Some things won't take off and you can discard them, but you'll find that some of your clients will really like what you're trying out. Evolution happens by trial and error. There's a balance here that you have to navigate. it's your style, so you need to be happy with what you're making, but you need to make something that clients are going to pay for now, and can also adapt to changing trends. I'm a big believer in focusing on strengths rather than weaknesses. That's why I'm not trying to be an illustrator anymore. You could spend a lot of effort building up your weaknesses. so you have a nice, evenly spread out skillset, or you could find out what you're good at and try to be the best at that thing. Clients are generally looking for the best artist they can find in certain style. Working with a very well-balanced, medium talent, all-rounder is useful, but not exactly that exciting or inspiring for an art director. 10. Getting Feedback: Getting feedback on your work is simply asking other people for their opinion. It can be difficult and scary because you're putting yourself and your work out there for someone else to judge. If you want to be a professional illustrator though, that is part of the deal, You are not necessarily the best judge of what you are best at. You look at your own work through your own lens and your own experience or possibly lack of experience. You might like one of your illustrations because you know how much time you spent on it, or you enjoyed working on it. When you can see the effort that you put in, and you remember how much fun it was to make, when you feel really proud of the effort, it makes you like that illustration more. Equally you might have worked on a project that you hated working on. The deadline was too short, the client was making too many changes or you made some stupid time-wasting mistakes. You might not like that illustration because you remember all those negative things. In both cases. You are not seeing the work objectively. The things you like and are most proud of, might not be the most commercially attractive, And the project that you hated working on might be the best illustration in your portfolio. If you make one illustration and you'd like it a lot, you might make a few more like that or you might make 20 more and fill up your whole portfolio with work that is similar to that first image. But what if your judgment and assessment of that first image was inaccurate or unrealistic in some way? You'd end up with a whole portfolio of work made, following guidelines that you've made up, that are biased towards your own particular taste. You might be lucky and your taste aligns with what the market wants. But you might not, because the rest of the commercial world doesn't share your particular tastes in illustration style. Before you commit three months to working in a certain style, or on illustrations that you like, you need to get some outside assistance to help you see your work objectively. When you ask someone else for their opinion on your work, they can often see what you can't, and they don't see all the other context that affects your judgment. This is an essential part of developing your work. You can get feedback on your work from anybody, but some people are gonna be more useful than others in actually improving your work. Your family and friends are not likely to be objective enough, or experienced enough to give you much useful feedback. You can get feedback from your classmates and peers; They'll have very limited commercial experience if they're still learning too, but they'll definitely know things that you don't and they'll have different skills and interests within the subject. They can offer you, at the very least, a fresh pair of eyes. They might make suggestions that you wouldn't have thought of. You can, and should, post work here in the class for your classmates and myself to give you feedback on. And you should try to offer some constructive comments on other people's work too, is a very useful skill to develop. We're not looking for a pat on the back or thumbs up. What we want here is a community of people that want to help each other get better. And you do that by offering your genuine opinions on what's working and what isn't. You should also be asking your teachers for feedback if you're at college or university, even if they don't have much commercial experience themselves, their job is to help you develop, and they're good at it. Make the most of your teachers because you won't have access to them forever. As your teacher in this class, I'll be very happy to offer you my feedback and watch your skills develop. Asking professional illustrators for their feedback is an obvious option. They're in it, they're making money from their work, so they must be doing something right. But you don't need to go for the most famous and popular illustrators to learn something useful. It's probably better to ask people that are closer to your level for a couple of reasons: The super famous and popular illustrators, we'll get a lot of requests for this kind of thing, and being popular means that their time is probably limited. You might find it hard to get a response from people that are really high up the ladder. Also, if you ask an Illustrator that has been working for ten or 15 years about tips for beginners, they're not as closely connected with that stage of the career path. What they did ten or 15 years ago might not apply today. But someone that's only been in it for a couple of years can give you so much useful information on what they did, and what mistakes they made, probably, because it's all still fresh in their mind. You can also ask art directors and agents for their advice. I'm an agent and I love giving advice, clearly. I'm sure I'm not the only one. There are also other professionals that can give you great feedback on your work. The Association of Illustrators, for example, do a lot of that. There are a lot of places you can get feedback from. And the more you get, the more your work will improve, you can think of it like a multiplier. You could go from being a level one Illustrator to a level 50 illustrator, by yourself over a long period of time and learn from trial and error. You might get there eventually But if you've got a group of people that can give you advice on your work and make suggestions on how to improve it, then you will improve to a higher level than you could achieve by yourself, and it will happen a lot faster. Giving good feedback is a skill that not everybody has developed. If you ask an illustrator or a couple of years into their career for some advice on your work, chances are their experience of giving feedback on other people's work is very limited. So they might really want to help you, but because they're inexperienced, they might not give you very good advice. Teachers, art directors and agents do it a lot so they've had more practice, but even then not everybody is right 100% of the time, there's still a lot of personal opinion that informs their feedback. How do you know if the feedback you're getting is the right feedback? Well, like any good experiment, you need a large sample size. The more information you can get, the better you'll be able to see the right solution. If you ask one person for feedback on your work, they might be right, but they might not be, and you have no way of knowing which. The more experienced the person you ask, the more trust you can have in their opinion, but it's still just an opinion. If you ask 20 people, for example, for their opinion on your portfolio, you'll see patterns emerging. Some illustrations will attract a lot of comments and attention and some won't. You might find that 15 of that 20, like a particular illustration. That's a strong signal that you should do more work like that. There might be one illustration in your portfolio, but nobody comments on, and that could be a sign that it's probably not working that well. If two-thirds of the people you ask, say you should try drawing your characters a bit differently, Maybe you should? But if just one person tells you that they don't like the colors that you use, and everybody else thinks your colors are fine you should probably ignore that. it's just that person's particular tastes doesn't match yours. It doesn't mean they're trying to mislead you, is just their opinion. When you're at the start of your illustration career, you have the time to do this kind of thing. Ask as many people as you can and don't pay too much attention to any one piece of feedback, unless it really seems to make sense to you, but instead, look for trends and patterns in what people are saying. If the majority say one thing, it's a good indicator that it would be good feedback to follow. This is going to be a really powerful way to improve your work quickly. At the same time you're building your network and you getting used to putting your work out there into the world for people to comment on which you're going to have to do at some point anyway, if you want to make some money. 11. Your website: Your website is your portfolio. The only time you should consider making a printed portfolio is if a client asks you for one, and they probably won't. Your website is where you show your best stuff to attract customers. I have a few thoughts on websites that I'll share with you here. This is my personal preference, Others might disagree with me, but I like to focus on the practical function of your website. The first thing is to keep it simple. You don't need an expensive, complicated website, especially at the start, spending a lot of money on something like this before you're actually making money from your illustration work is not worth it, I will return to that idea in the self-promotion chapter. You can always improve it later, but your website has a very simple job to do and that's to present your work and your contact details. Everything else is non-essential, in my opinion. Go for quality over quantity. You probably need at least ten of your best images on there to give people a good overview of what you can do, but after that, there is no magic number of how many images you should include, but just include the best stuff. Some people will say that you're only as good as the worst image in your portfolio. I don't necessarily agree with that, but I wouldn't say all killer, no filler is a good rule of thumb. Make your landing page a grid of your illustrations so clients can see them all right there as soon as they land on the page, don't add any unnecessary barriers between the viewer and the work. No entrance pages or animated intros. Let people see the work as easily and as quickly as possible, because art directors are busy, they don't have time to mess around. The more work they have to do, and the more clicks they have to make, the less likely it is that they're going to do it. Don't hide projects behind thumbnails because people might not click through and look at them. Get all your good stuff out there in the open on the front page so they can't avoid seeing it, even if they're only on your website for a few seconds. When it comes to your About page, think about what client actually wants to know. If you're a new artist, they probably don't want to know all that much about your life story to be honest. You don't want to present yourself as a beginner, even if you are. Clients, just want to know if you can be trusted to work professionally, where you are and how to contact you. That's pretty much it. It's normal to have a few lines about yourself, but you don't need to overdo it. If you've got a client list, add it on that. If not, no problem. You also don't need big written descriptions of each illustration and what it was made for. Clients aren't hiring you for your writing ability. If you have to explain your illustrations too much, they're not doing their job properly. A line or two about how the illustration solved a particular problem is more than enough. Your website doesn't have to be perfect. It only has to be good enough to get you hired. Worry about all the nice to have elements of a website later once you're making some money. Those kinds of things don't have a big effect on if somebody hires you. Let the work speak for itself. Let it be the star of the show and the rest of the website is fine. Just doing It's very simple job in presenting the work clearly. 12. How to find clients: Finding potential new clients is actually quite easy. It just requires a bit of research. Persuading them to work with you is a different story, but we'll go through this process. And if you'll regularly improving your portfolio in a strategic way, it should only be a matter of time. We're going to use magazines as the example. As it's the most common way for illustrators to find their way into freelance work. But this process can be repeated for different kinds of clients too. The first thing I want to say is there are thousands of magazines out there that could potentially hire you. Most of them you've probably never heard of. The ones that you have heard of the big names like The Washington Post, the New York Times, and The New Yorker, for example. They all use illustration, but every new Illustrator that starts sending their work out there into the world is sending their work to these big name clients. There's a ton of competition. They can take their pick, basically, of who they want to work with. Now these names would look great on your client list, but the big names aren't necessarily the best paying clients, and you're competing with every other Illustrator out there. I'm not saying you shouldn't get in touch with them, but those big names will come later. What you should be focused on at this point is getting experience and getting paid. If you only get in touch with big recognizable names, then you're wandering into luck territory. Maybe they'll see your work among the thousands of other applicants, but you might get lost in the crowd. If it were me, I'd be doing my best to find less well-known magazines. The art directors at those magazines aren't getting thousands of illustrators getting in touch with them every year. You've got a much better shot of reaching the right person and making a good impression. If I'm an art director and I have 100 illustrated as a week getting in touch with me. I don't have the time to give every one of them my full attention. I've got other things to do. But if I only got a few emails like that, it's gonna be much easier, and more enjoyable, for me to look at those artists websites and give them a fair shot. The work has still got to be good to make an impression, but you're much less likely to be ignored if you go for the clients that aren't so insanely popular. Obviously not every magazine uses illustration. If you find 100 magazines that you want to get in touch with and none of them actually hire illustrators, you've wasted your time. So you've got to know that they use illustration first. The way I would find clients if I were a new Illustrator today takes care of that problem without too much hard work. Every client you'll find using this strategy, you can be sure they definitely use illustration. So how did you do it? Well, I'm reasonably confident that any of you want to be illustrators are following a whole bunch of them on Instagram or wherever else. Even if you're not, illustrators are very easy to find online. And do you know what most of their websites have in common? They tell you who they've worked for! Every client worth a **** is going to be on their client list alongside each illustration. No doubt you'll see a lot of the big names in there but if you spend a couple of hours looking through Illustrators Instagram feeds and website, which you're probably doing anyway, and just make a note of the names of the clients listed. You can find yourself a 100 new clients to get in touch with, easy. Some of you might have heard of, but a lot you won't have. If you live in the UK, chances are, you'll have no idea what kinds of magazines that have in the U.S. or France or Germany. But if you look at who a German Illustrator is working for regularly, you'll find a goldmine of potential clients that you wouldn't know about otherwise. If you're only looking at really popular illustrator's websites, they're more likely to be working for the big names you already know, or at least they're more likely to publicize those big names. But if you look at newer, less established illustrators, you'll see all of the different regional and independent clients that they've been lucky enough to work with. And those are the clients that hire newer illustrators. Some of these artists might even be tagging the art directors in their Instagram posts, and that makes the next part much easier. So let's assume that you can get list together of 30 magazines you've never heard of in a couple of hours research. You put their names into a spreadsheet. That's a great start, you already know they use illustration, but not every client on this list is gonna be a good fit for you and your work. You could just chance it and send your work and hope for the best, but then you're not being strategic. You are relying on luck again, you might be wasting your own time, not to mention their's. You've got to narrow down this long-list to clients that use your kind of illustration. A few minutes on their website, social media, or on a Google image search should show you the kinds of illustrations they use regularly. If it's a magazine about countryside farming, for example, and they use quite traditional watercolor, sketchy illustrations and you make loud vector illustrations, then you can move on. Don't waste your time and don't waste theirs. You can take them off the list. Since you're on their website, see if you can find the name of their art director. They're mostly easy to find, with email addresses sometimes. Sometimes you have to do a little bit more detective work. You might type the name of the magazine into Google alongside 'art director' or 'designe'r or 'creative director', use your imagination. Often you'll find a LinkedIn profile that tells you the name of the person that you need. As a side note here, I don't think you should ever get in touch with these art directors via their personal social media pages. Linkedin included. Illustrator's bombarding their personal inboxes is probably not what they want, and likely to have the opposite effect you want. Your goal here is to find their professional email address, at the magazine that you want to work for. If you can't find the email, but you have found the name, call up the magazine and ask for the email address for the art director. If they ask why you want to say you're an illustrator, is perfectly acceptable to do that. Now, after a few hours work, you've got a list of brand new potential clients. You know they use illustration and more importantly, your kind of illustration. You've also got the name and email address of the art director. That is a very productive afternoon's work. 13. Getting in touch with clients: Now you've got your list of verified potential clients. It's time to get in touch, with a personalized introduction to you and your work. If you find yourself sending the same blanket email to multiple clients, stop. That's not personalized, is lazy, and they can tell. That's not to say you can't prepare a template email to send out to clients that you would adjust for each person. That would be a smart thing to do, that will save you time. Ideally, you're personalizing your e-mail with the art directors name. Maybe a short sentence about why you'd like to work with the magazine or something like that. Maybe you think and you'd be a great fit for their food section. or you could tell them that you really liked a cover design from a previous issue. Whatever it is It just shows that you've done a bit of research. The most important thing to personalize is the examples of work you send to them. If you've developed your portfolio in a strategic way, then you'll have a range of subjects illustrated in your style. You can send appropriate work to the magazine you're getting in touch with. It's unreasonable to think that you'll have examples of every different subject, but you can use your judgment. There's probably little use in sending illustrations of technology subjects to a gardening magazine. But maybe sending food illustrations or animals wouldn't be so far out of their area of interest. Here's what I think will get you the best results: A friendly greeting. It doesn't have to be too formal. An introduction to who you are and what you do. We don't need a life story, just that you're an illustrator and that you'd like to show them some of your work, A link to your website if they'd like to see more. And two to three web resolution images in the body of the email. You're not sending huge print resolution images, but you're not sending blurry, low-quality images or PDFs either. If you only send a link to your website, you're not catching anybody's attention. They might click the link, they might not. But if you've got images in the e-mail itself as soon as they open the email, they can't avoid seeing them. They're right there grabbing their attention. If you send a link to download a folder with your work in it, or zip file with images in there, you're putting a barrier up between your work and the art directors eyes. They have to take an extra step to see your work. And they might not take that extra step if you don't capture their attention with some great illustrations. Make it as easy as possible for these people to see your work. That's all you need. It's very simple, it's very quick. It's not desperate, it's professional, but friendly, is helpful. It's a nice e-mail to receive. Once your portfolio is in a good place and it doesn't have to be perfect, You can repeat this process of finding, and getting in touch with clients as part of your normal day's work. Here comes the hard part: Waiting, being rejected; possibly, being ignored; almost definitely. Don't expect to get 50 replies to 50 emails. It ain't gonna happen. People are busy. If they like your work, they might bookmark it for future use. If they don't like it, they'll likely just ignore it. You really have no way of knowing what kind of impression you've made most of the time. But this is not something you do once and just sit back and wait for the jobs to roll in. This process should be just as much a part of your day-to-day work as making new illustrations is. It's hard to get over the negative feelings of being ignored. But if you assume that out of 50 emails you send, you won't get a single reply, then anything you do get back is going to be a nice surprise. Artists are often scared of this part of the job, it's outside their comfort zone. They don't teach it in universities. But let me tell you, this part of the job is absolutely essential to get in your first clients. Out of those 50 emails you've sent, some of them probably aren't going to like your work, That's fine. If they ask you not to send anymore e-mails, don't. It's nothing personal. It's just not a good fit. But chances are they won't do that. For anyone that you email, make a note in your spreadsheet and set yourself a reminder to get in touch with them again in three to six months. When you do get in touch, make sure you're sending them new work. Not the same images. That shows that you are constantly developing, improving, and working on new things. And you're enthusiastic. There's nothing annoying about sending an art director well-considered email. Don't worry about that. If your work is good and suitable for their magazine, you're actually doing them a favor by showing it to them. It means they don't have to go out and search for it. When you following up with clients who've already been in touch with, you could try asking for some feedback on your work. It might encourage them to send you a reply. Even if they can't hire you right now, if you can get some feedback for free, that's a win, There's a big difference between being annoying and being persistent, annoying would be sending an impersonal email every month with the same images, or adding these art directors to your mailing list without their permission. But if you get in touch every few months and you show new work and show your enthusiasm for working with them. That's a very positive thing. You've been persistent in a professional way. One of the artists I work with submitted her work for representation five years in a row. It took a **** of a lot of persistence and motivation for her to do that, but it did pay off eventually. If you can find even 20 new potential clients per week by doing a few hours of research. And you keep an organized spreadsheet, in six months. You've got a list of 500 people that you can e-mail on a regular basis and show them what you've been working on. In my mind, there are only two things you need to focus your attention on when you're starting out as an illustrator. Make new work and to get in touch with clients to get a job. Now this is the hard stuff. making work and improving your skills takes time and getting in touch with clients requires a lot of patience and a thick skin. But these are without a doubt, the most important parts of what you should be doing. Posting work on Instagram and Behance and dribbble, and Twitter is easy, it's passive. It relies on clients finding you by chance. You could spend six months just working on your social media presence to make it the best it can be. And at the end of it, still not have a paying client. The hard part of getting in touch with clients regularly is proactive, and it's gonna get better results. The faster you can get your first paying clients, the better, nothing is going to motivate you as much as getting that kind of validation that someone wants to pay for your work. The more of this proactive hustling you can do, the faster it'll happen. It's not the most fun part of the job. But even if you set aside the creative work for a week and just did this part, think about how many clients you could find to show your work to. Make this a part of your weekly routine or even your daily routine, 30 minutes or client research a day will really add up. And you won't need to do this forever. Once you start finding your real clients, it gets easier. One thing leads to another. When you have quiet periods in the future, you've already done the hard work of making a list of these art directors. You can send off some emails whenever you like. And then you'll be sending real client work to them, which is even more likely to make them feel good about hiring you. Now, if you do this consistently for a few months and you don't get a single reply or any feedback. You might have to admit to yourself that the quality of the work isn't high enough yet. That can be very disheartening, but it is useful information. You'll know then you should refocus your attention on improving your skills, adding in some new things to your portfolio. Maybe getting your portfolio reviewed by someone that knows what they're talking about. Don't let it put you off. It's just a hurdle that you have to get over. Don't be too precious or proud. If you really want it, you have to commit to improving even when it's hard and disappointing. 14. Self promotion: At the start of your career, the best self-promotion is the cheapest and the quickest. And that's Email. Instagram is cheap, but it's not quick to gain a following and get your work seen by the right people sending out printed postcards. I'll promotional items is expensive and it takes longer to make it and print it and post it. Most of those things end up in the bin eventually. I have a few prints and things from artists that I've kept, but the ones that don't like, I don't keep them around, especially after the pandemic. You don't even know if a lot of the people who you send these things to are even in their offices, or they're working from home, people might not see them, but they'll definitely see an e-mail. You should be spending as little money as possible on promoting yourself until you on making regular money from illustration. I know that seems counter-intuitive, but the more money you save at the beginning, the longer you can survive without having to give up on your dreams and get normal job. Printed items can be a nice gift to give to clients once you know your work is good. And you've got some cash that you can invest in marketing yourself. At the start, you've got no money, but you've got plenty of time because you don't have many clients. Spend your time wisely rather than your money and think about those kinds of things later down the line. Using services like Illustration, directory books, or paying for lists of client contact details can seem like a shortcut to getting work. They're definitely advertised as an investment, but they are hugely expensive and it doesn't make sense to pay for those until you know your work is commercially viable. There are plenty of artists in those books that have paid a lot of money to be in there, and their work is nowhere near good enough. They've wasted their money. I've never had massive success with those kinds of things anyway, and I've used them through the agency and as a freelance illustrator, I'm sure it can be useful later on in your career as part of your marketing strategy, but not at the start. Don't waste your money. 15. Social Media: Social media is an important tool for illustrators, but that's all it is, a tool. It shouldn't be the thing that you spend most of your time on. There are illustrators that do amazing work through their Instagram profile, but they are an exception. It takes a long time to get to that level where you could be an influencer. And you don't get to that stage without doing the client work first. Getting paid to illustrate for real clients should be the priority, not getting 50,000 Instagram followers. Your following will come naturally as a byproduct of you being successful in finding and working with real-life clients. 1000 Instagram followers doesn't equal money in your bank. You don't need to be on every social media platform. It's a waste of time. Pick one or two to focus on, learn how they work and what works on each platform and post regularly. You should start early with your illustration Instagram and post regularly once you do have a decent following, your Instagram profile is potentially going to be more valuable than your website because art directors can follow you there. Personally I really like to be able to scroll back through an artist feed to see their progression. The platforms that make most sense for Illustrators are the image-based ones. Instagram and Dribbble are probably the best options. I'm sure there are more at this point that I don't even know about. Having a portfolio on Behance is pretty good too. If you really want to save some money at Behance profile would be a good substitute for your own website. It looks good and it's free. 16. Being professional: When you're promoting yourself, whether that's simply emailing a client or posting on social media. Remember to be professional and try to think like a business. It's great to show your personality, especially on social media, but there's a line between personal and professional that you shouldn't confuse once you're out there working on your career, you want it to be about the work. Sharing your holiday snaps on your illustration Instagram feed is irrelevant. Think about what a client wants to see in order to decide whether or not to hire you. That's your finished illustrations and maybe some of your process. Being professional more generally means being organized, being consistent, being reliable, working hard, and working smart. You have a lot of opportunities to make a first impression as an Illustrator. Every time you send an email to a client you're hoping to work for, that's a fresh start. But once you get that first job with a client, the way you work on that project will be the impression that lasts. Here's some things that you want to take seriously. Don't miss deadlines. If you need more time, ask for it early in the project, not on the deadline day. Don't over-promise. Be realistic about what you can deliver and know your limits. If you can't do something for whatever reason, as tempting as it might be, don't say you can and hope for the best. Keep your files organized. Don't lose things. That goes for the things the client sends you, as well as the things that you make and it even goes to the layers in your Photoshop files. being organized saves time, which means you can be more productive. Ask questions. if you need to know something or you don't understand something, ask. Professionals don't guess. There's nothing wrong with asking what something means or asking for more direction. It's better than the alternative, which is making something that the client doesn't want. Plan for problems. Projects change. Sometimes the client changes the brief halfway through and you have to adapt. Keep your files in layers, work a little bit bigger than you need to. Keep backups of your work, follow instructions, stick to the brief. This doesn't mean you shouldn't offer your opinions or ideas, but the illustrations you might have a job to do, make sure they're doing them well. Handle mistakes like a professional. Everybody makes mistakes. If you do, admit it, offer solutions, don't sweep it under the rug. Professionals make mistakes all the time. It's how they handle them that makes a difference. Think like a business, keep your finances in order. I read a small business book and then read another one. Treat illustration like your career, not your hobby. Learn about all the boring bits as well as the creative bits. All the different parts of the job have to work together. Creative talent without any business sense isn't gonna get you very far. 17. Final thoughts: I want the gap between you finding your style and getting your first paid projects to be as short as possible. I hope this course can get you from A to B efficiently and cheaply. The process isn't particularly sexy, but it works. We know you've essentially got two main tasks. Make new work and find new clients. At the start, you'll be spending most of your time making new work but as you grow your portfolio, that balance will tip over into more and more finding clients to work with. Your third task is going to be getting feedback on your work along the way, which will help you improve. There are so many nonessential tasks that you could be doing in this time and a lot of people do, but it just slows down the process. There's plenty of time for those nice to have, but non-essential things later down the line, once you're making money from illustration, getting into a routine of learning new skills, making new work, analyzing what works and what doesn't, and not being too precious about letting things go is a great first step. The next step means putting yourself out there. The scary bit. Get an outside perspective and as much feedback as you can and the quality of your work will skyrocket. Remember, you are probably not the best judge of what you are best at. Don't wait for your portfolio to be perfect before you start showing it to people because it never will be if it's only you that seen it. The only way it's going to be the best it can be, from a commercial perspective, is if you've responded to feedback that you've got along the way. If you haven't already, feel free to post some of you work here, and this can be your first step in getting some constructive feedback on your work. I haven't talked about agents in this course because agents aren't really for beginners. You might think you can skip the scary part of getting in touch with clients yourself by getting an agent, but it doesn't work like that because 99% of the time an agent isn't going to be interested in an illustrator that hasn't been able to find themself any work. They need to know you're a professional. Finding an agent comes later when you've got a few clients under your belt, you've proved yourself and you're ready to take on bigger and better projects. I'm looking forward to seeing your work out there in the real-world sometime very soon. Thanks for watching.