Transcripts
1. Intro: Hello. My name is Kendyll Hillegas and I'm a full-time freelance illustrator. As a commercial artist, I work with clients large and small on everything from a apparel to editorial to packaging. It's taken years, but I've built my business up so that I'm not just surviving as an artist, but thriving. Regularly working with clients like the Wall Street Journal and Real Simple, as well as major national and international food brands. While it may sound great and look rosy from the outside, it was a long, challenging road to get here. I'm not a natural at all with the art and business stuff. When I graduated from school, I had absolutely no idea how to actually make a career as an artist. I had some basic art skills and I could draw, and I was creative, but I didn't really have much direction or clarity beyond that. It took years of painful struggle and figuring things out on my own to turn my passion into a fulfilling career. So if you're in that same boat, if you have some creative and artistic skills and are interested in pursuing art as a vocation where you actually make money, but you're not really sure what to do next or how to turn it into a business, this class is for you. This will be a survey course, which means that we'll have a broad overview of the 10 most important practical businessy things that are often not taught in art school. So we'll tackle everything from the day-to-day skills needed to run an art business to the foundational ones needed to build it up like portfolios, customer service, and finding your niche. So many artists cringe when they hear the word business, and thinking about invoices or professional industry standards or marketing makes them want to run and hide their head under a pillow. But I'm here to tell you that it's really not that bad and that building a successful creative career is totally possible. In this course, I'll do my best to demystify even the tabooest of art business subjects so that afterwards you will have a solid foundational overview of some of the most important aspects of running a successful art business. Please keep in mind that we are taking on a lot in this class. I will cover what I view as the most important and vital things to know for getting your art business established. But there will still be more to learn. Since I'm a commercial artist and illustrator myself, this course is specifically geared towards other artists and illustrators. It's also best suited towards people who have a solid grasp on their actual artistic skills and style. So if you're still learning to draw or paint or struggling to find your style, I'd recommend that you switch to one of my other classes and focus on your technical artistic skill first, before putting too much energy into the business side. There will be plenty of time for that later. But if you're at a more intermediate level and have a fairly consistent developing style and feel ready to start transitioning to working professionally, then let's dive in.
2. How to Tell When Your Portfolio is at a Professional Level: Lesson 1, how to tell when my portfolio is at a professional level. Whether you're a new grad or a self-taught artist, it can be tough to know when you're ready to make the leap to the professional level. As creative types, we tend to question our abilities and struggle with self-doubt. A question I personally wrestled with and hear all the time is how can I know if my work is at a professional level? Regardless of style and commercial illustration, professional level work shares three common characteristics. Number one, quality; it displays clear skill and craft regardless of the style. Number two, quantity; the skill and style show consistency across the portfolio. Number three, strategy; the creator has given some real thought to how and where their work might fit in the market. Now let's talk about how these three characteristics actually play out in real life by talking about three phases of an artistic career. The sprout stage, the growth stage, and the bloom stage. I hear via email and DMs from a lot of beginning artists who want to pursue a creative career and are frustrated that they're not finding any attraction. They make personal projects, they share them online, they do the things that they've been told to do, and yet they don't get hired or commissioned and this is understandably very frustrating. Whenever I hear from these folks and I take a look at their work, once I drill down, I find that at least one of those three characteristics I mentioned is missing. Either their work isn't up to a professional quality, their work isn't at a professional quantity, or their work isn't focused and aimed at any particular market. If scenario number one is true and their work isn't up to a professional quality yet, we'll consider this creative person at the sprout stage. A sprout artist may have decent basic skills and know how to use tools and supplies. They're not really a beginner, but they probably still spend a lot of time experimenting, trying out different approaches, and they likely lack a clear focus in their work. Depending on their personality, a sprout artists may be feeling a bit lost and frustrated with not being able to produce what they want or they may be just really having fun and enjoying the process of experimentation. If quantity or portfolio size is the issue, we can consider this person at the growth stage. A growth stage artist is probably beginning to zero in on a style, really hone in on that. Maybe even focusing on specific subjects or a certain type of media, and they're almost definitely investing serious time on a regular basis and really dropping in some deep roots to their creative practice. There will be emerging consistent themes and a cohesive look and feel to their work. At this point, they probably have a larger body of art and they may even be landing a paying client here or there. Lastly, our bloom stage creative person looks similar to the growth stage person, but in addition to that, larger, skilled and consistent portfolio, they are beginning to direct their focus in specific areas to fit a clear market need. They're always growing even in that bloom stage, but their work now has not only a distinct look and feel, but also a really clear aim. At this point, if they've not already, they should really begin actively promoting their work. For me when I was in art school, I learned a lot and my art skills improved, but once I graduated, I still wasn't producing a professional level of art work and that's not at all uncommon. My work was all over the place. I didn't know how to motivate myself effectively and I really struggled to invest big chunks of time in my work. I was constantly frustrated and disappointed in myself and my art. Essentially without knowing it, I was in the sprout stage. This is certainly not the case for everyone, but many art school grads and self-taught artists are in the same boat. If you're regularly not sure what to draw or you feel anxiety about drawing, or you're having a hard time motivating yourself to make work, or you often find yourself thinking, "I just need to get a client and then I'll be motivated to draw", you may be in the sprout stage too. Recommendations for the sprout stage. If you are in this stage of your creative journey, your main goal should be to find the thing, whether it's the style, the subject, the media, the story, the idea that finding that thing that you're so excited about and you feel so connected to that you can easily spend hours and hours and hours, the hours and hours and hours that it takes to get your skills and quality of work up to a professional level. Basically you need to work on finding your style first, which I consider like growing your root system. You can absolutely still take this class, but if you're in the sprout stage, my honest recommendation would be to pause this course and go take my other class, the scientific method for artists instead. It's all about finding your style by finding that thing that's going to motivate and inspire you to invest the time that it takes to develop a personal style. Now, if you already feel driven and motivated to create work and can sit down and gladly spend hours, but your work isn't consistent yet or you don't have a large amount of it, you may be transitioning from the sprout stage to the growth stage. Some growth stage recommendations. If you're in this phase, your main goal is to really deepen your creative roots by making a large, consistent body of work. Sprout stage aims for quality or health to use a plain metaphor. Growth stage aims for quality and quantity. At this point it's about health and size. Now, you may be asking, how large is large? How many pieces? How will I know if my portfolio is consistent enough? Again, there is quite a bit of subjectivity here, but let's tackle this with a story. My first commercial assignment for packaging came after I had been drawing every day for close to a year. It was for a pretzel package and by the time the client contacted me, I had already drawn around 10 different bread and cracker items including a pretzel. That's not counting the dozens of other types of food and other categories like animals or botanicals that I was working on at the time. If you find yourself thinking, "Hey, I do an ice cream cone a couple of times, why isn't anyone hiring me to draw ice cream", or "I've drawn food like 10 times, why isn't anyone hiring me to draw food?" You will likely need to drill down into more specific categories and themes within food or botanicals, or landscapes, interiors, or whatever your category is, and draw those things many, many times over. When you are in this phase, I recommend that you do not spend a ton of time on postcards, cold emailing, setting up collaborations, getting super strategic with social media. You can by all means share your work and I encourage you to share your process and get familiar with basic business practices. This class is a great start. But until then, until you actually have that large consistent body of polished work, it may be tough to attract commercial clients and growth as an artist should still be your main goal. Finally, stage 3, the bloom stage. Now, if you have a large consistent body of work and you connect with everything I mentioned about the growth stage, but you still haven't quite hit your stride with actually landing clients. Maybe you've had a few here and there, but it's nothing consistent, you may be transitioning from the growth stage into the bloom stage. Recommendations for the bloom stage. Bloom stage artists or bloomers should continue to focus on everything they did in the growth stage, in terms of regularly making quality work and adding it to their growing portfolio. They should also start trying to actively promote their work by peeling off a small percentage of their art time, maybe 25 percent to start to put towards researching their market niche and positioning themselves within it through the creation of even more work and the presentation of their existing work. Not to sound like a broken record, but this class is really best suited for late growers and bloomers as most of the topics we'll tackle are things that they need to focus on. Even if you have a lot of freedom to spend time working on your art career, we all have limited hours in the day, so it's vital to spend your time strategically and appropriately for the stage that you're actually in. The assignment for this lesson is to figure out what stage you're in. You probably already have a good sense of where you are based off of my descriptions. But if you need a little more help or if you're like me and you just enjoy taking quizzes, you can look in the class project section for the Lesson 1 assignment and take the quiz. Then I encourage you to introduce yourself by creating a class project, you can upload a piece of your work or a picture of yourself and let us know what phase you're in.
3. How to Identify Your Market & Niche: Lesson two. How to identify your market and niche. Now that we have a good sense about portfolio maturity, and when a portfolio is at a pro-level, it's time to talk about another key piece of the puzzle for turning your art into a career: Identifying and positioning your work within a market, which is the main challenge for bloomers. If you're going to make a living out of your creativity, you will at some point have to consider how your creativity and skill can be monetized. Identifying your market will help you decide how to strategically pursue making money from your art. Now, we can't move forward here within this subject without acknowledging that this topic or really any discussion of money and art together can be a real taboo in the art world. There are many artists who really hate even considering how their art could be used to make money. They want to create it out of a pure authenticity without even considering the money question before they make the work. To those artists I would say this: If you want to make a reliable living from your creative work beyond just hoping for some billionaire art collector to decide to be your patron, you will need to consider other values, other things that are important to you other than just pure authenticity. I like to think about the process of finding your market niche and imagining how your art could be used within it or what need it could fill as the development of empathy. Yes, of course, you can and should speak from your authentic voice and style as a creator, but in order to make this an actual career, you will also at the same time have to grow your empathy towards the people who will pay you for your work. Now, I think some creative people actually have a different response to the money question, and they're eager to turn their passion into a profit from day one. Now, that's great at one level but to those artists I would say this: Focusing on the profit part too early can be just as problematic as refusing to acknowledge it at all. It's like deciding you want to run a lemonade stand before finding out whether you actually enjoy the process of making lemonade. For example, maybe you like drinking lemonade or I'm making it on occasion in small quantities for your family and friends, but what you really love to do, what ends up really lighting you up inside and getting you out of bed day in and day out is actually making the cookies that you sell off the lemonade stand, not making the lemonade itself. There's no way to know the answer to this question until you try it out really thoroughly. If you want to have a fulfilling creative career, I'd advise you to avoid spending much time on market research in the beginning until you're well through the sprout stage and have a really clear idea of what you are passionate about and motivated by, and what process you actually enjoy engaging in. If you're in the sprout stage, try to focus on following your passion first until your skills are honed and really well-developed. But if you're a grower or a bloomer and you're ready to start identifying your market, here are some key initial questions. Number 1, where does your art fit? This is a pretty simple straightforward question. Look around and find the art and artists whose work is similar to yours, whether it's in style, in subject, in content. Where are they working? Who is actually buying their work? This should give you a rough idea of where you might fit in the larger market. Question number 2. Are you a business-to-business artist or a business-to-customer artist? Basically what this means is, do you sell your work directly to the customer, the person who's going to use your art themselves, or do you sell your work to a business who will use that illustration, that artwork, to promote, sell, build up their own business? A few other questions to help you discern whether you're a business-to-business artists or business-to-customer artist. Do you want to have total control over your work? Do you want to develop your own products like graphic novels, stickers, art prints, mugs, and sell them directly to your fan base, to your customers? Do a lot of people seem to really relate to your work or find it shareable, or would you maybe consider yourself more of a fine artist, i.e, you take commissions or you sell at galleries? If you answered yes to any of these questions, you may be a business-to-customer artist or a B2C artist, meaning that you create your work directly for your customers. Your customers are your audience. On the other hand, for business-to-business artists, do you want to have your work on products designed by someone else, or in books or magazines? Do you want to work with clients and companies and brands? Are you good at taking feedback and open to listening to the input of others when it comes to your work? Are you willing to use your artistic skill to execute someone else's idea? If you answered yes to any of these, you may be more of a business-to-business artists, meaning you create work for businesses to use and help sell whatever it is they're selling, or to make their products look good, or to tell a better story, et cetera. In that case, the business owners and the art directors who work with them and who hire you are your audience. Now, this isn't a fixed category split by any means. Many artists start out as business-to-customer artists and then go B2B, or vice versa. Plenty of artists are both at the same time, but it's a good idea to focus more on one initially since they do have different processes. Next, after considering whether you're a B2B artist or a B2C artist, try to drill down even further and figure out what industry your work fits into. Now some of this, of course, will be decided by whether you're a B2B or B2C since they have different industries, but broadly you could think of industry like the country that your work lives in. It could be fine art, illustration, animation, surface design products, et cetera. Next after industry, what market does your work connect with? The market is like the state within the country. For example, some markets within the industry of illustration would be children's book, editorial, packaging. Lastly, what niche? The niche is like the city, drilling down even further into that level of detail. Some niche examples would be food, fashion portraits, animals. Niche can also include the style or media that you use, so realism, flat, fanciful, fun, et cetera. These questions are all on the class projects section by the way so no need to furiously take notes here. As you work through the industry market niche questions, it's natural to start out really broad, or to find it difficult to narrow yourself down, especially if you're earlier on in your career. For example, as someone who illustrates a lot of food for magazines, and packaging, and advertising, I am often asked how to break into food illustration. This is not a simple answer because food illustration isn't specific enough. Food illustration could be done as a business-to-business artist or a business-to-customer artist, it could be private commissions, it could be recipe illustration, it could be editorial illustration, or packaging, or surface pattern, or cookbooks, or a parallel, or advertising. It could have a million different styles, so you need to get as specific as possible when identifying your industry market niche. This will make it easier to break into, and will make it more clear to you when you've had a win or success, or when you're ready to move on. If your work could fit into several different niches, focus on developing one at a time. That's going to be a theme here one thing at a time. You can choose the first one based off of a lots of different criteria. You could, of course, pick the low-hanging fruit first, whichever niche seems the easiest, you could choose the most exciting first, the one that you feel the most passionate about and deeply aligned with, or you could pick the one that makes the next one easier. Sometimes breaking into one niche can make the one after that more simple. Now, if you find that you're feeling hamstrung by having to decide, take the pressure off and remind yourself that this is all one big experiment, and you will likely change your mind and your focus several times over the next few months and dozens of times throughout your career. Give yourself permission to choose the wrong niche. It will all be okay even if you do. Your assignment. Use the reflection questions we went over to identify an industry market niche and whether you're a business-to-business artist or a business-to-customer artist. Remember once again, you are not choosing your ultimate forever destiny, you're picking something to focus on for a time. Think a 1-6 month window initially. Then please share what you find out from the questions in your class project, as well as any other thoughts that you have on the process.
4. How to Price Your Illustration: Lesson 3, How to Price Work? Moving on to everyone's favorite topic, Pricing. Before we dive in a quick disclaimer; pricing in illustration and art is notoriously complex and it varies depending on everything from the skill and the style, and the experience of the artist, to the size and influence of the client, to the particular industry market niche. I'm going to do my best to break things down as simply as possible, but bear in mind that I'll be coming to this discussion with the lens of a commercial artist who specializes in advertising, packaging in a tutorial illustration. My experience in other niches such as licensing, surface pattern, medical, or even children's book is really limited. If you're heading into something super specialized like animation or medical illustration, take all of this as a starting point and do a bit more research tailored to your industry. Also, since I live in the US, everything I'm going to talk about will be in USD. Let's go ahead and get to it. For freelancers there are two basic approaches, day and hourly rates and value-based or flat rates. Hourly rate pricing uses a formula that takes into account the hours that you work in a year, the unpaid or admin work that is included in that, expenses, cost of living, any overhead that you have for your business, profit margin, etc. I'll put a basic formula for figuring out your hourly rate in the class projects section. Whether or not you use it regularly as a part of your pricing schema, it's a good idea to have a sense of your hourly rate. There are some fields in art where an hourly rate is very commonly used or it's even standard. One example I know is animation and many artists will find it helpful too when it comes to pricing commissions or finished paintings, just to have a good sense of what their hourly rate is. Commercial illustrators like me, who may not often use an hourly rate will still need to disclose one in their contract should any unforeseen changes in the project arise. For example additional edits that weren't included in the base pricing and we'll talk all about that in the contract section. In general, unless they're in a field where hourly pricing is standard, I don't recommend that most artists use it as their sole pricing structure. Value-based or flat rate pricing is my preferred method and it's definitely more standard for commercial illustration. This pricing takes into account the base fee that you would need to make in order to make the creation of the peace worthwhile, which includes, of course, the time required, the sides of the piece, the level of detail, the medium used, your experience, etc., and augments that number by accounting for the value that the work will bring to the client. Essentially, the client pays you to make the work, your base fee, plus the right to use the work in a specific way. This all gets rolled into one flat rate that's easy for the client to understand and to budget for. Flat rate pricing is standard across many market niches, including editorial, children's book, packaging, advertising, scientific and medical, basically most niche's in art and illustration. Let's unpack a little flat rate pricing example. Let's say I make a realistic 5 by 7 illustration of an apple. If it's used for a magazine, maybe it will get used as a spot illustration. A spot illustration is an illustration that's used within the context of the text in a page layout. If it's for a greeting card or a surface pattern, it will likely get used more broadly, probably as a prominent feature of the product. If it's for a logo or for packaging, it will be used heavily, prominently and frequently to help sell a product so the client gets more value out of it than either of the other two examples and should subsequently pay more. Another factor is the size of the client. A small magazine will not be seen by as many people, whereas a large international one or a national one will have a huge audience. Similarly, a spot illustration is less visible and important than a cover illustration. I know you all want to know what the actual hard numbers are, so here are some commercial pricing examples. Let's go back to that small 5 by 7 illustration of an apple. If it's a spot illustration for a local or regional magazine, it might be somewhere in the $200 to $300 range for a simple, somewhat realistic style. That same illustration for a national greeting card company would be probably closer to the $600 range. Again, that same illustration for a small company's package would be 800-1,000, and for a large company's package or for maybe a national ad campaign could be anywhere from 1,500-3,000. Basically, if the illustration is more visible and more highly used, it has more value to the client and thus should have a higher price tag. Now on the other hand, private non-commercial pricing is quite a bit different. If you're a fine artist and creating work mostly for people to hang in their homes or if you're creating commissions, your pricing should take into account that base fee that we talked about, as well as incorporating the market rate or what your competition is selling their work for. If you have gallery representation, you'll also need to take into account any fees that the gallery will take. Commission's, work that you're creating for someone else that's specified, the subject is specified by someone else, private commissions should always cost more. For example if you're selling an existing 8 by 10 landscape painting that you just made yourself and it's already there, it's already existing. If you're selling that on your shop for $400, a commission should cost at least 25-50 percent more because it is more work for you to collaborate with the client and create work to their specifications than it is for you to just sell an existing painting. Now, any discussion on pricing would not be complete without quickly touching on working for free or for publicity or for product. My advice on this subject in three words is, don't do it. Of course I can say that it's bad for the industry or bad for pricing overall and those things may be true, but the honest reason that I discourage it is because it's exasperating, it deflates yourself esteem, and it's simply not necessary to advance your career. If you're tempted to take on free work because you want the practice, practice by working on your own self-initiated projects instead, you have total control in that case and all the benefit. You can still make it like an assignment. Pick out your favorite perfume and make that perfume an illustrated ad campaign or you could reduce some of the spots for an article that you really enjoyed or you can make a fabric to use on gifts for your family. If you're tempted to work for free because you want professional experience, I'm sad to say that it's unlikely you'll find it with a client who's asking you to work for free, because these clients are not being professional themselves. They often are not bought into the projects so they don't take deadlines or boundary seriously, i.e. they don't act professionally and it's also unlikely that it will lead to future paid work with the client, even if they say so. The honest truth is that if you are working for free, they are choosing you because you're the free option, not the option that they like the most. All that being said, I know that some of you will still decide to work for free at some point. If you really want to work for free or for product, be sure that you retain the copyright and that both you and the client sign a contract clearly stating that you own the work and that you're giving them the right to use it only in a limited capacity, and be sure to describe what that capacity is. I see lots of young and beginning artists who work for exposure or for product and end up giving away their rights as well. Another thing that you want to do is make sure that you have total creative control. One situation in which I have worked for free and still do occasionally is with family and friends. I'll give them the choice of the family and friends discount, which is basically me taking their brief or their project and running with it. They don't get to ask for edits and I get to make it exactly how I want or they can just pay a standard market rate if they don't want to do that. The way I see it, if you're working for free, you should at the very least have maximum creative control and agency over your work. Now if this all feels a bit overwhelming, just keep in mind that you will feel more comfortable, you'll get more comfortable with pricing the more experience you have under your belt, but it will never be completely clear cut. There are so many factors as we discussed, so having a set of one size fits all prices will just not be possible for most creators and artists. You will likely need to price each piece, each product, each commercial project on an individual basis using your own experience and taking into account the things we talked about, especially the visibility equals value equation. Supplementing this with external resources can really help you feel more confident and certainly was a big help for me. For that reason, I recommend commercial artists, especially in the US and possibly in Europe as well, get a copy of the Graphic Artist Guild Handbook for Pricing and Ethical Guidelines. If you're not able to get the Guild Handbook, many public libraries in the US have a copy of this book. You can also get a used one. It tends to run for about $30, it is one of those resources that I bought a couple of years into my career and if I could go back and tell myself at day 1, to invest in something, it would be that. However, if you're not able to get the Guild Handbook, there are still plenty of free resources like Box.net has real life submissions from actual illustrators. Jessica Hische is a hand lettering artist and a Skillshare teacher, and she has lots of free pricing resources on her website, her PDF, "The Dark Art of Pricing," should be required reading in my opinion. She also just released, I think it's $10 or $15 pricing seminar that goes really in-depth into commercial pricing. Both free and paid resources from Jessica Hische. Twitter hashtags can also be another really great source of information, i.e. Publishingpaidme, that's a big one. They can have a lot of good info on those hashtags. Then peer pricing research, this is especially helpful for business to customer artists. This entails figuring out what other folks are charging. You can do this by looking at their products and shops on Etsy or Patreon, and taking note of other artists prices on Instagram or in the galleries that represent them. Last but not least, for free pricing resources, I have lots on my YouTube videos. I of course have a YouTube channel where I've share tons of free resources for illustrators and artists, including lots on pricing. One final note on pricing is that it can of course be dependent on the location of the artist and the location of the buyer or business. For example if you live in a country where the cost of living is lower than the US, but your client is in the US, you can ensure to still charge prices based on the US market, vice versa is also true. If you live in the US where the cost of living is high, but your client is somewhere with a much lower cost of living, you may need to charge a lower rate than you would for a US client. All of that being said, the principality of visibility equals value should still be consistent across markets. An advertising illustration should generally be more expensive than a spot illustration, regardless of whether the client is in the US or Canada or Taiwan or South Africa. Your assignment for this lesson is to pick one of the pricing scenarios from the class project section and come up with your own price. Make sure to take into account your base fee, which includes all of those things we talked about, the time required, the size of the piece, the level of detail, the medium used, your experience, etc., and the value that the work will bring to the client. Share your pricing schema in your class project.
5. How to Make a Portfolio Website: Lesson 4, how to make a portfolio website. Just like considering your market niche at some point, if you want to make a living from your art, you will need a website. Of course, there are rare examples of artists who are successful without one, but they are the uncommon exception and should not be the rule. We're going to talk about options for creating and hosting your site and how to make it look professional and tailored for the market that you're aiming for. First up, some common platforms for websites. There's of course, WordPress, I used to use this at the very beginning. It's free, but you will likely need some paid add ons unless you're really comfortable with code. There is Squarespace. This is what I use currently and have used for several years. It's very user-friendly and great if you want something that looks nice and it's ready for you to just drop in your content. Squarespace is paid, but it has multiple pricing tiers. There's Wix as well. This is another popular platform that is also paid. I haven't used it personally, but I know some people prefer it because it's a bit more flexible than Squarespace. Other free options would be some free blogging platform like Tumblr, which you can still connect a custom domain to. There are lots of other options as well. This is far from a comprehensive list. I'm just mentioning a few here to start the conversation. If you have a platform that you use and like, you can feel free to add it to the website platforms for artists thread in the discussion section, we're going to try to get a few threads in there going. Let's chat a bit about URLs or domain names. Now, you may be super familiar with this already. I'm just going to explain a bit about what custom and dedicated URLs look like. If you already are super familiar with that, you can just skip over this section. But for those who don't know, a dedicated URL is basically just the www.your name. whatever the suffix is. While a free URL looks more like www.your name.tumblr.com or.ntc.com, etc. Any dedicated URL is always paid. If you're going to have something that's a your name.com, that's going to be something you'll have to pay for. I recommend that you choose your website service based off of where you are in your career. If you're further along in the growth stage or the bloom stage, spend more effort and more money, if your earlier on, say in the sprout stage, spend less. At the beginning you might opt for a free platform with a free URL and then move to a paid site later on. You don't need to feel self-conscious about having your free website, the quality of the work and the presentation of the work matters a lot more. I've seen plenty of paid artists websites that look very unprofessional. Having a paid website is no guarantee that you're going to be taken seriously. Next step, you want to choose your URL wisely, especially if it's a paid one. Sum opt to use their name like I have, some opt for a business name, some opt to include art or illustration or studio in the URL. If you do decide to do this, I recommend using a word that your audience would actually use to find you. For example, if you're a children's book Illustrator having your URL as Sarah Smith studio, may look cool, but it doesn't add a lot of value because most people don't search for a children's book Illustrator by searching studio. Likewise, if you decide to use an assumed name or a business name rather than your own, give it some thought and make sure it's something that you really think will work and that you'll stick to in the long-term. I sometimes wish I had used a different last name or even just shorten mine to Hille because Hillegas is such a mouthful. But now that I'm established, it's hard to change it. You can also consider choosing more than one URL to improve your SEO. For example, I have both Kendyll Hillegas and realistic food illustration. Before we wrap up, I want to go over 10 at general layout and design principles to keep in mind for art websites. Number 1, you want to keep the format simple and focused on the images. There's a reason so many artists websites look really similar, especially if you're just begging, try not to put too much effort into making the format of your website stand out. You want your work to stand out. Focus on letting your artwork to be the larger attention getter. Opt for a clean background with no pattern. White often works best, but it's not necessarily always true. For example, my friend Fabiola's website is super colorful, but it works great with her style and the image is still really pop and are the star of the show. You want to also make it easy for art directors or buyers or galleries to see the actual work, so have it prominent on the homepage. This seems like a no-brainer, but so many people bury their work behind menus and buttons that have to be clicked through and art directors don't have time for this and most buyers aren't patient enough to dig around. On my own website, the homepage captures around 90 percent of the traffic, which means 90 percent of the people who visit my website don't ever leave the homepage. Just keep that in mind when you're putting your portfolio together. If you have a large portfolio, you can organize it into collections and have an image that represents each collection on your homepage. My website is an example of this organization and it's by no means unique, it's a very common way of organizing your website. If your portfolio is smaller, on the other hand, less than five images in the collection, or maybe less than 30 images total, be sure to keep it all on the homepage. Don't make the user click around needlessly. You can organize collections by project. Work on a particular assignment, by client, so work for a particular client, or by subjects, ie fruit, botanical, portraits, scenes, etc. You can also do both, which is what I do on my website. You want to also include only the work that you want to be hired for. Don't add in random, unrelated images just to fill in the gaps. You may be tempted to do this, especially since I've talked about quantity being important, but remember, quality is always the first concern. On that note, include only your best work. It's easier to do this when you've been making work for longer and have more to choose from, but just keep that in mind from the beginning. Also, you want to be sure that your images are formatted appropriately. Make sure they are 72 DPI. You don't want to have nice juicy hi-res images on your website for people to download and steel and print on to SoCs. Add subtle signatures to your work. Don't have a big honking watermark over the image. I know that we're all nervous about people stealing things, as I just mentioned. But the solution to that, unfortunately, the only real solution to that is to just not put your work online ever and that's not realistic for most of us. Try to keep your signature subtle, since it's visible and will remind people who made the work, but don't make it that actual impediment to an art director viewing your work. Be sure to make your e-mail address prominent, visible, and easy to find. Don't make an art director have to work to e-mail you. You'd be surprised how many people have a hard time with that or have their e-mail address buried somewhere on their website or only have e-mail form. A lot of our directors really don't like e-mail forms. Make your e-mail address super visible. Next, you want to make a simple about page with a picture of you. People like to actually see the face of the person that they're working with, and clearly state that you are an artist or an illustrator. This is another great place for your e-mail address, it can be in more than one location on your website. Your assignment for this lesson. If you don't have a website yet, do some research and look into which platform would be the best fit for you. Give some consideration to your domain name, which URL would you use, do some basic research into whether your preferred domain is even available. There are lots of search engines that let you do this. If you already have a website, give it an audit, take an honest look at your website and evaluate based on those 10 general criteria for art websites, where can you improve? Add your findings to your class project.
6. Social Media Basics: Lesson 5, how to use social media. Time to have just a very brief chat about social media. We could have a whole class about this topic. There are already some excellent ones on Skillshare, but if we did, I would not be the best person to teach it. There are artists and illustrators with massive social audiences who really understand and use the tool in a sophisticated way. Thankfully, neither of those things is necessary to have a successful art career. An engaged audience regardless of the size and consistently following a few key principles for using social media to promote and share your work, are the two most important factors. The key principles are nothing new or revolutionary and you probably already know them already, we're just going to go for them really quick. They are to present your work well. Take good photos or scan and edit your work before posting it. Number 2, you want to share the process of what goes into the work, not just the finished pieces. You're going to show you and your story. This is something that I personally could get better at doing. I tend to just show a lot of finished work, but sharing that behind the scenes can be really important and helpful too. Number 3, you want to post regularly, so three or more times a week. Number 4, write thoughtful captions, and number 5, engage with your audience as much as possible. Then reply to their comments, be kind, comment on the work of other people and those who follow you. Number 6, make sure your contact info is clearly visible on your social media profile, and state that you're a freelance artist or a fine artist. If you do have a little bit of client experience, you can name a couple of clients that you've worked for, but basically you just want to be really obvious and say your name and the fact that you're a freelance illustrator, commercial illustrator, fine artist, whatever it is, children's book illustrator. Then you also of course, want to include your website in your bio if you have one. A few other things to keep in mind when it comes to social media. You want to choose one or two platforms to focus on, especially initially, there are so many available that it can be really overwhelming. If you're brand new, try focusing maybe on just one to begin with. If you're in the sprout stage, by all means, share your work and your learning process. This can actually be really a great time to build a following because people love seeing that behind the scenes. But don't get too sucked into trying to build a mega audience for its own sake. For most people, there are no shortcuts in social media, and having a massive social audience is not a panacea. If you want to build a thriving B2C art career, business-to-customer art career, you'll need an engaged audience regardless of size. If you want to build a thriving B2B art career, you will need first and foremost, that large, consistent body of quality work. If you're a grower or bloomer and you're ready to put more focus on promotion and audience building, I'll put some links in the class resources tab for good intermediate social media classes. I invite you-all to do the same in the discussion section as well. If there's a social media class on Skillshare that you've taken or maybe even a free video on YouTube that you found to be a really helpful resource, please add that to the thread in the discussion section.
7. Cold Pitching and Active Promo: Lesson 6, how to cold pitch and basic promotion. Now that we've covered websites and social media, which are more passive or residual forms of self-promotion, we're going to switch gears and talk about more active forms of self-promotion, like pitching your work, cold emailing art directors, and sending mailers. One quick caveat before we dive in. Some new and aspiring artists tend to want to pitch their work too early before it's fully developed. They are looking to "be discovered" by an art director or an agency who whisk them out of obscurity and take care of all their artistic problems. Now while this may happen for a very lucky few, it's not the norm and you should not depend on it. All the pitching and active promo in the world will not make up for work that's lacking in quality, quantity, or focus. If you're in the sprout stage, you can absolutely listen and learn from this section of the course, but I'd advise you not to spend too much time on this until you're late into the growth stage or the bloom stage. Instead, you know what to do, spend that time actually making the work. If you are in the bloom stage or the late growth stage, what do you need to do to make sure art directors find you and give you freelance assignments? The foundational components are things that we have covered already. Number 1, you want to make that large, high-quality body of work and continue to add to it with strategic, self-initiated projects that fit within your market niche. Number 2 is you want to maintain that website with a clean, easy to find examples of your best work and work that you want to be hired to do in your contact info. Number 3, you want to post that work on social media regularly. You're just going to read and repeat these three things again and again, continuing to experiment, refine, and iterate each time. If you want to take it a step further and actively seek out new clients, you can try a few different tactics, including mailers and cold emails. We're going to talk about cold emails first. A cold email is when you find a contact info for an art director or client that you want to work with and you reach out to them to introduce yourself. There are a few places to find their contact info. You can buy a list of contact info. For disclosure, I have never done this, but I know people do. Number 2 is you can get the info from a friend or a reference, somebody who has maybe worked with that client before. Number 3, you can find it on the client's website, and number 4, you can google, which is what I have typically done. To google to find the name of an art director and contact info of an art director. By googling, you want to search the name of the company and the phrase art director, or maybe creative director. Once you have an email address and a name and are ready to draft that first cold email, remember to keep the message personal, so use their actual name, not to whom it may concern. You want to reference something that you like about the publication or the company or that art director's work or some specific reason why you decided to actually take the proactive step of contacting them. Number 2, pithy. Short and sweet. Don't go on and on. They care about the work, not about your qualifications, education, etc. This is not a resume. Number 3, practical. Mention that you're available for freelance work and include your contact info, a website, and number 4, pretty. Choose images that seem like they would actually work for that client and match their aesthetic. Don't just choose random things. Attach 3-10 images and be sure that they're sized appropriately. You don't want to flood their inbox and that they have your name on the image title. Actually put your name on the title of the image when you title the file. I'll put a sample cold email in the class project section. Once you've cold emailed someone, if you really want to work with them, you can add them to your regular email updates list and send updates with your new work every 3-6 months. A confession, this is something that I have always been really terrible at doing because quite frankly, it takes a lot of time and I have always gotten work just fine via the other methods that we've talked about. Personal projects, having a website, and posting regularly on social media. But lately I've been trying to get better about staying on top of this so that I can keep in touch with existing clients who I really enjoyed working with and encourage repeat business. It's always super nice to work with someone you've worked with before, assuming it was a good working experience. Now let's talk about sending those follow-up updates and how they're different from or similar to cold emails. To send an update you want to follow more or less the same structure that you use for the cold email. You want to keep it personal using their name, etc, referencing the last project you did together, maybe the last time they heard from you. Pithy, again, short and sweet this time probably shorter and sweeter. Mention that you have been busy and that you have some new work you want to share. Number 3, practical, mention that you'd still like to work with them and you're still available. Four, pretty. Choosing those relevant images, making sure that they are things that you haven't already sent to that client before. A simple way to do that is to have two different folders full of images. I have a folder of images that I use if I'm reaching out to somebody for the first time and then a folder full of images that I use for repeat emails, for follow-up emails, and I refresh the images there in that folder every three months as I create new work. My list is about 40 people long, made up mostly of existing clients that I'd like to work with again, and if I don't want to work with someone again, I just don't put them on the list and aspirational or dream clients. I do not have mega lists of hundreds of art directors that I send mass emails to. This is an approach that works for some people and that some people take, but it's never been mine. Other kinds of promo. Of course, there are other types of promotional content including postcards, physical mailers, merch stickers, etc, thank you packs and more. I've done a few postcard mailers in my time and I regularly send little packs of postcards, stickers, and sometimes small originals to clients that I've worked with already. But similar to cold emails, this has never been a big focus for me. The advantages of sending out physical mailers are that it's often easier to find the contact info for the art director. You just need their name and the company address. Some art directors also really like physical mailers and will save postcards in a visible place in their studio rather than in a folder on their email server. It's also fun. The few times I've done it, I really enjoyed it. It's a higher bar for entry so not as many people do it because, of course, you have to pay to have the postcards made. If you do decide you want to send a postcard, you can find contact info similar to how you found emails, either by buying lists or by googling. There are lots of places to get cards printed. I've used Vistaprint and MOO. Personally, MOO has a much better quality, but they are quite a bit more expensive. Vistaprint has messed up my order several times, but they're always willing to correct it for free. If you do go the Vistaprint route, I recommend choosing one of their higher end papers since that really makes a difference. When it's time to actually make your postcard, I suggest that you choose one key image rather than a collection of images. That makes the image really stand out a lot more since it's the star of the show. Of course, you can always make a few different postcards with different images and send several in an envelope to each art director. One approach to consider is sending a postcard and then following up with an email or vice versa. Now for any type of promo, keep in mind that you will get a very small response rate. My response rate is higher now that I'm more established and that my list includes a lot of people that I've worked with. But when I first got started, it would be around 5-10 percent on a good day. If I email 30 people, I would be very lucky to have three people respond. Not three people actually giving me work, but three people just saying, thanks for emailing. If you send out a big blast of cold emails and it's just crickets, don't be discouraged. Just because somebody doesn't reply, doesn't mean that they don't like your work or that they don't want to work with you. They may not reply because they're very busy or because they don't have exactly the right project at the moment, or because they think your skills aren't quite there yet, but they're interested in keeping an eye on you. If you still want to work with somebody and they haven't emailed you asking to be removed from your list, by all means you can keep them on that list and keep sending them quarterly updates even if they never reply to you. Now, what's worked for me in terms of promo. I have had work come from Google image searches. That's probably my top referral, from Instagram, which is the next one, from Tumblr, from Etsy, from Pinterest, from Twitter, and from Behance. Direct client outreach has never been a big fear for me. Your assignment for this lesson. All right for this lesson, we are going to try finding the contact info for an art director that you'd like to work with or up to five if you're feeling ambitious. Follow the steps that we used for talking about how to actually track down an art director. I'm also going to put a link to a YouTube video that I made that really goes in depth and in detail into finding art director contact info. Then you want to draft the email using the template that we went over, and again, that'll be in the class project section or a postcard if you like. You can share this in your class project. You don't have to share the contact info that you found. You did that, that's your heartbreaking. Keep that all for yourself, but share, if you would, the email draft and the images that you would attach to it.
8. Delivering Final Work & Industry Standards: Lesson 7, how to deliver finished work and what clients expect. Let's talk about how to deliver finished work and what clients expect when you do. Now, if you're creating fine art for non-commercial clients, this is pretty straightforward. They usually just want the actual finished physical work, but for commercial clients, it's a bit more complicated and there are definitely specific expectations around how final work should be formatted and delivered. The first thing to consider is file format. There are several common file types that most commercial illustration clients use. We're going to quickly go over each one and what's used for. First step, there's a JPG or JPEG, sometimes this is used for print, but more often, it's used for online applications when a transparent background is not needed or maybe for sharing rough drafts. Next is PNG, this is usually for online or digital applications only. It's never really used in print, and it's used when a transparent background is required. TIFF for T-I-F-F, this is generally used for print only and can have a transparent background or not. It's a higher-quality image file than a JPG. Then finally, there's a PSD file. Generally, photoshop files are used when the illustrator is supplying the client with a layered file where each layer needs to be able to be edited individually. You don't have to use Photoshop for this, you can use a [inaudible] like Affinity or Pixelmator and export it to a PSD file. This is what I do personally. Lastly, I will mention SVG and EPS. These are usually used for illustrators who work in vector rather than raster format. Of course, there are other specialized file types using animation, for example. But again, this is from the point of view of an illustrator working commercial illustration, so we're focusing mainly on illustrator specific file types. Next up is the color profile. Some clients will request a particular color profile, for example, on screen or digital applications, usually they require some form of RGB and print usually require CMYK. Now, if you're a digital artist working from the ground up and procreate or photoshop to make your work, and you're creating for print, by all means, you can choose CMYK when you're setting up your file. But if you are like me and you create traditional work and then scan it in, all of your scans will be RGB by default. Some illustrators like to edit the color profile themselves, and this is totally fine, but I rarely do and here's why. Translating RGB to CMYK actually is quite a skill onto itself, and there are so many different versions of each of those profiles. Many commercial clients will prefer to do this themselves as they work with professional color separators. In addition, color profiles and the way an image looks when printed can vary depending on the printing process and the substrate, so whatever the image is printed on and other factors as well. One other thing to consider is that even when you do work in CMYK on your iPad or a computer, you're still seeing the colors in RGB. It's just an approximation of what CMYK would be. You can always ask the client what their preference is and this will not be considered unprofessional, or you can tell them how you standardly provide it and ask if that's okay. Different niches will also have different requirements here, so if you're working in an unfamiliar niche, then it's probably better to go ahead and ask the question just so you know what the client is expecting. The third expectation for delivery with commercial clients is clear cutting. If you have an approach that's similar to mine where your work is a subject isolated on a white background, most clients will expect that you will remove that background before delivering your work. This is sometimes called clear cutting or clean cutting or even layering or layered, which is essentially turning the finished scan illustration into its own freestanding layer. This will only really be a concern for traditional media artists who scan their work and to digitize it, because if you're working digitally, you can just turn off the background layer. Lastly, let's talk about file size. You want to make sure that the file size and the density is appropriate for the client in their purpose. There is no standard size, but instead, sizing is based off of the end-use. If you're making a digital illustration or a banner, it's common to be given the exact dimensions of that illustration in pixels. If it's for a print magazine, sometimes, they may give you rough proportions, sometimes they'll give you exact dimensions in inches or in centimeters. Basically, if the client has requested a particular size, be sure to deliver that size exactly. You can use a program like Pixelmator or like Affinity to create a canvas that has those exact dimensions and then import your image, your scan, directly into that canvas. As for density, if your client is digital, you want to export something in the 72-150 dpi range, or if they're a print magazine, closer to the 350 range, and if it's packaging or advertising, generally, it's more like 400-600 range, since they'll often use it in a few different applications. Once again, you can ask the client what their expectations are and what they need if you're not sure, and it's always better to ask and never unprofessional to ask. There's no assignment for this lesson. We are just going to jump right into our next lesson, working with clients.
9. Working with Clients: Welcome back. This is Lesson 8, how to work with clients. Another name for this lesson would be customer service for artists and commercial illustrators. Whether you're a business-to-customer artist or business-to-business artist, you will have customers. If its business-to-business, you'll call those customers clients, and everyone who has customers needs to practice some level of customer service. There isn't anything complicated or crazy about this, I try to follow just five basic principles: Number 1, you want to be kind and empathetic. This is such a simple rule but it's so important and it can be easy to forget, especially if you're working with commercial clients. Look for opportunities to make the client feel seen and understood, and appreciated. Try to see things from their perspective when you can, and most of all, care about their project and their goals. Make it your job to care about the things that they care about. Number 2, you want to be upfront, direct, and clear. Let the client know what the process of working with you is actually like. So be sure to be clear about what the client is actually getting, how long it will take for them to get it, what you will have finished by when; so the different phases of the process, and what you need from the client in order to do so. Last but not least, be clear about the price of the client. What will this cost? What about if we need to add on extras? The third principle is to be proactive and prompt. Look for and address possible trouble spots before they emerge. Sometimes it seems like if there might be the potential for miscommunication or sticky spots, we tend to shy away and hope that they'll just disappear and that we don't have to deal with them. This will not serve you in the end. If you sense a hiccup coming with the client, try to cut it off at the pass, and be willing to even hop on the phone when necessary. All clients appreciate quick communication. You want to also respond as soon as possible within reason. Of course, you're not going to respond at 11:00 PM on a Friday, but don't try to make yourself seem hard to get or force yourself to wait three days to reply to a client so they think that you're really busy or important. Just respond reasonably quickly. Basically, treat the client how you want to be treated. The fourth principle is to be humble and open to feedback. Care more about helping the team achieve the overall goal than about being the star of the show. This is especially true for business-to-business artists. If you drop the ball or if you make a mistake, apologize. If you want to create commercial work or take on commissions as a fine artist, you have to be open to client feedback and to change in the work in ways that you potentially may not like. Sometimes you'll come around to like it in the end and sometimes you won't. As you get more established, you'll be able to be pickier about the kinds of work and projects that you take on, and only take on work that aligns well with your aesthetic. But even then, clients may want to do things differently than you, it's super common. If you can't take feedback gracefully or if it completely takes the wind out of your sales and makes it impossible for you to work, this may not be the niche for you. The fifth and final principle for a client customer service is to be on time. Set a realistic timeline and stick to it. Especially if you're just getting started, you may want to be conservative in your estimate initially. So if you think something will take you two days, then estimate three days. If for some reason you know you're not going to make a deadline that you've already previously set, tell the client as soon as you know, don't wait until the deadline is approaching. Don't tell them on the day that you're not going to be able to get them the assignment, that it's going to be late. If you know the day before, tell them the day before. That kind of clear communication will always be greatly appreciated by any client, but again, especially by businesses and brands. Your assignment for this lesson. This is going to be a little bit different. We're going to do a reflection exercise here. Imagine your ideal client project. Who are you working with? What are you making? What is the assignment? Now imagine that you are the client. After you've articulated all that, try maybe writing it down. Now you're going to imagine that you yourself are the client. Try to picture yourself in their shoes; what are their goals? Why had they chosen you as an artist? What are some of their biggest concerns or uncertainties about working with you? How can you proactively address these? If you feel comfortable, share some of your thoughts and reflections in the class project section.
10. How to Put Together and Understand a Contract: Lesson 9, how to put together a basic contract. So we are nearing the end of this course, but before we finish up, we have to tackle one of the most important business skills an artist can have, creating and understanding contracts and agreements. Of course, I need to say right up front here that I am not a lawyer or a legal professional. I'm just an artist who has worked to understand intellectual property contracts, which is the big umbrella that our contracts usually fall under. But you should take everything I say with a grain of salt and just like the rest of this class, use it as a launch pad to learn more. Okay, let's go. For me, contracts and agreements were one of the most intimidating aspects of my early freelance career. I knew I needed to have some kind of agreement or contract, especially if I was going to do this for the long term. But they all seemed so overwhelming and long and incomprehensible. I have learned through trial and error that there are 10 foundational things that I need to include in every contract, whether it's for a big company commissioning illustration for a national campaign or for a private individual commissioning a pet portrait for their grandma. Those 10 key things are number 1, the names of the parties, so you and the client. Number 2, deliverables. The deliverables are what the client is getting and the form that they'll come in. This could be a physical artwork, a digital download, etc. You should also include the dimensions, the style, the content, basically a nice thorough description of what specifically the client is paying for. You'd be surprised how many painful miscommunications can be avoided just by thoroughly describing the deliverables. Number 3, timeline and the process, so when the work will be done and how. You want to describe each stage of your process and come up with deadlines for each phase. Don't rely on the client to do this. You want also to spell the revisions. How many times the client can ask for changes and what kinds of changes they can ask for. Again, be very specific here, so spell it out as clearly and simply as possible, what changes the client can make and at which phase in the project. You also want to mention what it will cost if the client needs to have additional changes. If that happens, it's usually built on an hourly basis, so you can just state that that additional fee will be built at your standard hourly rate of whatever your hourly rate is. Number 5, you want to include, of course your price or your fee, so how much this costs. Be sure to indicate whether it's per illustration or image and make the total cost very clear and obvious. A payment structure, so this could include a 25-50 percent deposit, info on how and when you accept payment, etc. so whether you do checks or online payment or PayPal, I strongly recommend getting a deposit if you can. In some markets, it's just not as common, in editorial for example, but you should always request it. With private clients, I standardly do a 50 percent deposit and then a 50 percent final payment before I send out the actual work. Next up, you also want to include a kill fee, which is how much you will be paid should the project be canceled at various points. So imagine that you've got halfway through a watercolor illustration and the client suddenly canceled the project because they don't need to use it anymore. You need to be protected and make sure that you'll be paid fairly for your work even if the client changes their mind. You also want to have a contingent upon payment clause. This states that the client's right to use the work is contingent on them paying you. So this is really only needed with commercial clients. Next up, usage rights, how the client may use the finished work, and who owns the copyright. This may seem counter-intuitive, but you should have this clause in a private commission as well as a commercial one. This is what spells out the value of the client is getting. Be specific once again. Describe exactly how the client can use the work. So if they're planning to put it on towels, don't just say linens, say towels. State that any additional usage will have to be negotiated separately and may incur additional fees. Next is the term. The term is the length of time that the client may use the work for the specified purpose. This is only really needed for commercial commissions because there's really no specific length of time, no term that a private commission could have the pet portrait painted for their grandma hanging on the wall. So this varies by market once again, but a term could be anywhere from six months to a few years to indefinite. Of course, these are just the basics and you can include many other things in your agreement. In addition to these 10 items, when I'm working with a commercial client, I use a template from the graphic artist skilled handbook that covers things like mediation and an indemnity clause. You can also Google contract templates or contract templates for illustrators or artists or you can buy your own copy of the GAG handbook. Sometimes, a company will supply you with their own contract. This is actually fairly common if it's a larger corporate client and if this happens, I always read through the contract with particular attention to the above 10 things that I mentioned. You can also ask the client to sign your contract even if you've signed theirs or if they are not open to doing that, you can ask them to amend their contract to include the things that they might not have included in it, like a specific timeline or a kill fee. So just because a company sends you a contract does not mean you have to accept the terms and sign as is. Asking for changes is very common and I do it all the time. For example, it's becoming increasingly common for companies to include an all rights clause in their contract. This would basically mean that the client owns your work in its entirety and you can't use it for anything else ever. Now, there are some situations where the client does need this latitude. But in general, for something like editorial or picture book or licensing, they just need it for a very specific use. If the client contract has an all rights clause in it and it seems inappropriate, I encourage you to negotiate and request if these usage rights be constrained to only what the client really needs. Now, just because the client has included an all rights clause in their contract, doesn't mean that they're malicious or that they're trying to take advantage of you. Oftentimes, these contracts, they are form contract. They are put together by some legal department or maybe a lawyer who they have hired one time to make the contract and who tries to write the contract in a way that is the most advantageous to the client. So it's not indicative of them trying to step on you or trying to take advantage of you, and as all the more reason why since it was just a form contract put together by a lawyer who doesn't necessarily know all of the industry specific intricacies of pricing, all the more reason for you to go ahead and ask to make changes to it. If they do insist on all rights, if the client does insist on this, the price should come up significantly. Or if they're opposed to a price jump, limit the rights. So there's no need for a magazine that will print your illustration one time to own all of the rights forever. If you're creating your own contract, you can create a PDF and send it to the client for an electronic signature, or you can ask them to print it and sign it and send it back to you, or you can use a service like DocuSign or HelloSign. Personally, I use something called Bonsai to create my contracts using the GAG template that I've just imported into it, and it also tracks signatures and opens for me. But I used to use PDFs in the early days because it's easy and free. Or you might have a combination where you sign the client's contract that details out pricing and deliverables and usage, but doesn't include a timeline or info about revisions. You could then hammer out the details of those things in the body of an e-mail. Basically, the important thing to remember about contracts and agreements is that you need a clear record in writing of what you and the client agreed to with respect to the project. Your assignment for this lesson is to get comfortable with creating your own contract or agreement by drafting a contract template that you can use later. So do some research, Google contract template for illustrators, sample contract for freelancers, read several of these templates, and Google any terms that you don't understand, try to get familiar with the language. Then you want to pick one or two templates and look them over with those 10 key things that we talked about in mind. Are all 10 there? Do they look different? Do they need to be added or amended? Are there extra things in this contract that aren't specifically relevant to you? If so, you can simply delete or replace them with something that is. Of course, you can always work with an intellectual property attorney or seek out legal help for artists if you truly feel uncomfortable with this aspect of the job. You can have somebody put together a form contract for you. If you ever find yourself in a situation where the stakes are very high, so a really large project that's going to take you a year or more to work on, children's book illustration is a good example of that, you might consider doing that regardless, seeking out some help, either an agent or an attorney who can navigate some of the legal aspects of it for you. But I strongly encourage you to familiarize yourself with contracts and basic legal language related to art regardless, especially if you are aiming for a career in the commercial sector. Even if you are going to work with an attorney for some of it, it's still in your interest to understand it and even though it is a bit boring, it will serve you very well in the long run.
11. Invoices & Basic Finances: Lesson 10, how to manage basic finances. We are on the final tenth business skill, getting paid and dealing with money. First step, one last disclaimer. You all already know that I'm not a lawyer. But just in case there was any doubt, I am also not a CPA or financial pro. I'm just an artist who has learned to understand some of those things and is here to hopefully demystify them a little bit for you. That being said, let's dive into our first topic. Making and sending invoices. Similar to contracts, you can create invoices super simply with just a PDF or with a program like Bonsai or FreshBooks. I started with the PDF model just like I did with contract and move toward Bonsai once it became too hard to keep track of which clients had paid and which hadn't. This has been helpful, but of course the downside is that Bonsai costs money. For that reason, if you're just getting started and you only have a few client projects or one every once in a while, I would absolutely recommend the PDF route initially. Some helpful pointers on putting together in voices. You want to include much of the same info that was in the contract, and at a minimum, these four things. Number 1, your contact info and the clients contact info. Number 2, the date of issue and the invoice number. Have those up at the top of the invoice if possible. Should you need to contact the client to remind them about the invoice, it's much more professional to reference the invoice number and the date rather than just saying, "Hey, remember what I asked you to pay me that one time." Putting a prominent due date at the top of the invoice is also good, this is number 3. I suggest a net 30 days, which means that you will be paid or that they will need to pay you 30 days after the date of issue. If you send on June first, it will be due on June 30th, and that 30 or net 45 is standard for most commercial clients. But if you're doing private commissions, it's more standard to have either 100 percent up front when the invoice is received before work begins or 50 percent up front and 50 percent at the close of the project. Number 4 is a description of what is actually covered in this invoice. This becomes especially important if you work with a client multiple times or across a multi-phase project. You want to make it super clear what had been paid for when, in order to avoid any concerns with double billing. Then you title the file with the invoice number and with your name. When to send an the voice? You want to send an invoice for a deposit as soon as the contract has been signed before you actually start work, and then you want to send the invoice for the final deposit as soon as the client has signed off on the final work. When to follow up on an invoice? I like to send a reminder one week before the invoice is due. Bonsai does this automatically for me, which is super nice. Then if the invoice doesn't paid by the due date, I typically wait 3-5 business days and then send another reminder. This time it's written personally. Next step, tracking finances. I get questions about this all the time and it seems to be something that a lot of people get really nervous about. We're going to keep it simple and talk about my number 1 tip for tracking your business finances, and that is to have a separate account and debit card for your business. This can be really helpful and can simplify tracking of income and expenses. It's an all-in-one reference that's super useful not only at tax time but throughout the year to allow you to see pattern and keep on top of your business finances. I have a separate account and every time I get paid, whether it's from a client, from an online sale from Skillshare, it all goes into that same place. I also use the account for all of my business expenses like web hosting, studio, rent, paying subcontractors, etc. That being said, you do not have to have this separation from the get-go, at least you don't in the US. Especially, if you're just picking up a few clients here and there, it's okay to wait to take that step to actually making a separate account. The baseline most important thing is you want to be able to track how much you brought in and how much you paid out in expenses. You can do this in the beginning, even if you haven't separated your finances. But once you start getting more consistent work, I recommend getting a separate account. Otherwise, it can be easy to miss things and make mistakes. Last but not least, taxes. What I'm about to say is really applicable only to US residents, and I am not going to go into a ton of detail here because as I already mentioned, I'm not a CPA or tax expert. Hopefully, I'll be able to just give you a broad overview and a good sense of where you might need to learn more. First up, the basics, any self-employment income will be taxed differently than employment income. Because of this, setting aside money for taxes becomes super important. Otherwise, you can end up with a big scary bill when it's tax time and not enough cash on hand to pay it. Personally, every time I get paid from a client project, I set aside 20-30 percent in a tax savings account. This is challenging to do but the way I look at it is if I were a regular employee, I would never see that money in my paycheck anyway, it will just automatically be taken out. I try to treat it the same way. I am withholding on my own behalf, that's another reason having a separate bank account is helpful. When a deposit comes in, I first take the taxes out and then I transfer a set amount to a personal account for my salary. Staying organized in January. In January, once it's tax time, you will receive 1099 rather than W-2s. As a freelancer, you will likely have several different 1099. Because of this having a file both a digital and a physical one for saving 1099 as they come in is super helpful. I'm really not going to go into any more detail on that about taxes because I am not an expert and thresholds and rules change all the time. To answer questions like, how much do I need to make from freelancing before I need to pay taxes? It's best to do some googling so you can get a basic understanding yourself. Most importantly, it's okay to ask for help from an actual tax expert and to work with a pro if you need to. On that note, I will disclose that my partner is great with numbers and uses TurboTax. I just give him all of my expenses and reports and 1099 and he takes care of it. But if that weren't the case, I would 100 percent definitely pay a pro to do it for me because it is not my thing and there is no shame in admitting that. I'll put some links to helpful tax [inaudible] freelancers in the resources section. Your assignment for this lesson is to get comfortable with creating your own invoices by drafting an invoice template that you can use later. Again, just like you did with the contracts, do some research, try invoice template for illustrators or sample invoice for freelancers. Read through several of these templates and Google any terms that you don't understand to get familiar with the language. Then pick a template to use as a starting point and add in or modify those basic four components that we talked about. The contact info, date and invoice number, the due date, and the description of what's being built. Some people like to get a bit fancy with designing their invoice and it's certainly fine to do so. But overall, I recommend that you keep it clear, simple, and easy to understand. Then if you'd like, you can upload an image of your completed invoice template to your class project section.
12. BONUS LESSON - Image Editing: Bonus lesson, how to photograph and scan work. For this bonus lesson, we are going to focus on one of the most basic and practical skills an artists can have capturing images of their work. I debated whether I wanted to include this lesson in the class because it isn't really strictly a business-related lesson. But for a lot of people, when they're making the leap to just creating work as a hobby or creating work as a beginner and wanting to transition into a working professional, the thing that gets in their way is sharing quality images of their work. What is the actual impediment to them sharing quality images of their work is making quality images. So to me, even though this isn't business-related in the same sense as like marketing or finances, it really is a skill that has pretty key importance for your business success as an artist. We are going to dive into that today. Now, some artists, especially photographers, may have learned these things in art school, but many traditional media artists, myself included, did not. If you're a photographer or if you already feel super competent in capturing images of your work, you can probably just skip this lesson unless you want to learn about scanners. We're going to tackle the two main ways of capturing images of your work for presentation, photography, and scanning. First step, the basics of photographing your art for show or for presentation, not for reproduction. Number one, you want to shoot in natural, indirect light. This means you want a well-lit environment, but you do not want the light directly on your art. You can achieve this in a few different ways. You can be outside in the shade, this is really ideal, or you can be inside in a well-lit room with at least two windows or indoors using lighting equipment. You also want to shoot from a variety of angles. Of course, you want a nice head-on shot, which shows the whole image. You can use a grid on your camera, or even your iPhone will have this, to make sure that you're actually directly in front, not shooting from an angle, and you want to try to stand back to avoid any image distortion. Then try shooting from the side and from close up. Shooting from the side shows texture and dimension in your work, which is especially important if the work is on Canvas or panel or has some sort dimension to it. You also want to show scale. Shoot alongside a prop or an easel or have the work held by a model. Now, tip number three, this is simple and it's just to use the best camera that you have. This doesn't necessarily have to be a DSLR. It can be an iPhone or a smartphone, but if you have a better camera, by all means, use it. Of course, you want to use a tripod if you have one as well. If you're steady when shooting, the picture will have more detail and will look more crisp. This can also help with centering and making sure that you avoid any of that image distortion. If you don't have a tripod, you can try to set up the shots and you can steady your arm on a piece of furniture or a wall, and then once you have a photo, you'll edit it using a basic photo app like iPhoto. You will almost certainly want to tweak the white balance and the exposure, especially if the art is on a white background or has a lot of light colors on it. You'll also want to tweak the saturation. Your aim should be to make it look the most like the real thing as possible. Again, make sure when you're taking pictures this way, this is for presentations, so for including it on your website maybe, or for sending it to a gallery or to your Instagram. But this, you wouldn't be able to take pictures to make reproductions using this method, you will need a different camera, much nicer equipment, all of that. Now, before we move on to scanning, a quick note on making art prints from photos. If you want to photograph your work in order to make reproductions, you'll need a very good camera, a Pro lighting setup, and a tripod. For this reason, it may be better to work with a professional photographer or to use a scanner if possible. Okay. Moving on to scanning. The basics of scanning your art, either for show or for reproduction. We could spend a whole class going over scanners and how they work. But we're going to try to focus today on the essential basics that you must pay attention to when choosing and operating a scanner. If you're scanning artwork, you want to try to choose a stand-alone flatbed scanner. You may be able to get the scan quality you need from a combined printer scanner, but the surface area of the scanning plate is often much smaller, so it can be tricky. When you're choosing a scanner, you'll see lots of measurements and numbers in there description. here are two that you should definitely pay attention to and they're very simple nontechnical lay person's explanations: Optical resolution. OR is how much detail the scanner is actually able to capture per inch. More is better, a higher optical resolution is better. My scanner has an OR of 6400 DPI, but you should look for something with an OR of at least 1200. Number two is color depth. The amount of information captured in each pixel, whether it's 32, 36, 42, and 48 bit, these are all pretty common measurements here. Look for higher, again, 42 or 48 bit if possible. Check the class projects and resources section for my scanner recommendations. I would say Epson perfection V600 on the high end. This is a scanner that I use. It retails for about 220 and the Epson perfection B39 on the lower end, which retails for 100. Okay. So on to actually using your scanner. Once you have your scanner, download the scanner driver, which is the software that allows your computer to talk to the scanner. Whenever you turn it on, you're operating it, be sure that you first select the pro or manual mode from the driver menu. Depending on the scanner you choose, when you open the driver, you'll have several options for the scanning mode, similar to using a camera. Generally, there's an auto mode and a partially auto mode, and the manual mode. In my driver, manual mode is called professional. You pretty much always want to choose the manual mode so that the auto settings are turned off. Many of these auto settings are for photos or for documents or even negatives. You want the plain unedited scan to work with. Within promo, turn off any adjustments. I used to spend time specifically tweaking the settings on each scan to get the image to look exactly the way that I want it. But generally now unless I'm scanning a particularly troublesome piece, usually one one is all yellow or has lots of very light colors, I choose professional manual mode and just turn off any of those modifications, settings including auto exposure. I do this because I prefer to edit the scan myself in a photo editing program. I find that it ultimately saves time and gets me the same results in the end. You also want to choose photo as the scan setting and set it to 48 bit or the highest option that you have to capture as much color information as possible. Then you want to choose your DPI. I pretty much always scan in the 350 to 700 DPI range, and this should be sufficient for most art applications. You can, of course, scan higher, but the files will be enormous and will be really slow to edit. You should ultimately choose your DPI based on the end use. For example, if I'm scanning a four by six illustration that would be printed in a magazine. I'll just scan it at 350 DPI. But if I'm scanning a four by six illustration that will be used for packaging and advertising, I will go in the 600 to 700 DPI range, since that client is likely to want to enlarge illustration and use it and other applications. In either scenario, I will also export a lower resolution version for my portfolio and for online use. Keep in mind that you can always size the file down later, but you can't size it up without rescanning. So when in doubt, scan with a higher res. Once you have your scan, you'll need to edit it. You'll need something with a bit more umph than iPhoto. I recommend using either Pixel Meter or Affinity Photo. You can of course use Photoshop, but it's a pretty heavy hitter and if all you're using it for is a little bit of post-scan editing, you really don't need it and you can easily avoid the expense. You can export the same high-quality professional files from Pixel Meter or affinity and I personally never use Photoshop. My goals when editing a scan are generally to make it look as much like the original as possible. This usually means adjusting the tonal range with the curves tool and sometimes making saturation and exposure adjustments as well. There is no universal recommendation or setting here since everyone's taste and style and medium and actual artwork is different. You will need to just mess around and figure out what you like in terms of the settings and what your visual goals are. Since my work is usually isolated subjects without a background, it's also very important to remove the empty space around the illustration so that you're left with a transparent background. We talked about this earlier in the section where we were talking about client expectations around work delivery. So this makes removing the background here makes reproduction like making prints and merge a lot easier, and it will also use less ink if you're using the scans to make art prints. Of course, if you're aiming to work with those commercial clients, they will pretty much all want and expect the final file to have had the background removed. So you want to show your work formatted in this way, even if you're just sharing it on social media or your website, even if it was just made for a portfolio and not for a client. Now, I've already done a whole class about removing backgrounds from your work. We're not going to go into much more detail than that right now, but I'll link the class in the material section. Obviously, if your work has backgrounds, like if you're a background artist or if you create fully rendered scene paintings, you wouldn't be removing the background. You would just crop any messy edges to create a nice clean image. Before we wrap up, a quick chat about who should use a camera and who should use a scanner. Very broadly, an artist whose work has a lot of texture, as in the work itself is a bit 3D or who paints on large dimensional surfaces like canvases or panels, will more often need to use a camera because it's just going to be pretty difficult to get that work to lay flat on a scanner bed, an artist who paints on paper or maybe on really small panels and has a more subtle texture could go either way. An artist who wants to make prints out of their work or to work with commercial clients, editorial, children's book, etc, will need a scanner. That's kind of like an essential business tool. So your assignment for this lesson is to capture, edit, and share an image of your work. You can use either a camera or scanner, edit the image according to the end-use. If you want to use the photo in your Etsy shop, keep that in mind when you're taking a picture and stage it that way. If you want to use the scan as a part of your surface pattern portfolio, keep that in mind as well. So let us know your intended use when you share the image in your class project.
13. Lightning Round: Lesson 12: Lightining round or troubleshooting. If you are not sick of business talk yet, let's tackle a few additional questions or hiccups that can come up for new creative business owners. What about NDAs? An NDA is a non-disclosure agreement. It's basically you promising not to talk about the client's project until they say it's okay to do so. It is very common to be asked to sign an NDA before being offered a job, before even quoting a price, especially with a larger brand or a more prominent client. There's nothing shady about it. I have a file full of NDAs for really cool jobs that didn't end up panning out. Usually if you do end up landing the gig, once the work is public, you will be able to talk about it. Make sure you read it through as you would with any legal form just to understand what you're signing. But there's no problem with signing NDAs and there's nothing fishy about a client asking you to sign one before you've agreed to do the job. What about work for hire? Work for hire is a term that you'll see in some creative contracts. Basically, it means that anything that you make for the client is owned outright by them as soon as it is made, similar to all rights. But this is even more comprehensive as you don't even own the authorship of work that's made under a work for hire arrangement. I recommend avoiding work for hire arrangements at all costs except in very specific circumstances where it's more standard. For example, working in an animation on an existing property. What about late payments? It's inevitable that at some point you will encounter a client who is very late in paying their invoice. A little late, 1-2 weeks over is super common in my experience, and sending a polite reminder is something that you have to be comfortable doing. But there certainly are clients who, whether through forgetfulness or something more intentional, will push way, way past the deadline. As with many things, prevention is the best medicine. Here are three ways to prevent late payments. Number one 1 is to include a late fee in your contract, mine is 1.5 percent. This starts accruing as soon as the invoice is late. Number 2 is include a contingent on payment clause. Write it into your contract that the client has no right to use the work until they've paid you. Number 3 is to get paid upfront or before you deliver the finals. If you're working for a really small or unknown client, getting paid up front is best, especially if you have a funny feeling about it. If it's a larger commercial client, getting at least 50 percent upfront and 50 percent before you turn over the work is a good idea, but it's not always possible. Let's assume that the inevitable has finally happened and you have had your first overdue invoice. Here are four ways to deal with it. Number 1, send weekly reminders once the invoice is past due. Number 2, enforce the late fee if it's more than a week past due, and certainly if a client has been late before, I politely let them know that I will enforce the late fee we agreed to in our contract. Number 3 is to pick up the phone. It's scary, but sometimes you have to actually pick up the phone and speak to a human to get the invoice paid. Number 4 this is something to keep in your back pocket more as a last resort, and that is to reach up the food chain. The worst-case of late payment that I ever had was working for a national non-profit, they were something like eight months past due and had ignored my many e-mails and phone calls, and finally out of desperation, I researched the board members and e-mailed each of them individually, and I was paid within a week. Moving on. Another common question is, should I form an LLC? That depends. I personally have not formed an LLC because it hasn't made sense yet financially. There are a lot of reporting burdens and more paperwork to deal with, and the tax structure is more complicated than it is for sole proprietors. For artists and illustrators, there's no reason to feel like you have to form an LLC before you can start working. You can always do it down the road when it makes sense. Basically, it really depends on your circumstances. Should I get business insurance? Since I opted not to form an LLC yet, once I had a separate studio that people could come in and visit, I felt it was important to get business insurance, both to ensure my equipment, but also for liability reasons. In case someone were to trip over a painter cord and get hurt, for example. If you have a home studio, you can still get business insurance to cover your equipment. Like the LLC question, this is not something that you have to answer right away or before you get started. I've been a full-time freelancer since 2013 and only felt that it made sense to take on the expense of business insurance in 2019. Now, if you have any other business or art related business and art related questions that I haven't addressed in this particular section or elsewhere in the class, please feel free to leave them in the class discussion section, I will be filming a follow-up question and answer session one month after this class publishes, and I will do my best to include all of the unanswered questions.
14. Wrap Up: Okay folks, that is it for this course. You made it through. If you've been working your way through the class project as we went, well done. Thank you. Please do be sure to share it. Of course, if you haven't started yours yet, all of the prompts and descriptions are in the projects and resources tab. Take a look and dive in. Hands-on business practice may not be as much fun as hands-on art practice, but it is just as helpful. The best way to get more comfortable and familiar with writing contracts and quoting prices is just to start doing it. Thank you so much for taking this class. If it helped you, I would really appreciate a positive review. If you have other questions or business resources to share with our community, especially if they're relevant to the specific niches that we talked about, like children's books or gallery art or surface pattern, I encourage you to share them in the discussions tab. The more we all share what we know, the better off we'll all be. If you'd like to learn more from me, you can take one of my other Skillshare classes or visit my YouTube channel. Until next time, friends. Bye.
Kendyll Hillegas, Artist & Illustrator
