Hi ! I'm Marine Feuilleaubois.  I'm french, I'll do my best to write a proper english, but sometimes.. I slip. ^_^


https://www.instagram.com/plumeillu/

First, thank you so much for the time you dedicated to this course. It's clear, and full of good informations. I wish I saw that back when I started ;-)

 

Lesson 1 -

I began my journey in 2016, but I burnt some steps. I was lost and in a desperate need of a meaningful job. I clearly was in the sprout stage at this time and I needed to work on my skills. But I created my tiny business anyway and opened an etsy shop.

It's a digital painting.
I thought that was good back in 2016 :D #noshame...
Well, now I'm ashamed of it. 


I think I'm in the growth stage today.
I don't live of what I do. But I already worked on some bloom stage stuff (invoices, taxes, packaging, customer service, website, social media).


Here is a sample of my work.


I had a click when I started my first deserty looking painting (the profile buried in the sand one) and continued making painting in that universe. I call it "retro science-fiction", but "sureallist" is surely a more straightforward and simple way to describe my work.

As you can see I also like cute animal stuff, I do commissions for pet portraits in that cute style. I like doing it, but I only had very easy client so far with very few to no rework. I'm not sure I'll be so lucky all the time and I'm afraid this will be very time consuming. I want to be able to dedicate time to improve myself too. I'm not sure I will continue doing it... I feel it will keep me down from developping my skills and style.

Lesson 2 -

I am mainly a B2C artist. But my goal with those more mature surrealist pictures is to work for music artists and make their CD cover album/poster.

I have a hard time working B2B.
I worked for many years in a B2B company and client relation was awful. When my boss wasn't asking me to lie to the client, they lied to me and/or tried to manipulate me to get more than they paid for. I couldn't trust my clients, the people I was working closely with. I hated it, I left.
Today I mainly work B2C and sell prints of my work. I know it will never be enough to make a living out of it. That's why I'm considering working with professionnal again... But artists ones. I hope the relation will be more meaningful and more healthy. Am I fooling myself ?

I started watercolors in 2018, and I use a mix of pigmented inks and watercolors for the work I do today.
I am passionate about drawing techniques. So much that in 2019, I started to teach basics drawing techniques to adults in my city who "never drawn" (ie: stopped very young).
Even though I love teaching, I don't want it to be my only work. My goal is to have 30% of my income from teaching and 70% from drawing & painting.

I price my drawing lessons very low so people with low income can afford 2 hours a week of peace and quiet drawing in their crazy life.
Maybe I'll have to aim at a 20%-80%. Not sure. Covid crisis made it difficult to grow my teaching side of business, but at the same time I hope it won't be this way for too long...

 

Lesson 3 -

I priced my prints based on the prices I saw for others artists that sold print on Etsy. I took the quality of my paper (pretty good) and my printer (medium), I applyed a formula with taxes, packaging materials and fees (etsy, paypal or other), and added a margin (something like 25-30%).

But for my new goal, I have to work on that.
In France, a freelancer should price a 33€ net per hour to maybe make a minimum wage.
I'll have to take some more time to make a real pricing schema and update this section.

Lesson 4 -

I do have a website. Fully in french for the moment. Making it in english too is on my todo list for this year.

https://www.plume-illustrations.com/

I use Wix.

 

I really need to rework my home page.
To be honest I followed feedbacks to improve my SEO. And the homepage needs text to be considered interesting by google. That's a head scratcher...

Most of my customer and students find me because of my SEO. But I do understand it's to busy for a professional audiance.

Maybe I should make a second website ? Just to display my work and maybe add my work on vinyl and CD cover mockups.
I don't like the idea to manage two different websites. One is already a lot of work :| But, heh, if it's what needs to be done...
It will be a good time to find a better domain than plume-illustrations. It's ok for my local french customers/students (I had customers say to me they chose me because of the name of my website :o) and that's it.

 

Plume means nib or feather in french.

Feathers were use to write before we used nibs. Writing is very close to drawing. And we still use parts of feathers to make traditionnal brushes.

 

Writing this, I think I should defenitly make a new website, that will be in both french and english, aimed at a professional target. And keep plume-illustrations as it is for my B2C bussiness side. What do you think ?

I'm not sure with the domain of the new website... My name "feuilleaubois" is unprononcable for a non french... It could be translated in english by : leaf of wood. And even for french people, it's a hard one to write correctly (even it's nearly a phrase...). But when they ear it, usually they don't forget me because of my unusual name...

Lesson 6 -

I guess that's where some mockups would be good so my contact can better see if my work fits with his.

I'll make some research in case someone shares on a blog or a video how they got to work in that specific music field as a visual artist.

 

Lesson 8 -

My perfect client project ?
I guess a like minded and honest artist that can see the value of a visual artist for what it is and not profitability only. I'm really open to anything after that.

Lesson 9 -

Thank you for all the key informations you shared on that. I haven't a finished contract yet. But I already feel more confident to make it :)

 

Bonus - 

This is how I present my work :

Than once it's scanned and color balanced (I use affinity too) :

 

Any feedback on how to improve this will be welcomed !