Art by Marek Halko
How do you “go pro” as an artist? We see artists who are working full time, but we don’t always know the process they took to get to that point. This week, Jake Parker, Lee White, and Will Terry outline the five main steps they took to go from rookie to pro, and offer a framework for young artists to follow.
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SHOW LINKS
SHAMELESS PLUG “WHAT THEY DON’T TEACH IN ART SCHOOL”
HOW TO GET EDITORS, ART DIRECTORS, AND MORE
How do you get art directors and the rest of it? That team isn’t a team that goes with you from project to project. Each of the guys have bounced around between publishers and don’t often work with the same people. The publishing house will assign the people to you.
There are a few types of work: commission work, personal/self published work, and gallery. How do you get a team for your personal projects? When doing commission work, your team is assigned by the publisher. The team member that you have a choice over is your agent. You go out to lunch and just figure out if they’re someone you can work with. They will sell your work, choose the kind of work you will get, and will negotiate contracts. Everyone else gets chosen by your publisher. As you get more experience, you might hire an accountant and a lawyer to manage your income.
Lee’s team consists of his wife, Lisa, who runs a lot of the behind the scenes parts of Lee’s setup. He also has a literary agent for children’s books. He just hired his first assistant as well, but it is taking him some time to adjust — he’s not a great manager so he has to put a lot of thought into what she does.
Step 1: A lot of the time your spouse will help either assisting your work or just supporting you. Make sure your partner is on board with your career goals and understands what you do and is somewhat into it.
Step 2: Get an intern or an assistant. Colleges with art programs are a great resource for finding assistants. Jake found a lot of assistants from BYU’s illustration program, and having someone do a few hours every week was very helpful. You have to do evaluation forms and stuff like that, though. If you are getting to the point where you can’t do everything on your plate, consider letting a college student take care of it and find an assistant. As you work with them, you can decide whether or not to bring them on as an assistant. Jake would keep them on for class credit — 40 hours of work per credit, and if he wanted to keep them on, he would start paying them. You can bring on more assistants if you need to.
Step 3: Hire on employees. Make sure you work with your accountant so that you have all the legal stuff in order, including taxes and payroll. The distinction between the assistant and the employee is that the assistant is usually doing max 20 hours, whereas your employee is working for you full time and you’re responsible for their income.
When Will started, he had no idea about working with a publisher’s team. He has had different compartments of teams and assistants. He has hired graphic designers in the past to help him on his books, and has also found editors to help him develop his personal projects. He has a wide array of professionals that help him on various projects. He’s even got an audiobook guy for his new audiobook. He has to pay each of his people but they make the product so much better that he makes more money in the long run. Just consider the opportunity cost of doing it yourself vs hiring a professional.
One of the best teams you can develop early in your career is a core group of your peers. You can share techniques, ideas, and so forth. They can help you with free labor as you help them. You can share shop talk as well.
Step 4: Your business partner. You are both bringing something exclusive to the table, you both have skill sets with little overlap, and you split profits.
THE 5 MOVES TO GET AHEAD IN YOUR ART CAREER
Jake’s moves are:
Professional level work — even if it’s his own jobs made for himself. He would give himself assignments for jobs: he started with short comic book stories. His goal was to make them as professional looking as possible, he bought books about making comics and studied other comics. Start making the things you want to get into, even if it’s your own assignments.
Making a professional website. It was a way for people to find him if they google his name. Whether it’s blog posts or your about page, it just makes you searchable. Link to your site from your social media.
Treat social media as a job and not just like a diversion. Engage with people and respond, post regularly, and have a schedule set up.
Kickstarter. Jake Kickstarted a book, which taught him a lot about the entire process of professional publishing and work. People are used to shipping products, when you take part in that via Kickstarter, you learn a ton.
Starting an online shop. Jake took the thing he Kickstarted, as well as some smaller things, and started selling them on his site.
Lee’s moves:
Pick a specific type of work and follow it through. Specializing in a form or style is very important.
Find a market. Figure out your niche and work towards building your audience there.
Advertise to your specific audience. Lee would separate his audience into a top 100 to a top 20 and would give tiered marketing materials to them, with the top 20 receiving really high quality hand made stuff. It was tailored to them, and it made a huge difference.
Change your work regularly and often. Lee would switch up his portfolio every 6 months, with a lot of new images and new work.
Make income on the side. This helped Lee have a safety net as he was building up his children’s book career.
Will’s SIX moves:
He got scared, so he set up lunch appointments with three of his teachers. This was a form of networking as he asked his professors what to do next.
SHAMELESS PLUG “WHAT THEY DON’T TEACH IN ART SCHOOL”
He redid his portfolio and gave himself professional looking assignments so that art directors could look at his work and assume it was for a pro level client. Student portfolios look like student work.
Made sure he was always working on an assignment, always working. He had friends who would just slack off when they had no work. He realized that they weren’t good enough as artists to just slack off so they had to be working constantly.
Ads. Paying money for ads is expensive but it makes you take your work more seriously and forces you to put your best work forward.
Getting a rep. Will focused really hard on sending images out there to get a rep early on. He got a lot more work afterwards.
Looking for illustration work in less obvious places. There are lots of “secret” clients that exist out there, and you have to do some detective work to find out who the original clients are. You could spend that time relaxing or goofing off but if you put the work in, it can pay off big time.
FIVERR WOES
Fiverr has been around for around 10 years, and it goes through phases. Jobs start at $5 but it goes up, and they encourage tips.
Jake’s takes:
Pro: you get exposed to lots of different work opportunities. You don’t know what’s going to come down the pipeline. However, you have to be on the hook for whatever comes through, and the deadlines can be tight. It’s fine if you just need some experience, though, and can be a good way to get started. You do get paid.
Cons: You don’t get much pay, and Fiverr takes a 20% commission, which is a lot. They also take money from your tips. They only use Paypal which also includes fees. You are at the mercy of Fiverr’s guidelines — it’s a closed garden, so you can’t contact your client outside of Fiverr. You have to let Fiverr broker everything. The clients can be really hard to work with as well, and sometimes they never even respond. There are problems getting discovered when you start out as well.
Your job as an illustrator is to build a career that is independent of all platforms — that way if any of these platforms fall apart, including social media or artstation, you are still able to work and make money.
Will feels that every artist has a number of “bad” paintings within us that we need to get out before we can do good art. If you lack the discipline to give yourself assignments to get that work out of your system, Fiverr can provide a framework to make you do a lot of work. Get paid as well. If you get screwed by bad clients it will teach you to appreciate good clients as well.
If you’re young, you have so much time and so many years ahead of you. If you’re smart about it, you could have three different careers. You could transition to different mediums and forms. There is so much opportunity for people who have good work ethic and are smart about it.
LINKS
Jake Parker: mrjakeparker.com. Instagram: @jakeparker, Youtube: JakeParker44
Will Terry: willterry.com. Instagram: @willterryart, Youtube: WillTerryArt
Lee White: leewhiteillustration.com. Instagram: @leewhiteillo
Daniel Tu: danieltu.co.
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