A list of sources used for each part of this blog:
Work Experience emails
a3 studios website http://www.a3studios.com/ accessed January-March 2014
Bellykids website http://www.bellykids.co.uk/ accessed January-March 2014
Jelly London website http://www.jellylondon.com/ accessed January-April 2014
Katie Leamon website http://www.katieleamon.com accessed January-April 2014
Pocko website http://www.pocko.com accessed January-March 2014
Copyrights and Contracts
Stern, Simon ‘The Illustrator’s Guide to Law & Business Practice’ (2008) accessed February 2014
Online Portfolios
Bachman, Jess ‘How to Get Noticed by a Creative Director: Notes from a Thousand Portfolios’ (2013) accessed March 2014
Work Experience – Calls
a3 studios website http://www.a3studios.com/ accessed January-March 2014
Bellykids website http://www.bellykids.co.uk/ accessed January-March 2014
Jelly London website http://www.jellylondon.com/ accessed January-March 2014
Katie Leamon website http://www.katieleamon.com accessed January-March 2014
Pocko website http://www.pocko.com accessed January-March 2014
Rubber Cheese website http://www.rubbercheese.com/ accessed March 2014
Carnival Submission
‘Carnival’ The U of G Creative Writing anthology 2014 – Submission Call (February, 2014) accessed February-March 2014
Work Experience – School
The Leventhorpe School accessed March-April 2014
Emma Levey video
Bulfield, Stephen ‘Inside the imagination of a children’s illustrator’ http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-26465761 (7th March 2014) accessed April 2014
Business Cards
’30 Of the Most Creative Business Cards Ever’ accessed April 2014
Advice
Jones, Dani ‘Guest Post-Dani Jones-Advice for New Illustrators and Art School Graduates’ (17th May 2013) accessed May 2014
Expansion on information about Contracts
Jain, Vinay ‘Don’t Get Screwed: The Contract Provisions Every Creative Needs to Know’ accessed April 2014
Work Experience Report
Jelly London website http://www.jellylondon.com/ accessed January-April 2014
Katie Leamon website http://www.katieleamon.com accessed January-April 2014
CVs
Haller, Kelly CV http://www.pinterest.com/pin/289285976037244797/ accessed May 2014
Kim, Na CV http://www.pinterest.com/pin/289285976037244798/ accessed May 2014
Portfolios
Sea Lemon ‘Japanese Bookbinding Tutorial: 4-Hole’ (4th November 2012) accessed March 2014
Having a decent portfolio is an important part in being a prepared and professional illustrator and so I have experimented with various forms and styles of portfolio over the course of this module.
One simple style of portfolio was made based on the tutorial by SeaLeamon on youtube of how to make a book using Japanese binding, although we did learn how to Japanese bind last year it was useful to have a re-cap via this tutorial as she also suggested some different tips to those I knew such as starting from the inside of the book for example.
However, I did not plan my Japanese-bound portfolio particularly well as the layout I had chosen for my images I had not done for the images on the same page to be facing one another, however we were stitching together the open sides of folded A4 sheets and so the images I had wanted together in each double spread page had been moved around by my lack of foresight. I also did not bond my book very well and so I decided to look at other options.
I made some mini-portfolios as use for small business-card type examples of my work that are easy to hand out, however I forgot to put contact details on them and so if I were to use them as business cards I would need to rectify this mistake.
Lastly I decided to make another hand-bound book but this time bound in the middle, and I also edited my pages on InDesign to make sure that I had the right images facing each other this time around, I also created a new pattern for use of decoration on the cover and added a title page with my name.
I think I could have bound this portfolio a little better but overall I prefer it to the other things that I created and would probably use a similar technique again but possibly with better quality paper and more time spent creating a neat cover.
I created myself a rough Professional CV, using inspiration and influence from similar creative CVs that I have seen on Pinterest. I particularity liked the hand-painted style used by Na Kim in her CV as it added a more hand-made feel to it which most likely directly reflects on the work that she makes.
Na Kim CV
I also took influence from the CV I found by Kelly Haller, in which she used a small illustration at the bottom of her CV which I took as an idea to have an example of one of my characters at the bottom of my CV as well as possible extra illustrations around it.
I eventually chose to edit a recent piece I have an use elements of it as the decoration and the extra examples of creativity to add to my CV, I added hand-written elements for the section headings, as used by Na Kim in her CV, to add a little extra personality to the CV.
I feel like there is still room for improvement in this CV, I’m not sure whether the blurb at the top is needed and I could add more contact details and websites and possibly handwrite all of the text for a more complete feel to it, but I am quite pleased with the result of this as a starting point to work from.
I believe that going into freelance illustration would be the path I would like to take when I leave university as I currently stand, possibly working on shorter term projects rather than going immediately into a long-term book or something similar.
From what I have learned over the course of this module, I believe that is now more of an achievable goal for me to strive towards especially now that I have more knowledge about things such as contracts and how to negotiate those contracts if necessary, and to make sure that you keep as much copyright on your images as you can to not get too exploited by your client.
I also am glad in some ways that the illustration world is becoming more ‘online’ as it means it is easier to share your work and link people to a website than it is to have a physical portfolio with you all of the time, however the downside to this is that more people are putting themselves online and there is a larger pool of potential people for clients to find and choose to work with if you only rely on social media and online communication to get jobs.
I feel that I have by using online media to produce e-portfolios etc. that I have been getting better at promoting myself and my work and finding it easier to talk about my work in a positive light, where as in the past I have had trouble explaining my work.
I also feel that being more confident in myself will help me to produce CVs and more promotional work as well as gaining skills for job interviews and portfolio presentation and such. Doing the group project was a lesson in communication and that communication is key to produce good ideas if you are working in a group or sharing a space, for example if I were to rent studio space and share that space with other illustrators or creative people it would be a better working environment if we all communicated with each other well etc.
Overall, I believe that the knowledge of the industry that I have gained from this module and my own research has and will continue to improve my work and the presentation of my work and to know that it’s not just about what you produce it’s about you present your work to an audience or to a client or potential agency etc. To take care of how my work is presented as much as the work itself which also includes making sure that contracts fully allow me to meet the right standards to produce good work etc.
In this report I shall be summarising the events of the various work experience placements that I took part in, and also evaluating what I had learned from each experience and how beneficial, or not, each experience was to me and to expanding my knowledge of becoming an Illustrator or going into the world of Illustration.
My first taste of work experience in the illustration industry came in the form of stall manning for the Cheltenham literature festival. It was a good way to see a number of different types of illustration all from the University and the Pitville press, and was interesting to learn and see what different things people would look at and be more interested in.
It was also a good first step into becoming more aware of events surrounding the illustration world such as manning stores at events, and exploring these kind of events as a way to create more contacts and improve networking skills, although the booth we were in for the Illustration awards was small and all University related people so I did use any networking skills here, besides interacting with clients and trying to answer their questions as well as possible.
From what I could tell, most of the customers to the stall would look towards buying the more decorative or smaller items, such as the postcards and bookmarks on sale, rather than the small books and stories, this may be because there is less of an ‘investment’ involved when buying a postcard, you do not need to necessarily be interested in the story it represents if there is one. I remember that one lady was interested in supporting the students’ work and the university so she bought more of a variety of things that she liked the look of, but from what I remember most people (and there weren’t too many) went towards the smaller cheaper prints or postcards.
The larger part of my work experience was done helping out in the art department of my secondary school.
It felt strange being back to school as an ‘adult’ and having students call me by surname, it gave me a sense of responsibility and I feel that I did learn more about being responsible and sensible while in this placement.
On the first day I worked at my school, I spent the day becoming familiar with some of the classes and was helping out the teachers, by going around the classes and answering some of the student’s questions and giving them some suggestions to their work. The lower school classes were mostly starting new projects, so they were doing mind maps. One class’ new project was to do with Bugs and Butterflies, so I helped the students by suggesting ways they could compose their pages and where they could place the drawings of their bugs.
In the afternoon I also spoke to some of the Year 13s about their work and answered some of their questions about university and going in to an art and design based course. I felt comfortable answering their questions about foundation year too and recommended the course that I went on as well, it felt good to be able to help others with my past experiences and knowledge.
The second day involved similar tasks to those on the first day, helping out the teachers and classes, but I also had some more practical jobs to do in helping out the technicians such as organising boxes of fabrics and wool and threads as it is a job that’s often left for a while and so I completed these tasks while the technician could continue to do her regular tasks. It was a simple exercise, but it reminded me that some jobs shouldn’t be left to do until the last moment and that managing different tasks is an important part of being an illustrator.
On this day I was also drafted in to help one particular GCSE student with one of her artist studies. She was struggling to re-create some of the chosen images of the artist she was looking at, and so I helped her by teaching her different ways to use the medium (watercolour paints), such as tapping the brush to re-create the spotted effect her artist used in his work, and encouraging her to use colours more accurate to those used in his works as sometimes she would see that he had used blue and then had just chosen the first blue in the paint palette and used that rather than mixing one.
On the third day of my placement, I did some similar tasks to those I was given previously, namely a combination of helping out with old tasks left by the technician and also helping students in class.
The classes I helped out with today were all lower school classes, some Year 8s and some Year 7s. The Year 8 classes were producing mixed media images, with a focus on a figure in the centre with a head chosen from magazines, the classes were finishing off this project by adding more mixed media and adding related lyrics to their pieces. I gave some students suggestions as to where and how they could place their lyrics in a stylistic way, to flow across the page. It was good to go around the class and to see some students acting upon the advice that I gave them.
The Year 7 classes were creating a piece based from photographs of the school, and split into different sections. These sections had to be drawn to re-create the style of different types of art that they had looked at such as Impressionism, Cubism and Pointillism. With these students I helped them by suggesting ways of filling up the blank spaces in their pieces as well as how to re-create said styles if they were confused with how to do something. Again it was nice to see the students reacting well to the advice and treating me as a helper or a sub-teacher.
One Year 7 class was actually shown my online portfolio to be introduced to me, they were going to ask me questions about my work, however there was not time before the end of class.
On the last day at my placement in the school I began the day by helping out in Year 7 classes again, much like the previous day I gave advice to the students about their pieces based on different historical art forms.
For most of the afternoon however, I was given a more creatively productive project to do by the head of the art department. She asked me to create a sheet for AS Photography of how to use different photo editing techniques in Photoshop. As I am familiar with Photoshop from years of using it to enhance scans of my work and my own photos, as well as drawing directly into Photoshop to create work, completing this task was not too difficult and was actually quite entertaining to do something more creative and to use my skills to actually produce something.
Overall I have enjoyed my placements and believe that I have learned useful skills and information, such as gaining experience in manning stalls at the Literature festival and reinforcing the importance of organisational skills and generally improving on social skills by working at the school, and it felt rewarding to help some students by teaching them ways to improve their skills and also talking to older students and encouraging some to take art and design based courses if they were unsure.
However, as I am not necessarily interested in going into teaching after I leave university I feel I would have benefited more if I had worked harder to gain a placement in print studio or an agency. Luckily, I have been in recent contact with one of the people I had tried to contact during this period, Katie Leamon. Leamon created and designs her own stationary and she was recommended to my by a friend who stocks some her products in her shop. I recently got in contact with her and may be able to do a small summer contract in one of her studios that is not too far away from where I live and I hope I can gain an insight into the creation behind her products and seeing the printing process for some of the cards etc.
I also recently received an email from Jelly in London, whom I had previously contacted about possible work experience, which stated that they only hold placements for a 1 month period and would contact me if they had any spaces for them.
If I were to improve my placement experience overall, I think I would have spent more time contacting companies and places I was interested in and started earlier. I feel that I could have been more sociable with the students at my school when I was there as I did often find the results of helping the students rewarding.
‘GUEST POST-DANI JONES-ADVICE FOR NEW ILLUSTRATORS AND ART SCHOOL GRADUATES’ is an article I found recently and thought it would be interesting to look at as I will be soon entering the world of illustration outside of university, and any advice from professionals is generally worth a look at.
Dani Jones in this article gives 5 main pieces of advice (‘Draw, Make a Website, Advertise, Network and Look for Work) and expands on them with more points.
Under the draw heading she advises to keep doing work and producing new portfolio pieces, possibly even an entirely new portfolio after graduation, possibly to show that you shouldn’t rely on old work and always strive to be better and show people that you are still passionate about creating new work even if you’re not getting paid for it.
In the Make a website category, Jones advises to buy a domain name for your website and not to just use the free versions of sites such as blogspot etc. as it will look more professional and be more useful in the long run. She also suggests to use it as the central hub for you work as that is what potential clients will look for if they see some of your work that they are interested in.
I have created various online outlets for my work, as mentioned in this post , however I have only been using free versions of sites and have not created myself a single main website to host my work on yet, and so this is advice I can act on in future.
Jones also suggests hosting sites that she likes to use and reccommends, I am using ‘carbonmade’ currently for my online portfolio, which is one of the suggested sites, however I will also look into the others ‘Dreamhost’ and ‘Squarespace’.
For advertising yourself, Jones suggests creating a list of around 50 publishers that you would be interested in working for and sending them a small postcard of your favourite image, or perhaps the one you feel will appeal most to that publisher. She suggests postcard printing places, as she is an american artist some are based in America, however some of those linked offered English pricing too. If I were to follow this advice I would probably look harder into more local printers for my postcards.
For networking she suggests joining social networking sites, something I have already done, but also to attend conferences or convention, something that allows you to meet other artists in the same profession that you can speak to in person rather than just relying on online communication.
This is something that I need to work on, but I do plan on going to this year’s ELCAF in the summer, and so I should plan to use that event as a networking opportunity.
Jones’ last main point of advice in this article is to just keep looking for jobs, as they do not appear from nowhere, and also to look in a variety of places. Look for jobs via networking sites, or agencies as well as job websites etc.
She also gives some extra tips of things to do such as to enter into competitions, take part in sketch challenges, just to be constantly active in producing work etc.
I have found this article a useful piece as it has given me some more things to think about as I head more towards becoming a graduated illustrator and becoming more professional in general.
In this article ‘Don’t Get Screwed: The Contract Provisions Every Creative Needs to Know’, the author gives general tips to people in the creative industry about things to make sure of when writing contracts.
I had already learned a lot of these things from the AOI article mentioned in an earlier post such as negotiable contracts, and making sure those changes are also in writing, but from this new article I learned that a clause for these negotiations should be written into the contract, to make sure that everything is in writing.
The article also mentions making sure to include a section to allow you to be paid for work that has not been previously stated in the original outline of the work, so that you are not asked ‘to do additional work for no additional money’, which is not something I had picked out from the AOI article.
One of the most useful things in this article are the small written examples it provides for each point made, which is very useful to me as I have never written a contract and wouldn’t know where to begin, it gives pointers for someone struggling to write things in the appropriate language for a formal contract, a skill that all freelancing illustrators should probably have.
For a previous module we were asked to write an essay discussing and evaluating the work of a chosen illustrator. For my essay I chose to look into the work of Luke Pearson, most known for his work with Nobrow such as the Hildafolk comics. However, although he is most know for his comic series’ with Nobrow, Pearson has secured a wide variety of jobs from gaining a name through Nobrow, such as creating art for a flash-based video game, designing book covers, and doing storyboarding for a televised cartoon series.
It was interesting to learn that illustrators can get work in such a wide variety of fields, especially from Pearson’s example, that it can only take one illustrator to work in many different places while also maintaining a fairly consistent style, showing that jobs for illustrators are not necessarily restricted by the style of someone’s work. Although this probably depends on the style, as some illustrative styles may be more ‘restrictive’ than others.
Pearson is probably an example of luck as he quite quickly gained an illustration ‘name’ for himself after being published by Nobrow, and so I realise that he is probably the exception rather than the rule, however it is still encouraging to learn that there are a wide range of potantial clients and different areas of work for illustrators beyond the typically thought of things such as children’s books and advertisements.
Finding this article has been an interesting look into how creative people can get with something as simple as business cards.
Something as simple as being able to tear cards while still containing the same amount of information can add such a different effect to the card and make it even more apt and fitting to the business/person using it as advertisement.
I experimented with something along these lines by creating mini-portfolios, however to improve them I would need to add more details about myself for them to be useful as mini portfolios turned mini-business cards.
Mini-portfolios and Sketchbook that I made.
In this video, children’s book illustrator Emma Levey discusses her work and how she got started in the illustration industry.
Her main inspiration has been farm animals, as she grew up with animals from a child and has always been drawing them, she states this in the video by saying, “I just spent all my time watching them, observing them, drawing them”.
The mannerisms and ‘personality’ of her chickens is often what inspires her work, and this is something I would like to improve on capturing in my sketches and illustration work, however my work is more focused on human mannerisms rather than animal based mannerisms and characters.
Learning that professional illustrators use a strong base of observational drawing for their work as it cements the fact that drawing from observation is a skill to keep working at if I want to improve my work.
It was also interesting to note that Levey says that she sends most of her work digitally to the publishers, potentially allowing her to send work from anywhere with the right tools. Using computers and digital means of sending and showing work to people, such as publishers and agents, seems to be increasingly common among illustrators and is therefore important to learn about submitting high quality scans etc.
Becky Howard 