Advice

‘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.