Chelsea Conlin

Find Chelsea at:

• http://paper-nautilus.com
• http://twitter.com/cacodaemonia

Rachael Rossman

Find Rachael at:

• http://rachaelrossman.com
• http://twitter.com/rachaelrossman

Kristin Bowen

Find Kristin at:

• http://doghousepetportraits.com
• http://www.twitter.com/doghousepetart

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For the Love of Dog: Pet Portrait Artists!

• Are you afraid of social networking?
• Do you see it as a relentless time-suck with no quantifiable payoff?

Your fears are shared by many, and they are justified. Even in our increasingly online world, some creative professionals are still wary of using social networking as part of their self-promotion efforts. Some artists dismiss the idea as a superficial or detached way of trying to make connections and secure future work, while others just see it as the latest passing fad. However, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to justify these perspectives as more and more Art Directors, Agents, Illustrators, and Designers are finding success at building relationships and creating fame through the use of social networking.

12 Simple Steps

Contrary to what some may think, making proper use of the more common social networking sites can boost your profile and spread the word about how great you are, while making potentially lasting relationships with others in your field. Here are some tips that might help you to network online to the best effect:

• Pick a few that work. While it can be valuable to have a profile on as many sites as possible, it’s more practical and effective to devote your time and energy to the ones that are working for you.
• Be genuine. You may have noticed that I’ve used the word “relationships” a couple of times already. While this might seem like an odd way to describe the often impersonal interactions that take place over the internet, real connections do happen. Start genuine relationships with people rather than spam everyone you meet.
• Be generous. Share your knowledge and help those less experienced than yourself. This will help to make the types of connections mentioned above while presenting yourself as an expert in your field. People are searching online to have their needs met, and they will remember those who help them along the way.
• Broaden your scope. You may find yourself interacting with your artistic peers, and that’s great. However, it’s important to avoid the mistake of only networking with your fellow creators. This can lead to some great relationships, but it can also be limiting when it comes to attempting to promote your Illustration or Design business. Try to seek out and connect with Art Directors and others who hire people like you.
• Stay active. Submit regular updates to the few sites that you are most active on. It’s a good idea to stay on everyone’s radar and remind them that you’re an active, working artist, rather than a lifeless robot who posted a profile years ago never to return. No one is going to remember a name on a screen, but they will remember someone who is doing things that pique their interest, or even inspire them, on a regular basis.
• Be professional. It can be easy to overstep the line and start talking about your family, your favorite pet, and what you ate for breakfast. Unless you are providing something of value to people, they will quickly tune you out. Set clear boundaries for yourself to keep too much of your personal life from creeping in.
• Be personal. Balance the last tip with a healthy dose of humanity to remind people that you’re a real person. While it’s not a good idea to divulge to much personal information, real-life stories can be inspiring and helpful to others, as well as a deeper look into who you really are.
• Present a consistent brand. Try to make every aspect of your online presence visually cohesive through the use of logos, images, and color schemes whenever possible. That way, when someone stumbles upon your profile at any given social networking site, you will not only be planting yourself deeper in their memory banks, but you will also be showing yourself to be a professional business.
• Link to your website. Strangely enough, this step is often overlooked., but it’s one of the most important things you can do to draw someone into your world and present your brand and services. Your portfolio website is where you have the most control over your message and your efforts to convince your visitors to contact or hire you.
• Manage Your Time. One of the biggest dangers of social networking is losing yourself in an endless stream of friend requests and useless distractions. This is one of the things that gives social networking a bad name. The good news is that it doesn’t have to be that way. Set aside a few hours a week for this part of your business, and try not to overdo it at the expense of your valuable time. Some artists choose one day each week for social networking.
• Combine with offline efforts. Online networking is great, but don’t lose sight of the value of face-to-face connections and print promotions. Pay attention to any announcements of local networking events, and try to connect with other like-minded creators who live in your area.
• Don’t force it. Even with all these tips, social networking isn’t for everybody. You may find that certain sites are just not a good fit for your brand, your aesthetic sensibilities, or your personality. As with any part of your business, ditch anything that simply isn’t working for you and keep up with what is showing positive results.

Everything’s Going to Be Okay.

Social networking is not going to kill you, or your business. In fact, it can be quite the contrary. Social networking is changing the way the world does business, but it doesn’t mean that you have to abandon everything you’ve learned before. Rather, it’s just another set of tools to choose from in your daily promotional efforts. It can be extremely valuable to try and approach social networking as an opportunity to open some doors and see what lies on the other side.

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Social Networking Won’t Kill You: A Skeptical Artist’s Guide to Online Promotion

Ok, lets see if I can make two points at the same time.

When I first graduated and was ready to take the illustration world by storm a well-respected art director at The Times gave me the advice, “when it comes to clients, start at the top and work your way back.”

It’s great advice, especially to those people who are saying to themselves ‘oh I’ll just send stuff to my local weekly newspapers… “Smaller publications”… because it will be easier to get work from them…’. (here comes the first point) If you are beginning an illustration career you should not see ‘small’ clients as the only places you are worthy to work for just because you are new to the business; In general terms getting work is not about time spent as a professional, it is about the quality of your product. Plain and simple.

Now the other side of the coin.

The pervious advice should be bullet point number one on any new illustrator’s business plan, but it doesn’t mean a person should discard the so-called small stuff either. What I propose is to see the landscape of illustration clients on a level plain, treat the Philadelphia City Paper with equal respect and importance as Rolling Stone Magazine; my reasoning:

It is true that we as business owners want to do work for places that provide the most joy and fulfillment, but let’s be honest, we also want to make as much money as possible. Arguably the bigger clients will pay more money per illustration, especially when compared to a small B/W spot from a weekly paper. This is a logical approach, but don’t lose sight of the bigger picture. A magazine such as Rolling Stone can offer a nice payday for an illustration, but as a monthly magazine you can assume they are not going to call you more than 1-3 times a year (*average estimate). While these jobs are exactly what we all want, don’t brush off the importance of the smaller stuff.

Consider this: A weekly occurs 4 times more a month than a monthly, based on numbers alone, your likelihood of having steady work or at least more frequent offers from weeklies is much higher. Sure $100 sounds small compared to a nice $2000 pay day, but remember if you cultivate a good relationship with the weekly client and you get one spot a month you’re looking at an extra $1200 for the year. Now imagine you land 2 of these clients…$2400…you get the picture. Believe me, at the end of the day it makes a difference.

With the variety of pay scale that we as illustrators deal with, the smartest business decision is to look past the pyramid of clients and take it all on a level playing field. Each client you work for, whether big or small, will present its own set of benefits to your career and business. The idea is to keep your head up and always consider the long term. Don’t underestimate the power of the ‘smaller jobs’, but don’t think that’s all you are good for either.

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Business 101: Big fish, Small Fish

The concept of time is a hard one to become comfortable with and accepting it is a major obstacle that young illustrators have to face. It’s the first hurdle and if it cannot be cleared you will never move on in the race. To clarify, when I say ‘get comfortable with it’ that by no means implies you should put the drive in cruise control under the assumption that a full time career will take a ‘forever’ to reach. Still try hard, bust your ass, be frantic (but professional!), be anxious; just respect the effort it will take.

To get over this hurdle and others like it we as business owners (regardless of success) need to be able to play mental games with ourselves. The point here being the more you say something the more it begins to feel real. From day one treat illustration like a job. Sure it’s an amazing job that is a whole lot of fun, but it’s still a JOB and you are still running a business. Tell yourself that. Tell yourself constantly. Get up 5 days a week (although I would suggest more), start working at the same time each day, take 1 hour lunch breaks, hell, buy a punch clock if you have to ( I know people who do that), but most importantly tell others. When people ask what you do tell them. I don’t care if you have a part time job at Pet Co. or the local bar, tell them: “I have two jobs, I am a freelance illustrator and work a few days at Pet Co.”. These things sound awkward and trivial, but I promise it will make a huge impact on your attitude. Soon enough, after saying it out loud enough times it beings to settle in your brain that you are actually working as an illustrator regardless of making any money or not. As soon as you start believing that you are truly a working illustrator, the sooner the goal of being a financially sustained working illustrator will feel achievable.

On paper, working as an artist, getting paid to make pictures, sounds too good to be true. As a result many people don’t understand how it is possible. Overcoming that isn’t going to directly put cash in your account, but it is one piece of the puzzle to put you down the path that will.

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Business 101: If You Believe It, It Will Become

Typical Wednesday with Ryan Snook

Wednesday starts the same as every other weekday, I get coffee ready for me and my wife, Beth.

Then once Beth leaves for carpool and the 30 – 45 min commute and I take my coffee and commute to work…

And here is where I will sit for the next couple of hours. Above my desk I have the ICON 5 poster by Edel Rodriguez, a comic page I did for our wedding that worked as a program and a great little painting by Travis Lampe that Beth gave my for Xmas last year.

Next to my desk I have this Gary Panter print that was also a gift from Beth.

And here is the bookshelf where everything is stored. This thing creaks anytime I take something off it and I suspect it will topple over any day now. The top shelf hold a lot of my published work and at the bottom is a framed print of superman I did.

Now it’s time to work, so on this day I had some Kid Cudi playing.

Below are some pics from the work I was doing on a full page illustration for Bicycling Magazine.

LUNCH BREAK!

Wednesdays are the best for lunch breaks because generally every week I meet up with friend and fellow illustrator Alex Perkins for a trip to the comic shop and some pizza. We usually go to The Beguiling first…

I picked up a few comics.

Now it’s time for pizza.

YUM!

Before I go home I check out what Alex has been working on, lately he’s been putting together a wicked Dr. Doom mask!

Back to work, finishing up the full page for Bicycling Magazine. The final version ended up changing but this is pretty close what will end up in print.

And finally I finish the day with starting sketches for Boston Globe. Beth arrives home and that’s just another typical Wednesday for me.

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A Day in the life of Illustrator, Ryan Snook

• Lehel Kovács: illustration / google street view sketches (flickr)
• Google Maps: about street view

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The ABC’s of Google Street View (illustrated)

Likes:

Laps, Sunbeams, Tunafish, Animated String, Talking, Window Ledges, Tortilla Chips.

Dislikes:

Spraybottles, Breaking Dishes, Unattentiveness.

Nicknames:

G-Unit, Pooh, Poony, Boo, Boody, Babies, Noonie, Noon, LLCoolG.

• Jillian Tamaki: illustrations / sketchblog

Let us know if you have a studio pet/boss you would like featured by emailing us using the form on the top bar.

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Studio Pet: Gretel

What drawing implement do you prefer?

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Pilot Precise v5 / v7

And then along came Rhonda!

Rhonda is a stripped down 3D drawing tool!? Grab your mouse or Wacom tablet, draw, rotate, draw, zoom, draw, swivel 360º, draw. the interface is simple (truly barebones, you can undo, but not erase). to get a feel for what can be done with this software, check out Rhonda’s website and the video of James Paterson drawing away. We assume there are current 3D offerings that can do what Rhonda does, but the intuitive nature and simplicity of this software is what truly impresses. You don’t need to know anything about 3D software (this editor, for one) to use this app, just sit down and start drawing.

You can sign up on their website to join the beta testing program, which includes free software download, more tutorials, and forum access.

• Rhonda / @rhondaforever
• Presstube (James Paterson)

If you’ve tried out Rhonda, we’d love to see your drawings, post them to the Fuel Your Illustration flickr group.

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Rhonda 3d Drawing Software

Step 1:

Draw a perfect circle. Choose a whole number for it’s diameter, e.g. 27 pt. Calculate the circumference of the circle. The circumference is the diameter times pi (d * PI). Note this number. (e.g. 27 * PI = 84.823)

Step 2:

Draw the shape that you want to tile radially, for example, the shape shown below:

Place this shape so that the part that you want to connect is even with the circle from step one, like this:

The red dotted line segment shows the length that we are concerned with for this step. Take the circumference of the circle from step 1, and divide it be an integer. This integer could be any whole number, and it is equal to the number of times you want to tile the shape.  For instance, in this example we’ll use 34 as our integer, so 84.823 / 34 = 2.495, so we want to make the length indicated by the red dotted line segment to equal 2.495.

Step 3:

Now we need to find the rotation for each repetition.  Basically, this is just 360º divided by the integer from the last step.  So in our example, we’ll use 360º / 34 = 10.588º.

Step 4:

Copy the shape from step 2, rotate it 180º, and place them so that the red-dotted line segment lines up with opposite sides of the circle and justify everything center.  Select both of them and copy paste and rotate the number from step 3 (10.588º), then copy, paste in place, repeat (cmmd-C, cmmd-F, cmmd-D) for half of the number of times in step 2. (e.g. 34 / 2 = 17)

Have fun!

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Quick Tutorial: Radial Repeat

This is Porkchop, the illustrative Boston Terrier. He’s a tough critic, and all work decisions go through him, but he is a kind and generous authoritarian. Always chipper in the morning after the bike commute on the back of his illustrator Josh Cochran, and ever ready for that afternoon coffee break. A savvy pup, you can even follow Porkchop on twitter: @porkiethegreat

Likes:

Sunbeams, sleeping and foreshortening.

Dislikes:

Rain, late nights and Phil Collins.

Nicknames:

Porky, The Boss, Mr. Chops.

Let us know if you have a studio pet/boss you would like featured by emailing us using the form on the top bar.

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Studio Pet: Porkchop

“Don’t really have much to say about it actually. Except I love it.”

• Rachel Salomon: Illustration / Personal works

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Rachel Salomon’s Tachikawa Dip Pen