Like me, you might dream about spending your time creating great art, gaining recognition and a steady income. Through more trial and error than I’d like to admit, and several business models that had nothing to do with art, I’ve come up with some great starting points to help initialize a freelance career in art.
- Schedule your time -
My schedule sheets are weekly grids, with days of the week going horizontal and half-hour increments of time vertical; adjust this to your preferred format / timing, block out the times that are already taken up (sleeping, classes, etc), and then decide which part of your art business will be done when.
Art business stuff to consider: Personal projects. Commission projects. Website updates. Correspondence. Various organization. Self-promotion. Block out some parts for flexibility (In case you get an extra commission, a great idea, or a flu). Then take each other aspect and schedule it in. Also schedule wind-down / reward / off-work times. These are as necessary to the job itself as they are to your own well-being.
- Target audiences -
Don’t combine genres unless you’re willing to go all out in creating a world – for which the prep-time, difficulty, and risk are much greater. It might be a good idea to piggy-back on current industry standards, anyway, until you have a well known identity. Unless you have a backing story, people of traditional groups will shun untraditional work as simply “unusual.” However, these expectations soften after you gain recognition; Jim Hensen did anthropomorphized fairy creatures throughout his career (the long-faced Gelflings, for example) which were often explained in through their story contexts.
- Use themes and characters -
Even if you don’t flesh out a whole world, your viewers will like having something to keep up with. Having a few main characters who respond to current events, festivities, etc. make this a lot easier – that way you can stay within your own artistic “voice” without doing the same thing repeatedly and stagnating. Try these approaches on a few different genres, at least until one really gets going for you. Use pseudonyms for each, if you like, and make a time for promoting each on your schedule.
Those are the things necessary to make a basis for your audience to stand on; you can’t have a party without a venue, and you can’t have a fandom without a solid identity!
It’s also important that your target audience feels at home and finds what they’re looking for. I would suggest branching services / genres into different sub-domains: //illustration.yoursite.com, //logowork.yoursite.com, etc. Consider what you want people to see on each subdomain, then make that the main focus of each design. The interface of your illustration sub-domain doesn’t have to be as flashy as that in your website design sub-domain – and shouldn’t be! Force your audience to look at the art instead of the site design; make them bored otherwise.
OK, having exhaustively covered the above “Making a Venue” stuff, let’s move on to actual promotion.
- Make a logo, catchphrase, or banner to put into ALL of your sig-files. -
Join applicable communities, stick the correct ad into each sig-file, and throw yourself head-first into the general community hubbub. Don’t outwardly advertise or spam – just strike up people’s interest in you as a person: making friends often leads into gaining admiration. Check out advertising schemes on similar sites, join web rings, and put yourself into Google Adwords. Trade links with fellow artists. Set up artist tables and panels and things at as many conventions and related events as possible. Sell large prints at your favorite cafe. Do projects for multiple well-known publishers.
But most of all, keep up the spirit and follow your schedule. Confidence will not only put your fans and clients at ease – it will keep you doing the constant work necessary in freelance art. Don’t expect a total fame and fortune within a few weeks – it’s discouraging, but this is one of those industries that demands a huge amount of preparation and momentum-building. If need be, you could even get some kind of manager / agent for business and marketing; that way you can focus on being an artist rather than self-managing during half of your time. However, many people have the capability for both approaches. It’s up to your preference.
Learn more about this author, Amy Flynn.
Related posts:
Pingback: http://%/bvwssee