Illustration Career - Answers for Students

Some old, published work of mine above.

I had a student recently contact me with some Illustration Career related questions. I gave ungodly ridiculously long-winded answers. Maybe this will help someone else out there wanting to go into a drawing-related career.

Note: I work full-time for a video game company but I also freelance on the side for published works. I DID do freelance full-time for some gaps in my career though.

How did you get involved in illustration and what school did you go to become a professional illustrator? How did you prepare to get there? And what degrees do you hold?
I first became interested in illustration when I was in High School. I never stopped drawing from childhood, and when I realized I could make a career out of drawing (like being an animator for Disney!) I decided to work hard and take the art classes available in my public High School. I built a portfolio in those classes, drawing from life, learning basics for color and painting, as well as Art History. I went to Portfolio Review Days that are held at various colleges, such as University of the Arts in Philadelphia. It’s a gathering of art college representatives and a good opportunity for students to show their work and see what areas they need to improve. I remember standing in incredibly long lines with a giant portfolio case, with absolute fear at what the reviewers would tell me. I found MICA (the Maryland Institute College of Art) one of the most challenging reviews and loved their curriculum of 6 hour long studio classes. I applied and attended MICA in Baltimore, Maryland and majored in Illustration there. 4 years later, I graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Arts for Illustration. After college was a bit of a struggle. I still had not found my own individual voice in my own illustrations but continued to work hard to make a career for myself. I took on a few art-related jobs but they were never really the right place. It took a bit longer than I wanted but was very much worth it! My goal was always to have a job where I had the opportunity to draw all day everyday. I do just that!

What media do you enjoy most? What are the sources you get expressions or ideas from?

When I was in college, I loved watercolors and ink but I was awful with them! A professor suggested I scan my ink line art and color it in digitally. I was very bad at learning Photoshop (younger artists learn this in elementary school now!!) but I was much happier with my results so I started creating everything digital. I now draw and color everything in Photoshop but always make sure it looks a bit like paint. I think things look too stark and fake when you can tell it was completely done digitally, but that’s my opinion. I am incredibly inspired by traditional Asian artwork and inks from Western-style comic books. My sources come a lot from everything around me, and I always sit and think about expressions for a very long time. I always think of human beings, their interactions with one another, their emotions, and how they react to certain things. It’s always interesting!

What do you enjoy about working as an illustrator and what are the challenges that follow?
I love the freedom of being able to draw, and to solve problems from limitations. Figuring out something insightful or witty for a complicated subject, or trying to draw a lot of information into a tiny icon. When people feel something from my work, if they are moved or sense an emotion from it, it’s incredibly exciting for me. It’s like having others visit my world and I don’t feel alone. I get to use my hard-earned work to make a living doing something that I absolutely love. The greatest challenge, that many illustrators will probably agree with, is finding balance, by loving and hating yourself at the same time. What I mean is, an illustrator’s self esteem is complicated - you must think highly enough of yourself to want to continue drawing, but also dislike your work enough to constantly want to improve and better yourself.

How did you get your job and how much are you paid? Is it per piece or per time that you get paid based on?

My current job is the Lead Artist of a mobile games studio, JuiceBox Games Inc, in San Francisco, CA. I was asked by the Creative Director, whom I’d worked with before at another game company, to help start up the company as a contract artist. Before JuiceBox Games, I worked for a few other game companies over the course of 4-5 years, gaining a lot experience. My current job is salary-based and I am paid within an industry standard for Lead video game artists based on the city I live in. I do freelance illustration on the side of this job as well. I usually receive an email from a potential client like a magazine or children’s publisher who asks if I am available, a budget for the piece, a deadline, and the description of the illustration needed. I then sign a contract for the artwork needed, and go back and forth drawing for the client. I hand off the illustration, usually via email, and then I am paid afterward.

What is life as an illustrator like in a daily basis?

When I did freelance full-time, a lot of my day was sending out emails and postcards to art directors in hopes that they saw my work. I would research names of people at publishers for magazines, or textbooks, or companies for a lot of the day. If they liked my work, then they would contact me to draw for them. If I get an email, I will begin thinking out lots of ideas and doing a lot of research on the internet for the illustration. A lot of my illustrations have been for history, so I love reading about the topic the illustration should be about. If it’s for current events, I look up recent news articles. I would stay up late drawing because there were less distractions - no friends were online to talk to, and no noise from outside because everyone was asleep. It became a bad habit! In the past few years, I couldn’t handle the stress of whether I would get another client or not, so I went into video games because the pay was more stable. I think this is a per-person basis, some of my friends can handle full-time illustration very well, and I think that’s great! I personally like to do it on the side these days!

What pieces of art works are the ones you feel best about and what were the processes to make those pieces? How did you get your motivation for those pieces?

Some of my favorite pieces involve lots of origami or anything meticulous. It’s nostalgia for me because my mother would fold lots of paper cranes and other animals out of paper. My process is to sort of channel my own current feelings into a piece. What sort of emotion do I want to convey? I start with a bunch of thumbnail sketches, and find a proper composition that seems to work best for me and what I want others to see and feel in the piece. I then sketch out as close to what is in my mind but it never turns out to be close to what is in my head! I’ve just learned to accept that as part of my process. I lay out flat colors to get a sense of atmosphere and then put in the rest of the details after I feel strongly about the color tones. I get a ton of motivation from friends and those around me. I follow a lot of people on Tumblr, and my Facebook feed is constantly streaming posts of the work from my colleagues and friends. This sometimes can work against me, where I start to feel overwhelmingly pressured. You have to realize you should not get distracted by the cumulative work of everyone around you, it’s another form of balance illustrators have to find.

And is there any advice you would give for studying illustration or working as an illustrator?
Draw. Draw everyday and don’t stop. Don’t get caught up in the details of a sketch too early on. Don’t think you’ll never be able to draw a face or a hand better than you drew by just accepting it. It’s what erasers are for! The more you draw and observe things around you, the more you can improve. Don’t try to ‘find a style’ early on. It’ll come naturally on its own, whether you want it to or not. Also, you don’t have to listen to *every* critique that is pushed onto you, however, if maybe five or more people are all saying the same thing about your work, maybe it’s time to listen to what they say and change what you are doing.

Hope this helps some people out there!

Professional Illustration Career - interview

(first two images are from freelance, 2nd two images are from full-time)

A senior from Midlothian High School recently asked a few questions about my profession as she is also going into illustration.

1) Would you briefly describe your educational background?

I attended public High School in South Brunswick, NJ where I focused a lot of my electives/extracurricular activities around art classes (drawing/painting/portfolio preparation and AP Art History). Afterwards I attended the Maryland Institute College of Art, and graduated with a BFA in Illustration. I’ll be honest in saying that my portfolio when I first graduated was severely sub-par and took me awhile to really grasp my education and put it to proper good use!

2) What sort of courses/educational preparation would you recommend for someone looking to be an illustrator?

I think there are many paths an illustrator can take, I personally attended a college that had a fairly great Illustration department while I’ve known other colleagues to be self-taught with help from online courses (Gnomon, CG Society etc) or studying from art blogs like Muddy Colors, or Animation Mentor and so on. If you choose the college route, check out the work that’s there from the professors as well as the current students. If you feel personally challenged by the quality of the work and see a lot of successes coming out of it, then it’s probably a good school with good direction with a good Illustration program.   My personal recommendation overall is practice drawing everyday. Taking life drawing classes or painting classes, and understanding the basics of light, color, form, and composition is a great start. Getting the basics down really helps to start to understand the more complicated parts of illustration. Don’t worry about your own personal ‘style’ yet and focus on learning in general - your style will come through no matter what you do in the end (whether you like or not)!

3) What do you find enjoyable about your job? What do you find challenging or negative about it?

I sort of have two jobs, and are completely different worlds from one another. I’m a freelance illustrator, but I also have a full-time job drawing (and sometimes doing animation) for mobile games. These two jobs definitely fight one another a lot. It’s freedom and instability for one, and stability, with stricter rules for the other.  When I receive a gig for freelance illustration, I generally have a lot more freedom with the concept, and style. I’m contacted by an art director because they love my personal illustration work and that’s precisely what they’re looking for.  It’s a really great challenge to come up with witty imagery for a magazine article or for a comic book cover and sometimes an art director will let you just roll with whatever ideas you present to them.  On the negative side, freelance illustration can be very random and unstable. It could be days, weeks, or months before the next project comes along. You have to work hard to sell yourself.  This is where the full-time job comes in. My full-time job in mobile games provides a stable paycheck but can come with a price. Working a full-time art job in games means that you sometimes have to draw in a completely different style than your own. You also have much less flexibility when it comes to concepts. But this provides tons of great challenges as well, and shouldn’t be seen as a negative thing.  Learning to draw in different styles from your own can give a ton of insight for your own work, and lets you think in really new ways that you may never have discovered on your own.  The only negative part is that a full-time job can eat into the time of the freelance job since you’re there five days a week!

4) How did you get your start in illustration?

After graduating from MICA, I actually struggled quite a bit to find freelance work, mainly because my portfolio was pretty sub-par at the time. I really didn’t push myself hard enough while in college, and didn’t have the time to experiment with new media (especially digital, I used to make horrible watercolor illustrations!). I started off doing small freelance gigs here ‘n there for tiny no-name companies and publishers  after mailing promo-cards, cold-emailing, and cold-calling every art director I could find that would potentially want to use my work.  Two years after graduating, I opted to go into video games because I wanted stability (and health benefits) and because I loved playing video games myself. I worked for a small games studio in Brooklyn, NY for nearly 2 years while simultaneously promoting my work as a freelance illustrator.  I was actually quite unhappy doing games for larger companies like Mtv, VH1, and Nickelodeon because a lot of the games didn’t require any concept art - we were given existing assets. I decided to take the plunge and try to do only freelance in 2009 but it was at the same time as the economy crashing and was poorly timed. I spent 8 months building up my portfolio with my own personal work, and handing it out across the internet. It ended up having a bit of a snowball effect. People saw it, it was shared thousands of times over sites like reddit, imgur, and art blogs, and that piqued peoples interests. I finally had Art Directors contacting ME instead of vice versa.

5) What is the advancement potential in your field? Did it take long to make a name for yourself?

I’ll admit it took longer than I wanted to make a name for myself but it was utterly worth it. I feel a bit more confident about my work than I did when I first graduated college, and I should say, I feel… more deserving? of having a name for myself after about 4 years, but still incredibly lucky.  There’s tons of advancement, for both my freelance career as well as the mobile games career.  I generally say that I haven’t ‘made it’ until my personal work is plastered on advertisements in multiple countries, so I still have a long way to go to get my work seen as much as possible!  As for mobile games, I’ve advanced to not only create artwork full-time as a career, but I also lead and help direct a team of other artists beneath me. That in itself is a huge learning process and very fun!

6) Do you find that there are too few people entering illustration, or too many?

I believe there are actually tons of students entering illustration these days, but with good reason. Commercial art is so much more vast than it was years ago, even if they say ‘print is dead.’ Magazines and newspapers are being read on tablets and phones, and they still need our  imagery to accompany those articles. Children’s books are beginning to have animations added to them as well.  Video games and film production are incredibly prominent and need concept artists for their backgrounds and characters. Are there too many students? Possibly. I think there are a lot of individuals simply being handed a diploma and are not thoroughly prepared to jump into a career in illustration, so they might struggle for a long while. I think I lucked out that I was forced to make a website, a business card, promotional materials, and had knowledge of the business side of illustration tucked under my arm when I left school.

7) What skills are required of you in a typical workday?

A typical workday can have me under immense amounts of pressure to hit a pretty hard deadline (sometimes a few hours to get a whole piece done). Making quick decisions and hoping they’re the right ones for colors, compositions, themes, etc. Enormous amounts of multi-tasking as well for the mobile games job. I need to decide what will look best within the limitations that I’ve been given (correct image size, or working with limited colors and so on).

8) How many hours on average do you work in a week?

Tricky question! I feel like I work ALL hours of the week, but thoroughly enjoy a lot of it. My full-time job is 9-6pm 5 days a week, but I come home and draw for about 2 hours extra every night for practice and relaxation (or if I have a freelance gig), sometimes going until about midnight, and if not, I try to catch up on that over the weekend.

9) What sort of future do you see for the field of illustration?

I see illustration growing more and more. Advertising is always around, and technology is making it easier for people to view things at an exorbitantly faster rate, although with a much smaller attention span. I think a lot of illustrators will end up having to move to digital media more often than not. Time constraints are a lot more intense these days for getting things done. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but learning Photoshop/Illustrator and even Flash or another small animation program can greatly get you ahead.

10) If you were to start again, would you change your career path in any way?

I don’t think so! I’m quite happy with what I do though I wish I pushed myself harder towards the end of my education. Maybe try and be a bit easier on myself these days? For a long time I felt like a complete failure because I don’t do freelance illustration full-time. I couldn’t handle the stress of never knowing when the next job would come. After college, I felt my professors put such an emphasis on editorial illustration vs. any other types of careers in illustration, it was like I put blinders on and didn’t want to consider anything else for myself. I’m very happy working on games, and then getting to work on my personal style while being paid for it is just a great added bonus.

11) What is a reasonable salary range to expect in this profession? What is the long term potential?

Freelance illustration can widely vary, depending on what sort of clients you’re working with, or how big the projects.  I don’t think I could give a clear amount on that, but for some, starting off small and building up can take years to get somewhere comfortable (I think the average can be around $20k-50k). Doing illustration in the tech industry, from my experience, can be incredibly lucrative, though it depends on where you go. I’ve seen junior artists start at $35k in NYC, and not really go anywhere, while artists that work in the games industry on the west coast start at $65k and up. Lead artists on game teams can easily make six figures. There are two sides to this. While it can take awhile to get your salary where you want with freelance, you may struggle for a longer time, but you will be working in the style you enjoy with a lot more freedom such as working from your home studio, during whatever hours you work best, on a variety of projects from day to day.  The full-time route has you potentially working during hours that you might not be comfortable with, on projects that are longer and less in your control, but you easily save up money. After working a few years, it’s completely reasonable to take time off/quit your job, and try to pursue a particular dream. It might be put on hold for a bit, but it’s definitely obtainable with the money you save.  The long term potential to both of these is you get to do what not many people in the world get to do: be paid to do what you love.

Holy Cow

Wowee, I have an 8 page, FULLY COLORED comic I just cranked out because of my 3 weeks of unemployment. Or was it 4 weeks? Ah well. Check out the sequential art section of my site to find it! I've uploaded the cover art here as a preview.

San Diego is steadily creeping up on me and I need to print and bind about 50 copies of these for publishers. Phew. The pressure's still steadily pounding down on me but I think I can get it all done. ...Actually there is no 'I think I can' ...I have no real choice but to complete all the work I'm setting up for myself. Yikes...

Other news, I have two interviews lined up for this week. If I get a job, no need to worry so much about having my work published and freelancing gets pushed back a tiny bit. If no job, it's back to cranking out work. 'Til next update.

Cheers.

Red and White together at last

...Still fiddling in Photoshop, as you can see by this new image.




I'll try and submit it into some contests even though the composition is hideous. Bah! ...Gods what was I thinking?! Ah well.

Apparently I had COMPLETELY fogotten about the San Diego ComiCon. Thank you Joe, for reminding me about that. So, come the end of July, I will have created another 8 page comic that has some really rushed story completely inked, and I'll hand those out to... everyone and anything that can help me out in California.

Summer's job opportunities are as brutal as its blistering heat.

I believe summer interns and temps take all the jobs (read that as, college students on summer break) and they cost less than to hire someone with more experience and as a potentially permanent full-time person. This is fine. I could hold out until the end of summer. Heck, I could say I inked a comic and created a new piece about every 3 days for 4 months. I'd feel like that's saying a lot but... being unemployed has given me too much time for my own good.

Cheers.

Lack of Funds

That's the terminology I'm given by small companies. While I have the potential to do freelance concept work for a video game company now, I am hoping for something more concrete. Full-time being the key words. Freelance work for publication just isn't going my way right now, and I think I can definitely blame myself for not trying hard enough in that department. I look at work by Yuko Shimizu or Rodolphe Guenoden and I become a bit discouraged. I have higher hopes of getting a career in NYC, probably working in Illustrator. While I dislke the program, I believe I can teach myself easily for a job. I used to abhor Photoshop and now I can't seem to tear myself away from it. Funny how programs grow on us like that... I just take a bit of time to resist technology I suppose.

Relocation!

I've signed on to do a children's book which I'm biting my nails over with giddy-ness; Copyright to Laura Saba as they are her characters. Here's a sampling 1st sketch of the kids. I know I'll be revamping about three of 'em.


After applying to a few places, it has come to my attention that Baltimore just isn't the place for me. The amount of boarded up/cemented shut houses, muggings, drug-deals, and prostitutes etc, are steadily creeping closer to the people I love, along with myself. It's time to hit the road.
...The road up north to NYC and... Central Jersey of all places.

I was recommended to check out Digital Embryo who is looking to hire all sorts of people to work on games they develop for Nintendo DS (and very recently XBOX live too). While Cake Mania doesn't sound NEARLY as enticing as God of War II, they've just been licensed to take on games for the Wii. Here's hoping the interview goes well.

Meanwhile, I am rooting for my friend Joe to be hired at World Leaders Entertainment because (I doubt I will be and) he's exceptionally talented for the job. If they don't hire him, I'm pretty sure he'll become severe competition for them in the near future. Congrats to all the MICA seniors who are graduating this year!
Cheers.

Too Many Things!

The cover image to my 10 page comic!


It's all happening at once! First off, I have the line-work for my first of 6 sequential art stories up in my sequential art section which you can find here. In the next week or so, I'll add a two-tone flat color on it so it's easier on the eyes than just lines. I only have about 2 more stories in my head before I have to really start scratching my skull. I really DO want about 6 stories put together. Here's the whole story:

I made a few rules/guidelines/restrictions for myself in which there is absolutely no dialogue and each comic involves origami being used in an unconventional way (Seeds, transportation, weapons, and so forth). There's no page limit and...it's kind of exciting as I really don't have much coming my way at the moment.

Also, I've joined up on IllustrationMundo, go search for me if you'd like! It's pretty exciting to see how many people have clicked on the Scissors Cut Paper icon I have set up for it. Also, if you're there check out my latest obsession with Amy Sol whose work is somewhat similar-looking to Audrey Kawasaki but both have their own uniqueness that makes their work absolutely gorgeous. There's just something about girls that look super-airy and somewhat confused in their surreal settings.

I'm currently looking for jobs related to art in NYC. I've been searching for the past three weeks or so when a storyboard position opened for an animation studio. After sending off my resume and updating my website, I'm praying to someone out there that I get this job. The suspense will kill me over the next few days.

Cheers!