The drought.

To be fair, the main thing that has preoccupied my mind ever since I got back from my trip is this: work. More specifically, the lack of work on my plate. Well, more accurately, the lack of paid work on my plate. I won’t say I get a ton of work– but I do get a fair amount usually, enough to manage well. Except before I left home, I mailed out 200+ postcards. Usually I get some kind of bite, or else I hear from one of my regular clients. It’s been close to a month since I last had paid work– I got my last check last week, and now I’m spending my time hoping for some job to spring up.

Does this happen to you? I know some of you have day-jobs, which is a blessing and a curse. Me, I don’t– not because I don’t want one, but because I rarely find a decent one in my area, art related or not.  I’ve been lately hitting the job searches online, but it’s so far come up with nothing. So the time I do have I spend working on personal work– which is good, except it doesn’t pay, so I have an inherent amount of guilt welling up when I do so.

What do you do when the workload gets light? How do you let it not get to you? I am trying to shush the internal voice that likes to tell me this is a sign– but I don’t know, it feels awfully daunting no matter how much I try not to let it get to me. Are there other self-promotional ideas I can test out? Any other ways to get the word out? I am tempted to try the whole ’self-promo item’ mailing… Although it does get a little pricey.  I would send out postcards, except I already did! (seems redundant, huh?) Any suggestions you may have would be great (or, if you know someone who needs an illustrator, hint hint! )

Ah well, I am grateful enough just to have time to work on my own artwork. But I just hope that this drought ends soon.

Guest post time….

OK, so I know officially if it were a guest post it should have someone else’s name signed at the bottom, but to be honest I just have yet to get around on figuring out how to add different people. For now this’ll have to do:

Our buddy (and frequent commenter) Blake has graciously stepped in with a guest post– I will leave the rest to him!

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Terminology

Hi Guys!

My name is Blake Himsl Hunter, aka Trophiogrande. I volunteered to write a post for Meg and the Trade Secrets Blog.

The topic of this post is terminology. As an artist who is just in the beginning process of building my free-lance business I have had to learn the lingo. Terms like “Work for Hire”, “Spec”, “Creative Brief” and so on have been intimidating to me, mainly because I feel if I don’t have a firm grasp of the what concept of the terms mean I will hurt my business. So I’ll write about a term, talk about my experience briefly and encourage you out there to participate by adding and helping define terms with your comments.

Spot Illustration: A spot illustration is a small illustration created to be used in a larger piece. My own experience with spot illustrations has mainly been completing quick sketches for designers and Art Director’s who need images to complete a layout. Even though I don’t charge what I would for a larger illustrations, where my work is the main focal point, I can complete them faster, with less pressure, and more fun.

I’m Looking forward to your comments!

-Blake
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Thanks Blake! This seems like a good recurring topic to cover, kind of a glossary of sorts? Hopefully Blake (or some of you other readers out there, if you want to submit your take on some of the terms) can help me fill that up!

In other news, I’m pleased to note that I’m 1/5 of the way through with my first full comic effort, Thirty Birds (cocreated by my sister as writer). This is farther than I’ve gotten on a comic before, so I’m going to share one page of it with you. Sometimes all this text must be a little tiring to read with no pictures added!

Alright, check back next week– I can’t say I know what the topic will be, but I’ll be definitely posting, cross my heart!

welcome back trade secrets

Hi!

So you must’ve thought I or this blog had dropped off the face of the earth, right?

Apologies for all of that; I meant to explain but promptly forgot. Last weekend was my very first exhibiting at a convention (the Alternative Press Expo in San Francisco) and the weeks prior to that were me gearing up for that. Lots of printing, planning, and the like. So I felt a big time crunch to get everything done and Trade Secrets fell by the wayside. Sorry! But I am pleased to note that the blog apparently has developed its following, as I met at least three people at the convention who knew it and really loved it. (Thanks you guys!) I really do want this to become more useful to illustrators so I’m hoping to seek out more helpful friends and links and tips.

But first, I really want to talk about this convention. See, I’d only been to one other before- MoCCA in NYC, which seemed very strictly comics-only. Now, some of you may be completely out of the comics field– I’m not even sure if I’m in it, even though I am working on a comic as I type this and plotting up another one. But APE was nice because I actually saw quite a few exhibitors with no comics whatsoever. (Er, myself included.) I liked that aspect of it quite a bit– so I wound up striking up conversation with a lot of different people I’d never met and found a lot of people online who I hadn’t seen in person before so that was equally good. But the best benefit was that it was pretty good free press and even more importantly it rejuvenated my interest in what I do and in working on comics in general. I had several people recognize my name or my prints and so we had some really good times talking to fans. Talking shop with people in person (although I really did run my mouth off a lot here and there, but I’ll blame that on sleep deprivation) really inspired me. And I met a few people from Arizona, two of which are trying to start up an illustrator’s group (which since I kind of gave up on really excites me personally.) I had no expectations going in at this thing but I’m really glad I did it, because it made me feel good about the whole illustration thing.

Of course, not that I felt bad about it, but I’ll be honest with you readers– despite sending out my newest postcard earlier this month, I’m kind of approaching a dry spell in work. Which in a way is a blessing in disguise, it does allow me to keep working on the comics I’m working on, but at the same time it’s a little daunting. Depressing even. While talking to my friend Jonathan, we reasoned that what we do (illustration/comics/applied art on the whole) is such an insular thing that it gets all too easy to feel bad. Friends’ achievements become thorny patches of jealousy, the phone stops ringing, the inbox is empty, suddenly it feels like there’s a lone tumbleweed in the desert– that’s you.  It gets really important for us to try and ‘make it’ and any setbacks feel enormous and impassible; but I think finding social groups where you can talk about the things you love to do, or even make illustrations together, anything like that that can inspire you is a boon.  And also, here’s a key tip of advice that I still am working on following– instead of looking how successful other people seem to be, look at how far you’ve come– in the past year, since you started, whatever. We accomplish a lot and promptly forget about it, or at least I know I do.

So in this way the convention was actually very beneficial– it stressed the heck out of me for a while but at the same time, I feel really excited to do work. (Now if only that work would start piling in)

I will leave off here for now– on Thursday I’m going to post a nice little guest-entry by one of our devoted readers, who wanted to start explaining the various terminology out there for those who need to know and to strike up conversation about it. I’m still working on other ideas for the blog, so hopefully we can get some more varied opinions and posts out there! As always, if you have a great idea for a guest post, let me know and we can figure something out.