Do you really need experience to get hired as a freelance illustrator?
As always this is from a completely personal viewpoint and the experiences I’ve had throughout my career so far, and my viewpoint is that no, you don’t need client experience to get hired as a freelance illustrator and I’ll explain why that’s my opinion throughout this blog post and offer some tips which will hopefully put your mind at ease! This also only really applies to freelance work, obviously if you’re applying for a studio, they will always have their own requirements. However, following these steps are much more likely to get you recognised by a large studio or company and have them hire you outside of their usual recruitment process.
Now I haven’t worked for any ‘major’ clients yet, but I’m really proud of the clients that I have worked for and I feel like I’ve benefitted a lot from working with them and from the projects that I’ve produced with them. With that said, I still think that what I have to say on this topic is pretty informative and helpful for anyone who is looking to, or has just started out in freelance illustration and might be worrying that they don’t have the experience and reputation to back them up.
CLIENTS AREN’T USUALLY INTERESTED
A lot of clients aren’t actually interested in who you have previously worked with or if you’ve worked on any widely recognised projects. I’ve never, ever had a client come to me and ask me to tell them about my previous clients, sometimes they might ask what type of projects I’ve worked on before, but they’ve never asked about the client that was involved.
They’re usually much more interested in what you can do, and how you do it. For instance do you come across as professional or just a hobbyist? Are you reliable and can you meet deadlines? Are you consistent with your quality and output? They’re sending money, and sometimes a lot of it your way and they need to know if it’s going to be well spent, for example I’m sure they’d much rather spend their money on someone who’s reliable, hard working and consistent with little to no client history over someone who’s worked for big brands but they’re known as that talented guy who’s also really hard to work with because they’re arrogant and have poor communication skills.
Here are some of ways you can become this professional and reliable person even with no experience:
Have great communication skills, don’t waffle, be polite and not too formal. Also always go that step further to be personable with whoever you’re talking to because they’ll remember you for it.
Create your own personal projects as if they were for a client, think about what the end outcome might be, give yourself deadlines and then produce the work (more on this next). When you add it to your portfolio talk about the brief that you gave yourself, where you ran into problems, where you came up with solutions and how you reached the end outcome.
Share your work consistently, on social media, on art websites such as Behance, Artstation, deviantart etc. Also include a little bit of info on the project and your process, remember that the key here is the client really needs to get an idea of how you work.
As far as being professional, create a personal brand for yourself (there is so much information out there on doing this properly) and implement this across all of you platforms. Get your own domain name (also use this in your email address), build a portfolio (Squarespace is great) and share your journey along the way.
I KNOW I SAY THIS A LOT, BUT PERSONAL PROJECTS ARE EVERYTHING!
Personal projects can honestly be one of the best ways to really show clients out there what you can do! This is a chance where you really get to think about what kind of clients you want to work for and create a project tailored to them and the exact kind of work you might be expected to do for them, with no restraints. Personal projects are great to add to your portfolio when approaching clients about working with them, but if you also share them around and talk about your process behind them it’s also one of the best ways to attract clients to you.
I’ll give you a couple of examples; so if you want to be a freelance illustrator working in mainly editorial, start illustrating articles that are already out there and share your work, or better yet, write a blog and illustrate your own articles. Do you want to illustrate books? Then illustrate books that are already out there and share what you come up with, the same applies to something like a film poster. the same can also be done for apparel design, all you need to do is create a fake brand, decide what kind of demographic they’re targeting and what sort of morals and principles they have, Then come up with 10 designs which you can put on to t-shirt mock ups. You have to act as if you already have the job you want.
Although games studios for example do usually require you to have some experience, you can definitely prove yourself in other ways, do you know what you’d be expected to produce if you were in your ideal role at a games studio? The first step is to find that out (and a good way to tell is to look at job listings on studio websites which usually list what you’d be expected to do on a daily basis, a lot of artists also share stuff like this on Youtube). So maybe you wanted to be a concept artist, they are expected to consistently churn out a ton of quality concept sheets for games or film that fit into that world. So why not brainstorm some ideas, do some writing and design your own world? Are there vehicles? Creatures? Is it futuristic? What weapons do they have? What are the environments like etc? You could limit yourself to maybe 10-15 sheets for this world which would be your whole project, share it, get some feedback and then move onto the next one, because in reality that’s similar to what you’d be doing.
I could go on but this blog post is already super long, so it’s something I may come back to in a few weeks but I hope it provides some useful information for you guys! Next week I’ll be sharing a first look at some concept art I created for a short horror film last year which I haven’t been able to share anywhere yet!