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23 Jan

Posted at 07:19h in Art & Business
Hey kids! Today’s phrase is “Spec work”. In the creative industries (advertising, publishing, film making, etc.) doing a project “on spec” means “work done on speculation”, in other words doing work for free in the hopes that you’ll get paid later once the project “takes off”. Young artists just starting out are especially vulnerable to such projects, but even after...

21 Jan

Posted at 05:33h in Uncategorized
I love a good book. My wife and I have five large bookcases filled with books and four more boxes of books in a hall closet. A surprising number of them we’ve actually read. But life gets busy and I’ve got less time to read than ever. Thankfully, there are audiobooks I can download and listen to while working on...

18 Jan

Posted at 00:00h in Illustration
Some freelance projects have tight deadlines. Others move at a slower pace. Way back in Spring of 2005 I was contacted by a publisher to illustrate a series of children’s books designed to help kids understand various Christian concepts. Since there was no real rush our understanding was that I could set it aside to work on other more urgent...

14 Jan

Posted at 00:00h in Art & Business
After reading my recent two-part post entitled “How To Bid Out A Project” (Part 1 and Part 2), artist Mike Dashow emailed me with a question. He writes: I really enjoyed your blog post on bidding out a project….Once you have spoken with a client about needs, time-line, rights for image reuse, etcetera, you generally have a good idea of...

10 Jan

Posted at 00:00h in Art & Business, Uncategorized
Yesterday I listed some of the “Con’s” of freelancing. Please read that first if you haven’t already. Now that that’s out of the way I want to focus on some of the “Pro’s”, the terrific and exciting aspects of freelancing which, in my opinion, far outweigh the negatives and make the whole adventure worthwhile. If they didn’t, I wouldn’t have...

09 Jan

Posted at 00:00h in Art & Business
Recently I wrote a two-part post entitled “How To Bid Out A Project” (Part 1 and Part 2). One of the first things I mentioned was that, to cover expenses, a freelancer needs to charge much more per hour than he/she would normally make as a salaried employee. There has been some discussion of my article on another website, and...