Introduction

I am George fisher, a second year illustration student, for this modual i will be producing:

• five days of work experience
• a newspaper
• reflection on lectures

My practice is mostly sequential arts in digital formats, from creating small one page comics to graphic novella.

For this Module i would like to focus on what i can do for my future, and how to set it up.
This mainly lies in the lectures and work experience as we will be engaging with many other artists that have graduated and made a name for themselves, i believe i can learn a lot from these people and how they interact with the professional world.

This in conjunction with work experience that will allow me to engage with publications, artists and clients will help me get to grips better with the art world and allows me to make a name for myself before I graduate. I hope that I am able to interact with other artists and see how they work themselves.

A-z of Careers in the creative industry

A:nimator 
B:ook Binder 
C:hildrens book illustrator 
D:esigner 
E: 
F:ashion illustrator
G:raphic designer 
H: 
 I:nterior designer 
 J:ournalist 
K: 
L: 
M:agazine editor 
 N: 
 O:ragami creator
 P:otter 
Q: 
R:esident artist 
S:et design 
T:attoo artist 
U:niversity lecturer 
 V: 
 W:indow dresser 
X: 
Y:outube tutorials 
Z:ine maker

Zine presentation

Choosing from the careers listed from the A to Z of creative careers our group chose zine creator as our subject for the presentation this is my part of the presentation.

Pauline Ascroft

Guest speaker Pauline Ascroft has come over to guest speak about work placements 

We where informed about the different types of work experiences that could count towards the modal.

• Formal Experiance 
• assessed work
• informal/personal work
• shadowing
• interviewing
• spayed apprenticeship
• voluntary work
• competitions

With the five days of work experience I have to fill I will be looking at competitions and contacting friends and acquaintances in the art industry.

Paunline Ascroft spoke about CVS and creating both a professional and creative CV.

She spoke about the importance of putting your interests on a CV and how your employer can better grasp your personality by your interests.

work experience may be tweaked per job that you are submitting to, some work experience may be more useful in different types of jobs.

being concise with your statements and making sure that all of your important details are clear and at the beginning
Qualifications such as GCSES and A levels can often be truncated, there is more of a focus on how those skills can be transferable
a CV should be two sides of A4 at least

an on-line portfolio is easily accessible and you do not have to worry about damage or loss of a physical one

References such as teachers are available but it's more often a case of putting "references available upon request"

A creative CV

A creative CV can more often make a bigger impression on what kind of products you can make for an employer however there is a larger risk as it may not be accepted since it is not the usual standard.
A creative CV incorporates more design elements relating to your practice than a usual CV, it will have all the details of a CV but if you were applying for a job in handmade book binding you may print your CV on a book that you have bound yourself.

creative CVS may be better suited to a website form as there is more versatility in the work you can show on a website as long as it's well laid out and all links work it'll be acceptable.
make sure you have an accessible portfolio and it has quality work, striking a balance between all the things that you are able to do.

link to a creative CV pintrest board

Cover letters 

A cover letter may be needed to along with your CV explaining why you think your fit for the job.
these where the points we where given to follow creating a cover letter.

• Name
• why i am sending a CV
• why them
• why they should consider me
• next meeting/interview
• thank you
• goodbye

 Interviews

 we were given tips on how to handle interviews
The purpose of the interview telling your potential employer how you will and can do the job, and how you can fit into their company.
you can also asses the company yourself in an interview, how they treat you during your interview is important to.
keep your professional knowledge updated, about the company and yourself.
make sure that you are dressing appropriately for the interview, smart casual is usually the way to go if you are not sure.
know the journey to the interview so you can plan a route beforehand so you are not too late or too early.
keep a copy of the CV that you sent to the company on your person at the interview.
prepare questions for the company.

Treat yourself like a personal brand, a unique experience that a company may benefit from having.

make sure that you are on your guard at all times, an interview may start at any time before you know it, and you may be observed prior to your interview. Do not say anything to any of the employees that you would regret saying to your interviewer.

have a open and relaxed body language, first impressions count the most in interviews so being friendly and engaging with other people is important.

find out what you are entitled to before you accept the offer and after the interview ask for feedback over email or telephone
create a follow up email after.

my updated CV

 This is a link to my updated CV on Google docs

4 Professional qualities:
Dedicated, willing to learn, Organized, Understanding.

4 unique qualities about myself:
Loyal, passionate,

how would someone else describe me:
Strong willed, Hard working, passionate.

specialist skills:
digital painting

passions:
interest in fringe culture, classic rock

why should someone hire you:
I work quickly, I am in touch with my commissioners so I can adapt my work to their liking, I am competent with technology so I have no trouble sending them their commissions.

what can you uniquely offer:
adaptable style, adult oriented work

what is the purpose of your imagery:
to entertain and intrigue.

define your practice in a sentence:
Sad and gay, by a sad gay.

what do you want to illustrate? target audience:
My target audience is adults

do you want to have an adaptable or signature style? what are the pros and cons:
I believe that ultimately an artists style should be somewhere in between. A style that has signatures may often become dated with the time frame it's from, and an adaptable one will become unrecognisable to audience. Having a middle ground where an artist has signature flourishes in work however can still take inspirations from other examples from other work to make the work more cohesive is best.

full time or part time:
 I would like to work full time.

part time- what else would you do:
Any job offers that come up at the time.

what other things would you consider being freelance:
I'm mainly concerned with contract work and how much money I can get per contract.

 what experience would you think would help you:
Looking into artist anthology books and general small press publications

who are you going to contact for work experience:
Artists I am acquainted with, my established audience.

Skills Audit

Papio press

We where given a talk by the two members of the small business Papio Press Zanna Goldhawk and Harry Marshal.
This talk mainly focused on what it is like starting and running a small business.
Starting out they said that the power of small business websites such as Esty should not be underestimated and this paired with consistently advertising on social media such as Facebook and Instagram can lead to you being contacted by clients that may want to sell your products wholesale.
Having a Facebook page as a small business is a needed thing as websites may not always contact people following your shop about restocking or new items. this allows you to keep your clients up-to-date on what is in stock, what is up and coming, this can even lead to discount offers in the future as you are rewarding loyal customers that are subscribing to your pages.

The Growth hub at Oxtalls campus can give you a lot of advice on how to run a business and how to deal with accounting, and tax returns as revenue and customs will take note of businesses after a certain amount of income has come in. Reinvestment is important in a business, and you may not turn a profit when you start out, putting your own money into the creation of products can help start your business and ultimately create the inventory you need to properly meet demand.

Websites like print company can help create stock for your business while you do not have to worry about the shipping and handling, using Google to find local suppliers for your required stock such as printing for phone cases. Ebay is also a good tool when packaging your stock as bulk items are sold on there cheaply.

Admin and Emails are an important part of a business and easily the most time consuming. Replying to emails can mean anything to replying to customer queries or wholesale offers from other companies, time can be alleviated creating email templates to reply to emails.

Clare Owen

Artist Clare Owen gave a talk to us about her practice, as an illustrator and the many mediums that she works in.

At first she talked mainly about what can benefit us such as having a job and a shared apartment so that it becomes cheaper to support yourself when you are still new to the illustration world.
Owen worked in LUSH design studios and that allowed her to dress the store front, allowing herself to subtlety get her work out there even if she was working in a non artistic position at the time.

Owen used on-line platforms such as Blogger and Tumblr to consistently display her work and submit her work to competitions. This is where she got her breakout in the tiger print competition where she was freelancing more due to an increase in her popularity and was able to set up an Esty and freelance more. This led to big name brands such as urban outfitters wanting to stock her work.

Clare was offered a place in a small studio working with conical books , having being in charge of her own brief. she was working next to Tom Frost and Ben Newman having the experience of many older artists in the studio was both an threatening and interesting experience.

Her next job was when she signed with an agency and was more focused on making work, she felt that she grew a lot as an illustrator in that time, she diversify her portfolio more working for magazines, cards, and interior design.


She then talked about licensing  and interacting with other people and how she's delt with it in the past.
licensing can effect your ability to sell you work, and you may lose rights to your images depending on the contract, the contract may be on a royalty basis, or maybe on a one time basis.
it is also important to check if the company has the rights to change your image as they may modify it.

She tells us the importance of meeting real people face to face and treating everyone as an opportunity to get a new client, you don't know where new people might lead you in life.

Bjorn Lie

Frelance artist Bjorn Lie gave a talk to us about what it was like in the industry as a frelance illustrator and what he does and what he has learnt from himself as he develops his own visual language.

Lie has worked on many platforms such as magazine portraits and editorial works for the NY times.  But he has also worked with Fashion designers in Australia and product branding for babies.
he spoke about how he personally liked to do exhibitions of is fine art and books. He felt that picture books have more longevity as his children book is still coming out 8 years after in America.

Though he said that the one downside to freelancing is that pay is uncertain and you never know where it might be coming from. in the beginning you may spread yourself too thin and you may need to focus on a specific platform.

Lie talked about his influences in his visual language, talking about his love for gross out humour, hair metal, hip hop and graphiti and how those retro aesthetics influenced how he drew. He made comic books based on strange characters and situations as a child even making his own cigarette packaging. Lie loved using nostalgia in his work, this showing though with his use of retro colours, but also he uses nature to great effect as he was living in the Norwegian suburbs and often went skiing, nature was part of his childhood.

We can see from Lie's talk that as a freelance artist you can work on many platforms and many different types of clients. Versatility is the key, and mastering different meduims of art is a great help. Lie also showed that you shouldn't be afraid of revisiting the past for inspiration, as you never know where it may lead you now.

Copyright and plagiarism -Rachel Reid

In this lesson Rachel Reid gave a talk on the importance of copyright and plagiarism when it comes to the art world. Using the socreative service we where given questions and at the end of each one was a small discussion about our answers, it was very engaging and gave a good view of everyone opinion

It was mainly around the importance of sourcing artwork and artists in your academic work in order to be taken seriously and avoid copyright issues.
Our group overall gave a "fairly confident" rating in their abilities to reference things in their work.

while it was an informative lesson i don't feel i got a lot out of it, i already know that i should reference things, but the workshop didn't give me any new tools on how to reference.
this workshop also lacked teaching the lesson from another perspective, how i can protect myself and my work from plagiarism and how to handle things legally.

Hidden agenda

As part of my work experience I was invited by Martina Drobna along with several others people in the LGBT society to take part in the hidden agenda exhibition and work with the artist Liam Heart.

We where first given a talk by Martina about hate crime and the culture built within it and then a talk by Liam about media and outsider perceptions and how this can negatively effect the community.

Liam introduced us to his work and many LGBT artists in many different mediums, not just artists, but photographers and actors and stage performers.

I was interesting working with Liam and others, as we all came from different backgrounds in art, and some of us where not in art at all, there was a lot of freedom encouraged within the creation and I was glad to do something that was out of my usual medium.

Some pictures of me working on my first project

We were not given a strict brief on what we should create, only given the perimeters of an A3 page and to base our works off the presentation given.

 

Reaction to ostracism of queer people within community, it was interesting to work with only tissue paper and sewing thread, it gave alot of room to experiment and see how the materials worked together on page.

 

in reaction to unrealistic and narrow minded portrayal of queer identity within media. ment as a four mini poster series

Reaction to Catherine Opie and her self portrait collection and sexualization of queer female relationships Inspired by Opie's use of children's drawing in her work.

The exhibit opens properly may 7th, and the space was currently under construction.

 I could not get the whole wall in however I was able to take photographs of the wall containing parts of my work.

It was a great experience working with Liam Heart and so many other people.
however I had very little control over the end product that is shown in the gallery, and if I where to contribute to a gallery like this again I would like to be there not only for the creation but the putting up of the work as well.
Overall it was a great opportunity seeing other peoples processes and how conversations about the subjects was really interesting.

the unseen

as part of my work experience I submitted to the university publication "The unseen"

 

This was my first sketch before turning it digitally, I used a high lighter to mark out what colours went where and what should overlap. 

 left: pink right: Yellow

 

B&W version

colour approximation of the final product

 

Final printed product  

This was my first time submitting to a risograph publications, I was a bit apprehensive about how it would print however I think it has printed well, and I look forward to looking at this kind of publication more.

Re-drawing the line

"Re-drawing the line" is a reply to the book "Drawing the line" an indian small press book that talks about feminism from many different perspectives in reply to an gang rape in Deli where there was international outrage.

"re-drawing the line" was pitched to us as looking at life through another genders perspective.

I found the question hard due to my gender, there are many ways you could tackle this question as it is a broad subject. I did not want to talk about one single issue such as trouble walking in the street when it's dark or harassment, I wanted to bring a personal views and experiences in it. 

 

These are my rough drafts 

 

this is a black and white version of the final work, I wanted to create a segmented narrativeless comic that could be read in several ways.

This is a mock up of what the page may look like.

I stuck with a minimal style with the pictures becoming a grey tone to not distract from the text, but rather compliment it sticking with a simplistic style so it's easier to recognise the subject of the picture.

live brief story book covers

As part of my work experience we as a class where given a live brief of a poetry anthology for school children.
We were not given much in the way of what age group we were drawing for or any specifics that were wanted for the cover.

we where given the titles, "my voice is a shy tiger", "I can't imagine", "journeys" and "Broken but mending"

These are some of my progress photos for my submission

After sketching out thumbnails i settled on these designs for "my voice is a shy tiger" and "Journeys"

 

i wanted a slightly more traditional look to "my voice is a shy tiger", the main portion of it was done in pen and then putting it into photo editing software.

 

This is the final product that I had shown, the idea was of a tiger living in the jungle of your throat, looking at medical illustrations of throat muscles and abstracting them out into leafs and trees.

However I feel this is my weakest work as the face doesn't blend very well with the rest of the image, I struggled greatly with creating a background that could draw attention to the foreground and just ended up with a bad shadow.

When presenting it to the children I found that they wanted to make the tiger more anthropomorphic and for it to have shyer body language.

 

I favoured my cover for journeys a more. It had a simplistic, shape based style, that was more textural, high lights were done with brush to highlight and to make the colours pop more. The main idea i wanted to confront was the idea of nostalgia, when you where very young and everything was still an adventure to you, both in your physical journey as seen as the person is on public transport and a mental journey as that person is also holding a book.

Although I felt like this was a stronger cover over all when presenting it to the children it seemed to be out of their age range and it didn't appeal to their tastes. 

Even though i was nervous about presenting it overall it was a good experience presenting my work to several groups of children, I got a variety of different feedback from them

Fees and priceing

we where given a number of editorial and book works and we where told that we must guess how much the artist was paid for that work.

conde nast magazines
We estimated: £200
the artist was paid: £300

Woman & home
We estimated: £250
the artist was paid: £300

The Guardian
We estimated: £300
the artist was paid: £924

company's that are using your work or commissioning you are licensing the images that you create usually for a certain time frame and at a certain image size, relicensing the image means additional fees that the company has to pay, usually around 50% of the original price.

Cost is effected by how long the image is going to be in circulation, ie a book cover is going to be a larger sum of money than a magazine insert and if the magazine is going to be overseas or local. How tight the deadline is can effect the sum of moeny, illustrations that need to be done in a short amount of time usually have larger sums on them
depending on the ebb and flow of the economy you may find that companies will turn to stock photography more often when they are on a budget
an agent will usually take 35-45% of your cut.

things like newspaper covers can range from £500-£1000 while inside pages can be around £150-£400
book/cd covers are around £1000 due to how long in circulation they are, but this may be effected by how popular they are.
Educational splash pages are around £300-£500

books are different as there are usually advances of £3000-£5000 then after the project is completed, royalties may come in after a couple of years, depending on how many translations is has gotten overseas

Brochers may be around £1200-1300 and packaging £250-£1500 depending on the popularity of what you are advertising, and if its a seasonal project.

Advertizing can range around 600 for a black and white piece £1000-2000 for a colour full page

Rejection fees are around 25% of the agreed price if it is in its rough stages or 50% if it is in it's final state, you are usually unable to use that image again

Cancellation fees mean that you are expected to pay the company back and you may loose the rights to your owner ship of the images.

Reveiw of promotional material

As the third years prepare to move on from uni they have created promotional items to show to clients.

What attracted you to the item?
Middle print: Nice natural colours and and nice composition, professionally done, something i would typically see from a good Artist alley booth in a convention.


What is it's purpose?
It can easily be framed on a wall or tucked into a book, while I'm not sure if it is an original print or it is using an existing franchise it is easily accessible and would not be out of place on esty or at a convention


Does it have longevity?
as a print it can easily be displayed, though if it is a print from an existing franchise it may cycle out of the clients interest and be stored away.


Design details:
nice calm colours, uses a false frame technique that adds to the aesthetic.


Other comments: Perhaps should be in different sizes? it is in a general photograph size however i think it would have more breathing room for the detail if it where bigger.

 

What attracted you to the item?
Stickers, they are cleanly cut, bright and well detailed.


What is it's purpose?
Stickers can be used for any number of purposes, however I believe in this project it would be meaning to advertise a mascot character of a line.


Does it have longevity?
Yes and no, a sticker can be used very quickly and easily, it depends what exactly that sticker is on that can give it longevity.


Design details:
bright, fresh colours soft detailing


Other comments: I like the fact that they are cut out by themselfs and are their own sticker, it is not stuck on a sheet. The custom cut nature gives a level of professionalism.

What attracted you to the item?
Top prints, nice cohesive colour pallet and style, could easily be sold as a set, very graphic-esque 



What is it's purpose?
A print can easily be framed or put on display, it's style is definitely reminiscent of comic convention fair.

Does it have longevity?
It can easily be framed on a wall or tucked into a book, Even the alice and wonderland based print has both a draw for people and as a pop culture icon is not easily put away


Design details:
It has great use of black work contrasting with the colours, it's very muted and mysterious, easily something I might have been drawn to as a young teen.


Other comments:I like how some of her work is applied in different ways, such as the cat print being used for her business card, I would like to see more of her work applied in different ways

What attracted you to the item?
Cat prints, Prints that can give the aura of colourfulness without using many colours, it looks like a risograph publication

What is it's purpose?
As a print it could be famed, it is also flexable as a post card due to it's small size, and simplistic nature as it wouldn't recive much damage it's on sturdy card and it isn't glossy


Does it have longevity?
yes, it's some thing that could be kept around the house as decoration


Design details:
two colour designs, simplistic use of shape accented by line.


Other comments:very easily manipulated image, could be used in many formats.

What attracted you to the item?
teacup candles, the only item of it's kind that i saw in the promotional items table


What is it's purpose?
as a decorative item in a house


Does it have longevity?
yes and no, as the candle it will burn down eventually, however it may be used after as a decorative piece after the candle has burnt down.


Design details:
it's black lace designs on a white teacup, simple in it's design and contrast and sticks to a Gothic theme throughout.


Other comments:
 This person has a wide range of products that could easily be sold in stores, and the teacup candles are a unique approach to the brief and it's very effective, I could easily believe she is being stocked in stores.

Evaluation

Overall this module has been informative and has challenged me as an artist. I most enjoyed the artist talks as it is great to hear from successful artists and how I can learn from how they work in the professional world and how the professional world can interact with their practice. Having a refresher corse on CVs, interveiws, contract work and copyright was a good touch as many important details can be lost over time, and the talks have expanded upon the subject more from when i was prior taught about them.

I loved the newspaper project, it was interesting to work as a team with many different people to create a cohesive work, it was alot of hard work however i would like to do such things again, and having to take on finance and print yourself was a good introduction to outscoring your print and other products.

The five days of work experience was a greatly helped me, I now of many other artists anthology books and can submit to and advertise my work and I believe I have found a nice path for early career work because of the work experience. it also gave me a window into looking interacting with other artists and clients and how to appropriately respond to them.

Overall this module has given me a lot and has helped me on my path as an artist.