How to become an illustrator full time
One baby step at a time :)
You mean you can EMBED VIDEOS HERE TOO? Whaaaaaat!?
I made this video for you if you’re wondering how to become a full time artist or kick start your career in illustration.
Here are the 6 steps I took to make the leap from part time to full time illustration - I hope it helps you while you’re building your illustration career or working as a freelance illustrator.
How to become a full-time illustrator
Keep watching/reading to find out how to make the leap from part-time job to full-time creative!
Here are the six steps that I took and my story of going from a nanny to full-time creative. In case we've not met, I'm a live event Illustrator. I draw pictures at events, mostly online, and I've worked for Google, Facebook, Apple, lots of big companies like that.
Some things about my career just before you start reading and thinking, “well it's fine for her 'cause she's got somebody bringing loads of work in”.
I don't have an agent.
I don't have a secret pile of money. (I didn’t when I was starting out. Now I do have some savings because #adulting)
I don't have a "supportive husband" (hah). He’s lovely but he’s not funding my illustration career.
Acknowledging privilege
I'm a white, able-bodied, in a heterosexual relationship, cis-gender female living in the UK. I've been to university to post-graduate level, had student finance and financial government assistance for that and I have a nice family who wouldn't see me starve on the street. But that aside we'll still get into it. I wanted to acknowledge my abundant privilege and not be a complete, a***hole while we're talking about this.
I made the transition to full-time illustration in 2019.
Since then I've doubled and then tripled my income year on year just by drawing pictures. Hooray. As promised, here are the 6 steps I took.
1. Keep your part-time job
The first step, that I did was to keep my part-time job and I tell everybody who asks me about this to do the same, keep your part-time job! It is a secret weapon. Your part-time job is going to help you to say no to clients that aren't able to pay your fees.
A part-time job means that you're not putting so much pressure on your creative work that you seize up and can't do it. It's also really good for time management, because if you've got to do even half a day at your part-time job, then you've got to squash your work time into the other half of the day.
It’s really powerful having that concentrated got-to-work-now feeling. Especially in those early days when you might not have as much structure and regular clients.
2. Start calling yourself an illustrator!
You can just call yourself an illustrator now. I was on the Creative Boom podcast with Katy Cowan a couple of months ago. And there was a nice comment.
(It was mansplaining) But anyway, I'm going to share this comment, because this is the sort of thing that really messes with people's heads. You CAN just call yourself an illustrator, but here's what this man said.
He said,
'I get the positive sentiment, but illustrating as a professional field and something you have to work at and be consistent with, oh, I wouldn't call myself a plumber because I fixed a leak in my house. Not trying to be a gatekeeper, but there is some gray area here.'
Thank you for your wise and intelligent words. Yes. If you're a plumber, there are technical things in plumbing that are dangerous. For instance, are you going to flood someone's house if you get something wrong? When you're an illustrator, nobody’s house will get flooded if you draw a hand a bit funny. You are rewarded for your creative brain, your imagination. There are some technical bits to learn like dimensions and resolution and colours and stuff, but it's all learnable and even then…you don’t *have* to know these things to draw pictures.
I just, I don't even know where to begin with that. Just you ARE allowed to call yourself an illustrator, ignore people on the internet who are gatekeeping by saying stuff like this.
If you draw pictures, you're an illustrator. If you want to be an illustrator, you're an illustrator.
Good.
Thank you for coming to my Ted talk.
3. Keep making and sharing new illustration work
Make work, share work, make some more work. Share some more work. That is the key to helping people know that you are an illustrator and that you're available for work. If you don't show people, they're not going to know what you do. So that's my first tip: keep making work and sharing work.
Not necessarily on social media, although that's fine, but it's really worth building up a website with a portfolio because that's yours. You own it. It's not at the whim of algorithms and all that rubbish. So yes. Be very mindful of that. Especially if you're starting out. And don't feel bad about having a part-time job. I had a part-time job for literal years.
4. Make it SO EASY for people to work with you
Okay. My fourth tip is to make it really easy for people to work with you.
Make it obvious, make it a complete no-brainer. And that can look like putting on your social media, like ‘available for commissions’ or ‘open to commissions.' My books are open’, put it on your website as the first thing. So people can be like, ‘oh, this is how to work with this person’.
Keep telling people, keep telling people you're available to work.
5. Don’t let fear of missing out stop you FOMO-BE-GONE
My fifth tip is not to let fear of missing out FOMO, put you off. You might feel like because you haven't been to Art School or you haven't studied business or you haven't done the thing that you think you need to do. That's going to stop you from being able to run a successful illustration business, but it's just not true. Okay? You can learn everything you need to learn right now on the internet. There are incredible online courses available.
At the Good Ship Illustration, we're about to make a business course so you can sign up to the waiting list here. There are loads of incredible (often free) resources out there to help you build up your knowledge so that you can confidently and happily run an illustration business. That ties nicely in with my sixth tip, which is…
6. Surround yourself with other creative business owners!
That feeling that you're not alone = magic. You're not the only person dealing with clients or invoicing or trying to market and do you work at the same time? It’s really nice to have internet friends to talk to. If you have real life friends, even better, but internet friends are good too.
The Good Ship Illustration
In 2020 I co-founded The Good Ship Illustration with my good friends, Helen Stephens and Tania Willis. And we have so many free good things for you. (Scroll to the bottom of this blog post for all the good links.)
So we've got a podcast.
We have art club every Friday.
We've got freebies. If you're a picture book illustrator or if you're just wanting to get into a regular sketchbook practice.
It's a lovely, supportive creative community. And we'd love to meet you there! I realise I've given you these steps. It might be helpful for me to tell you a little bit about my story and yeah, just talk you through all of that.
My Illustration Career Path
So I studied animation at college for two years. I did a foundation degree, which is like a pretend degree. And then I did illustration and graphic design at Sunderland University. And then I graduated and I was snapped up by a marketing agency to be an in-house graphic designer, which was supposed to be brilliant, but it was not good at all. I learned a lot. Um, I was sacked, which was fun at the time. And then I went back to my job selling bath bombs at Lush. So I was part-time and Lush and part-time illustrating, but it was like three days a week at Lush, four days a week, illustrating - no such thing as free time. I was very tired. I didn't enjoy that. So then I broke up with my boyfriend and I moved to Italy to be a nanny because I wanted sunshine and pizzas and I had no money for traveling, but I wanted/needed to go traveling.
So that was my workaround. I stayed there for about a year. And then I moved to Germany to be a nanny - that was full-time. So I had my sketchbooks and I was drawing all the time, but I wasn't making any illustration money because it was all my energy was focused on babies and looking after other people's children, which I really enjoyed. But you know, if you want to be an illustrator… being a nanny started to feel less and less fun.
I did lots of sketchbook work and observational drawing. Then I saved up my nanny money so that I could be a part-time nanny. And during this time I was doing online courses in illustration learning as much as I could. I started to get commissions again! While working a bijillion other jobs part time
Jobs I did while I was building up my illustration career
Cleaning a yoga studio
Babysitting all the time
I worked in a Curry van (a food truck that used to go to food festivals all around Germany)
Teaching Chinese children English
Homework help and exam revision
Lecturer (part time so that I could keep illustrating and building my business)
It took a couple of years, but when I realized that the illustration was enough to pay all my bills and have some left and I'd saved up six months of expenses, I felt confident that the enquiries and the commissions were regular enough for me to sack off all the other jobs. That's when I quit my nanny job, and that's when I quit my lecturer job.
I think I was a little bit more scared than most people. Cause I was like, ‘I'm gonna live under a bridge if I quit my job’, but it was really fine. If you want to be sensible, I really recommend saving up six months of money because a lot of the time clients take ages to pay. Sometimes 90 day payment terms ruin your cash flow. Sometimes invoices have a mistake on them, so it can take months, honestly. It's ridiculous. So yes. Have that cushion + don't feel bad about keeping the security blanket of your part-time job.
When you DO leave your job to become a full time illustrator, it will be SO exciting
…and you'll feel so confident and ready to do it step by baby step.
For my 10 year illustration career, seven years of that I had a part-time job.
I hope that helps!
Hop over to that YouTube video and let me know where you are on your illustration career journey. I love hearing about it :)
Here are some nice links for further reading and investigating:
Come and say hi over on The Good Ship Illustration
PODCAST - The Good Ship Illustration podcast
Instagram - we run Art Club every Friday evening and it’s free and glorious.
We’re @thegoodshipillustration
Hi Katie,
Thank you for sharing your story, and your precious pieces of advice, it's so encouraging and honest, thank you really!!!