What to do when (illustration) business is slowwww

🐌 From a dangerously optimistic illustrator

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This post is a little Rocky montage. I hope you’ll go away feeling like I massaged your shoulders a bit and flung a towel in your direction. Please imagine me yelling at you enthusiastically & hopping about like a boxer on the telly.

You’ll (hopefully) go away feelin’ PUMPED and more than ready to go get some shiny new illustration projects booked in.

There’s IS illustration work out there. I promise.

Yessss, let’s do this.

This post is split into three parts, so you can pick your own adventure, or gobble up the whole thing in one go. Good work. **Reassuring slap on the back** GO GET ‘EM.

Part 1: Story time

Part 2: A nice bullet point list so you can get on with it and Do the Things

Part 3: A customised plan, depending on how slow things are for you right now

*bonus bit at the end* Loads of brilliant tips from fellow creative pals.

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Part One (story time)
What to do when illustration business is slow

It was March 2020 and I’d been working SO hard on building up my live illustration work. And it was working! So far, so good.

My nannying job? Gone.

My big girl lecturer job? GONE!

This live illustration thing had really picked up, and I was ready to just be a lean, mean live illustration machine. I didn’t need my normal human jobs anymore. I was ready to pay my rent with 100% live illustration money. I was freeeee!

**Ominous music plays**

While drawing at a posh Durham University event, I noticed all the businessmen muttering to each other and looking at their phones a lot.

It was a bit off-putting, to be honest. Then one of the suits looked up and announced to the room,

“Yep. They’ve declared it a pandemic now.”

I remember googling “What is a pandemic?” In my mind I was like Pffffff, what an over-reaction. We’ll be FINE. It’s not really going to affect us. Is it?

Hahahahahaghshfgdgjfgkdhg

Narrator: It did affect them. Quite a lot.

The next morning I opened up my emails to see this:

Cancelled cancelled, postponed, postponed (there were more than this, but this is all I could bear to dig up while searching my inbox) **shudder**

This screenshot was just the tip of the inbox-iceberg.

All of my work was pretty much cancelled in one slow crushing week-long wave of postponed-cancelled-sorry-we’re-pausing-this-for-now emails. I’d gone from too-busy and wondering how I was going to fit everything in, to having absolutely NO work lined up.

Absolutely nowt.

I closed my laptop.

I felt like the World’s Biggest Eejit. WHAT HAD I BEEN THINKING? Why’d I given up both of my jobs and put all of my freelance eggs in this stupid bloody live illustration basket? I should’ve known there was going to be a pandemic.

Typical.

I felt very panicky. Yes, I could sell the car or eat my boyfriend, but really I didn’t want to do either of those things.

I realise this is a super extreme version of ‘things being a bit slow’ it was a screeching halt. But there were some good chunky lessons in there which I would’ve loved to know in the slow, hardly any work coming in years before 2020.

**Fast forward a bit**

In 2020/2021 my live illustration work really really took off. I thought things had been busy in 2019? I was wrong. Turns out I didn’t need to sell the Fiat 500 or eat my boyfriend (now husband) after all.

The enquiries started coming in again as a trickle, increasing week-by-week, and then WHOOSH. By 2021 things were bonkers. I’m talking, 5-events-a-day kind of bonkers.

I couldn’t keep up with the demand. I felt like my drawing hand might drop off.

Woah, what changed?

1. I calmed myself down as much as I could (After crying as much as I needed to. Which was quite a lot.)

2. I put myself in my clients’ shiny corporate shoes and realised what they needed most. Meetings and events were definitely still happening - they were just online instead now. Duhh.

3. I promised myself never to put all of my freelance money-earning eggs into one basket ever again, amen.

It sounds really stupidly obvious now, 5 years later. Let me sum up my months-long existential crisis and panic in one pithy sentence for you:

I tweaked my website, and the rest is history.*

What that REALLY means is:

*I threw myself into a website editing FRENZY and did not rest until enquiries started coming in again 😅 - I also threw myself into getting The Good Ship Illustration goin’ with Helen and Tania (no more eggs in one basket ever again, remember?) That Good Ship thing? 5 years on and we’ve had over 4500 students through our online courses for illustrators, we have a top-10 Design podcast, and it’s fun! I’ve never had so much fun doing “work”. I feel very lucky to work with my friends and it warms ma cockles whenever we get lovely emails and DMs from Good Shippers who have gone and done exciting things like getting published, shortlisted for fancy awards, exhibited and started making a living from their creative work.

Actually, while I’m here banging on about The Good Ship, I should let you know that the Business Course is open for enrollment this week. It’d be lovely to see you in there.

Right. Who wants a list? (Me. Always. I love a list.)

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