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How to Overcome Your Fear of Specialisation

By Lea on September 9, 2011 / Jonathan's Progess, Marketing & Promoting Yourself / 2 Comments

One of the biggest things that Jonathan has struggled with in his journey to becoming a professional illustrator is his ongoing struggle to define why someone should hire him and not another illustrator.

He flip flopped over his style – should he have a core style? Should he demonstrate he can work in any style? What is his core style?

He flip flopped over subject matters – should he just do wildlife? Does he need to show he can do people too? Should he show he can do backgrounds such as city scapes and the countryside?

Alongside his chronic lack of self belief, it’s the single biggest thing which prevented him from making any progress as an illustrator. It’s been just as frustrating watching from the outside, as I’m sure it has been for him!

You may know by now, that he’s since found his core style and subject matter – cut paper collage of wildlife. And it has made the biggest difference to his success, with noticeable results:

He received a commendation in this year’s BBC Wildlife Artist of the Year competition
He’s been contacted by a large publishing company to create some mockups for a potential pop-up children’s book
He’s been asked to quote for a packaging project for a huge US company with distribution across the whole of North America
His work is about to be displayed in a local, upmarket gallery

The very fact that people are coming to him, interested in hiring him as a professional illustrator has been a huge boost to his confidence and given him a taste of the career he’s dreamed of for years.

If you doubt the fact that specialising in a particular field for your illustration is the right way to go, Jonathan’s experience is proof that it could be the most important thing you can do for your illustration career.

What’s Stopping You?

And yet I know this is a scary thing to do because…

You’re afraid of pigeon-holing and limiting yourself, thinking that art directors will want to see you can do a wide range of illustrations.

They don’t – most of the time, clients have a specific style in mind and want to go to the illustrator who they know can nail that style for them, because it’s just what they do.

You’re afraid if you work in the same style, medium and topic all the time, you’ll get bored.

There is nothing to stop you from working on other creative avenues, especially in your own time, but from a professional business and branding perspective, it pays to present consistency rather than experimentation.

You don’t know what to specialize in

This was Jonathan’s biggest challenge which is why he wrote the Style Guide based upon his experience of solving this problem! For him, it came down to looking at the subject matter he most enjoyed illustrating and the medium he most enjoyed using. It can be as simple as that

You’re not qualified

You may feel that you’re no specialist in the area you’d like to focus on, but nobody automatically becomes a specialist. They put in the work, they experiment and they keep refining their work in a specific area. Being “qualified” is often more a state of mind than anything else. If you feel qualified, then you are. Work on feeling qualified and you’ll be fine.

The bottom line: If you want to start attracting business and clients who come to you, rather than feeling like you constantly have to push to find them, make it your mission to become known as the “go to” illustrator for a style, a medium or a subject matter.

How to Do It

So once you’ve decided to become the “go to” illustrator for something, there are a few basics which will help convey this message to the rest of the world…

Make sure your portfolio reflects this type of work only.
Brand yourself and your illustration business to reflect your specialism.
Update your profiles and bio so everyone knows what you specialise in.
Make sure all external portfolio work (e.g. profiles on other portfolio sites) is “on brand”

And when the queries and projects start to roll in, you’ll wonder why you didn’t do this sooner – or is that just Jonathan?

Do You See Problems Or Solutions In Your Illustration Career?

By Jonathan on January 24, 2011 / Jonathan's Progess / 6 Comments

Sometimes when you’re so involved with your art and every little detail involved in trying to make a career out of it, it’s easy to overlook the progress you make along the way.

I don’t necessarily mean the improvements in your level of skill or draftsmanship, I’m talking about that all important confidence and self belief.

I recently had one of these lightbulb moments while talking to an artist friend about the BBC Wildlife Artist Of The Year 2011 competition. I had already decided to enter and my friend was thinking about it.

My friend creates their work in ink and adds flat planes of colour digitally, but upon realising that the competition doesn’t allow digitally created work to be entered, started to have doubts.

I suggested using gouache or acrylic to add the flat planes of colour that they would usually add in Photoshop but I could already hear the negativity creeping in and the walls going up. A few days later, I got a message from them saying that they decided not to enter.

So, what was my lightbulb moment?

Until a number of months ago, how my friend dealt with the additional challenges would have been exactly how I would have dealt with them. I would have given up.

The piece I’m creating is going to be the most challenging image I have ever made, for a number of reasons:

It’s about 10 times the size of any collage I’ve ever made – approximately 600x400mm
It will be the most detailed image I’ve ever created
The subject of my piece is of one of my favourite and one of the most majestic birds in world – the golden eagle but it feels daunting to do it justice
The background needs to be as much a character in the image as the bird
I have no idea how a traditional cut paper collage will be received by the judges of the competition (it may well be a first)

Previously, I would have had ‘that‘ voice in my head – dwelling on all these challenges, convincing myself I couldn’t pull it off and procrastination would have well and truly set in by now.

But you know what? This time, I haven’t heard those voices once and I’m totally ready and excited to take the challenge.

The only thing I’m thinking about are solutions to the creative challenges and for me that is a huge change in my mindset and one I’ll be celebrating (and thanking my friend for making me realise this).

Creating an illustration is all about making numerous creative decisions along the way, one after the other, to produce the strongest piece of work possible.

You have a choice…are you going to let those decisions and challenges cripple you and stop you in your tracks – or will you embrace them and grow as an artist by choosing to overcome them?

If you’re interested in finding out how my golden eagle collage takes shape, I’ll soon be sharing the progess in a post as part of zero2illo Process Of Illustration series next month.

Then There Were None: Progress Update Month 1

By Lea on October 25, 2010 / Jonathan's Progess / 1 Comment

Happy Monday! It’s Lea here, checking in with the first progress update for Jonathan’s new illustration business – Then There Were None. In our timeline, we’re into month 2 of the business so I thought it’d be useful to summarise what we’ve done so far to get to this stage…

Month 1 of Then There Were None

Naming the business

For a few years, Jonathan owned the domain two4joy.com – he loved it and when we were discussing the idea of his first business, he naturally felt this was the name he wanted to use. Only one problem…we no longer owned the domain and someone else now has it

And so we went back to the drawing board. For weeks. This was actually one of the things that delayed the launch and creation of the site because we couldn’t find a name which (a) we liked (b) that worked and (c) that was available as a .com domain.

We did some more brainstorming around the focus of Jonathan’s illustrations – obviously the theme of wildlife and nature is a big one – but it was still too broad.

It was while we were watching a programme on TV – The Lost Land of the Tiger – that we realised we could combine the idea for this business with a little bit of do-goodery too and give the business a real, tangible mission: to help save endangered animals by donating some of the profits to charitable causes plus helping to raise the profile of the goal to save endangered species.

Having figured out the concept and the mission behind the idea, we finally came up with the name: Then There Were None…

The only thing we questioned about it was the possibly negative connotation – but decided that it would serve as a great reminder to us and others – and made the final decision to go with it.

Fleshing out the concept

Hurray, we had a name!!! Now we needed to get the site up and running…faster said than done!

We started out with the idea for an online shop selling products with Jonathan’s illustrations printed on them, but let that idea sit for a while. Something didn’t quite feel right about it.

What bubbled to the surface was the fact that we didn’t want to set up a shop like all the other ones out there which would require *constant* marketing and huge amounts of traffic just to make a few sales which generate peanuts (I’ll be sharing the financial details & progress so far – YAY, there has been some income already! – in the zero2illo newsletter, out later today).

So we decided to try and get a bit smarter about the online shop concept, using what we’ve learned about running a business online and selling digital products for the past couple of years. That’s how we came upon the twist for the shop…

1) Regular, ongoing launches of limited collections - plays into the idea that you typically generate the most sales when you launch new things. With an online shop, we wanted to replicate that without constantly adding new products to a shop which just keeps on growing with the potential to become unwieldy and unmanageable for us and overwhelming for customers.

2) Products available for a specific period of time only - you’ll know that many people use the scarcity marketing tactic online to encourage people to buy. The idea of scarcity is a little difficult to replicate when digital products are endlessly available but with physical products, we wanted to leverage the concept of exclusivity which ties in really nicely with the idea of extinction, given the nature and mission of the business.

3) Focusing products around celebrations & occasions - as illustrators and artists, we’d all like to think that people will buy the beautiful things we create…just because. Unfortunately they don’t – so we wanted to give people extra reasons to buy and what better way to do this, than to tie the release of collections to celebrations and occasions where people naturally give gifts?

From Jonathan’s perspective, all of the above also become more manageable and give him a solid structure and focus for creating his actual illustrations (which as you’ll probably know by now, is a constant challenge!).

Building the shop

Domain name bought, concept fleshed out…time to build the shop which was my task. While Jonathan was busily creating the graphics for the site – all custom illustrations, as you’ll see – I got the basic site structure up and running.

For the techies amongst you, here’s what we’ve used:

Self-hosted WordPress, hosted on Bluehost [aff]
The latest version of Headway [aff] – we’ve had a sneak preview copy of version 2.0 for a while now – it’s even more awesome.
Aweber [aff] for the mailing list

The site itself has:

A blog
Links to our online shop profiles (more about those next week – boy have they caused us pain!)
Donate buttons for the WWF

The site took about half a day to build and another couple of hours to complete once Jonathan’s illustrations were ready. We unofficially launched the site with no products available for sale (this month’s task) to begin the mission and spread the word. And we still haven’t “officially” launched it yet – that’s coming up soon!

Next week, I’ll be talking more about what’s happened so far in month 2, including:

Researching the products & online Print-on-Demand (POD) services
Setting up the online shops
Our basic marketing strategy for the new business

As I said, I’ll be sharing the financial details of the business in the zero2illo newsletter (out later today along with a fun Halloween Sale – you’ve been warned!!), so if you’d like to know how much we’ve made so far (waaay more than we expected given we’ve not actually launched yet!) and how much we’ve spent getting to this stage, you can sign up over in the sidebar.

Building An Unconventional Illustration Business: A Step-by-Step Case Study

By Jonathan on October 15, 2010 / Jonathan's Progess / 10 Comments

This is quite a momentous post for me…after many years of fighting self doubt, procrastination and false starts I’m super excited to announce the new illustration-based business that Lea and I are about to launch.

It finally feels like I’ve found my focus when it comes to forging a career and a business using my illustration skills and that I’ve found what I was meant to be doing as an illustrator all along. But it’s not what I thought it would be – nor probably what most of you think of when you’re sitting there pondering about how you too can earn money from your illustrations…

An Unconventional Approach

We’ve been working on this business behind the scenes for the last couple of months and are finally ready to share it with you. When you consider the conventional route that many people follow to create an illustration-based career, this is somewhat of a more unconventional path which puts an illustrator firmly in control of their career and no longer at the mercy of an Art Director or Publisher. That’s what is so appealing to both of us…

A Case Study

Over the next 12 months, we’ve decided to use our experience as a case study for others. We’ll be sharing the progress of the business each month from day one – well, almost day one.

We’ll be sharing all of the highs, lows, successes and failures in the hope that it will, in turn, inspire other illustrators that it is possible – and to show how it can be done without having to put your illustration career in the hands of Art Directors or Publishers.

If you sign-up to the zero2illo newsletter (the sign up box is over in the blog sidebar), we’ll even be sharing the nitty gritty financial details too, including expenditure and income, in the hope that it will provide a complete and realistic picture of what it takes to create a new business from scratch.

Introducing The New Business…

Our new business is called ‘Then There Were None‘ and it’s basically an online shop…but with a twist.

Most readers will probably know that along with my passion for illustration, I am also passionate about wildlife and nature (just take a look at my portfolio and this will be pretty obvious) – specifically saving endangered species from extinction and these two passions combine to form the driving force behind the new business.

Here’s a basic run down of how the ‘Then There Were None’ shop will work:

There will only be 6 products on sale at any one time – 3 branded “flagship” products and a current collection comprising of 3 products only.
The collections will comprise of one product for babies, one product for children and one product for adults – typically either a babygro or bib, a t-shirt and a tote bag or print or gift cards.
The collections will be based around the main holidays in the year – Christmas, Valentines Day, Easter, Thanksgiving, Halloween etc.
The 3 branded products will always be available but the collections will only be available for a 6 week period (5 weeks prior to the holiday/event and 1 week afterwards before they become extinct!).
10% of all profits (including any commissions I receive as a result of this site) will be donated to charities both large and small, which are working to conserve and save species from extinction.

Next week, Lea will be talking more about what we’ve done so far and why we’ve decided to add the twists plus why I finally feel like I can get over my hangs up about marketing myself. We hope you’ll follow along with the case study and wish us luck with the progress of the business!

2009 was the year that…

By Jonathan on January 5, 2010 / Jonathan's Progess, zero2illo News / 8 Comments

2009 has been the biggest year of my life so far with some big decisions made, finally taking some action, the life changing arrival of my beautiful daughter and the realisation that sometimes working towards your goals means working on something else entirely.

The start of a new year is always a great time for reflection so without further ado, 2009 was the year that…

…I launched zero2illo

zero2illoBANNER 2009 was the year that...

…I had a digital painting tutorial featured on PSDtuts

…I had my first published work

…I became a father

mali 2009 was the year that...

…My illustration style finally fell into place

collageSTYLE 2009 was the year that...

…I was interviewed by the best illustration podcaster (in my opinion) of 2009

…We hit the road again

…I realised that working towards your goals sometimes means working on something else entirely.

This last point needs a little more explanation as it’s an important one because it was a bitter, but very necessary pill to swallow.

Sometimes, there just aren’t enough hours in the day to fit everything in and over the last six months this has become very apparent and something had to give. Illustration is my passion but I just haven’t have the time to put in to it to start making it pay.

With the responsibilities that come with being a husband and father, I had to priortise the businesses that we already had up and running as they were the main income source for our family. I wrestled with the fact that I had started to gain a small following on the zero2illo blog, that I had contacted other illustrators to request interviews with them, that I had been interviewed for something that I wasn’t able to give more of my time and attention to and that I had finally started to make some progress with my work.

It was so hard to let go but I know it’s temporary and it’s not as though I don’t enjoy the other work I currently get paid for (graphic design), I just didn’t want to let people down.

But then I realised something – by focusing my time and effort on our other businesses, we were building up passive income streams, setting up marketing channels, streamlining our services and getting our house in order…all of which means that in a month or two, I will be able to focus on my illustration career and this blog more than I ever have before and because of the time we have put into the other businesses, my wife will also have time to help me with this blog and my portfolio site (which is going to make a huge difference as she is a one woman dynamo when it comes to business and marketing!)

Temporarily loosening the grip on my illustration aspirations has been really hard but I now know that it was the right decision and that makes me more determined than ever to make 2010 a big year for illustration.

I’d like to thanks everyone for sticking with me while I get things sorted out and for all of the support and comments throughout 2009, believe me, they really do mean so much to me.

Wishing you all a successful and profitable New Year of Illustration,

Jonathan

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