Barry Crump (detail), by Trevor Dodd,
Drawing Conclusions

I needed someone to illustrate the ukulele book. Nothing fancy or artsy, just simple line drawings of ukuleles, fingering positions, accessories, and the like. I had a small budget and a tight deadline. As compensation, I was prepared to offer “Illustrated by” credit on the cover, and even one of those little “About the Illustrator” blurbs, where the artist could pose in a comical fashion and plug their website. To me it seemed like a great way to break into books and get a commercial portfolio. But I was flummoxed by some of the people I interviewed. Absolutely flummoxed. These were all folks who claimed they wanted to be professional illustrators, yet they made me want to run a mile. In the end I did find a couple of excellent people to work with, but it took weeks.

What was everybody else doing wrong? Consistently, the same things. So of course I started making a list, as a public service. This list is a little different from most of those offering advice to aspiring artists. When professional illustrators are interviewed about how to “break into the business”, they talk about which art school to attend, what sort of style to cultivate, how to stay creative, and so forth. But as a potential client, I. Don’t. Care about that. Here’s a counter-list of very, very simple, practical things an illustrator can do to get work, from a client’s point of view.

• Get a website. I can’t consider anyone who isn’t online. I’m sorry, that seems harsh, but I physically do not have time to spend an hour going to a coffee shop and shuffling through the portfolio of each of the dozens of illustrators I hear about. I need to see all your work in about 30 seconds, then move on to the next candidate.
• Sign up for a basic online space, for example at a commercial portfolio site like this one, or pay someone to design it for you. Even posting your portfolio to a blog like TypePad would be fine, and that’s dirt cheap. People who bother to register their own domain name of course get taken far more seriously.
• Make sure you get listed in some of the online artist directories. How do you find these? Google freelance illustrator [your home town], because that’s what your clients will be doing. Figure out what the top ten results have in common, and do that.
• Make sure all the text on your site is properly spelled and punctuated. I know, you won’t be hired for your writing skills. But it tells me you care about what I think.
• Don’t make implausible claims about the thousand things you can do, or list ten different “specialisations”. Less is more. I felt much more confident in people who did only three things, but did them well. Do, however, show me the full range of stuff you’re good at, not endless variations in the same style.
• What are your rates? I know, every drawing you do is a special snowflake, but show me some sample pieces and say how much they would cost. This is really important to those of us on limited budgets, but nobody (nobody!) does this. It drove me nuts.
• List all your contact details on your website. Insane, I know, but some people forget to add a mailing address or a cellphone, or use an email address that they never check “because it gets too much spam”, or give out their home address and number(!).

Fingering D7, by yours truly
Adzebill

• So that means having a working email address, preferably one that ends in your domain name, not gmail or xtra. If you just post it on your website, though, you’ll start getting spam, and potential clients might end up in your spam filter. There are plenty of ways to hide an email address from spammers: use one.
• Check your email every day, and respond to clients within 24 hours. Your competition does.
• Use capital letters and punctuation in your emails. I know, you’re an Artist and just too creative to use the shift key, blah blah blah. But clients tend not to hire 12-year-olds, so perhaps you should strive to resemble one as little as possible.
• In the signature of your email put your landline, your mobile number, and your web address. If you have a fax, excellent. (I like to mark up faxed copy and fax it back.)
• Don’t put a tiny graphic in your email signature; it means I can’t tell which of your emails have attachments or not. This becomes really important when we’re emailing versions back and forth.
• If you’re offered a chance to do a sample piece, do it within 24 hours if you possibly can, and supply nicely-packaged original art as well as emailing a low-resolution scan. Need I say first impressions count? Apparently I do.
• Email sketches and samples at screen resolution: 72 dpi and a few hundred pixels wide. Never, ever email me multi-megabyte unsolicited artwork.
• Make an effort. If someone wants you to draw (say) a ukulele, go out and find a real ukulele. You may have to borrow one, or actually shell out $30 and buy one. (Or find a photo of one–I hear you can do that without leaving the house these days.) Do a few sketches before the client asks, and you’ll get huge kudos for showing initiative.
• Reassure me that you can work with other people: that you always meet deadlines, that you’ve had work published before and it all went smoothly, that you have a professional invoicing and receipt setup, that you’re GST-registered (I don’t actually care either way, but this suggests that you’ve worked with corporate clients more than once).

Ukulele capo, by Helen Taylor,
helben [at] xtra.co.nz

• What’s your policy on sending preliminary sketches? What file formats do you supply copy in? How many corrections can I make to a completed work before I’m charged extra? What are your terms of payment? Who holds copyright? (Hint: who’s paying who?) Do you have to be cited when your work’s used? If you don’t know the answers to all of these, I’ll be thinking, “Oh no–am I your first-ever client?” To prevent this sinking feeling, summarise the answers for me on your website.
• The most important thing, and the rationale behind this list: convince me you are not a flake. Everyone knows the stereotype: unreliable, temperamental, disorganised, living in a dream world. This stereotype, I must reluctantly report, is based on fact. For a client, the nightmare would be an illustrator who doesn’t listen to your detailed brief, takes weeks to make changes, comes up with something completely unusable, and then disappears just as the deadline approaches. This is the secret fear your client is nursing, so your job is to assuage it by acting like a professional at all times.
• Finally, don’t take on a job you can’t do; it’s a waste of everybody’s time. If the client supplies a clear brief and examples of what they want, and you’re unable to produce art to that standard, don’t go invoicing them for the hours you spent trying. The client’s paying for finished art, not for your time. Learn to say no. If you take all these grumpy suggestions on board, and are halfway skilled as an artist, I predict you will get work. Because hardly anyone else is doing the stuff on this list, any illustrator who’s just a bit organised stands out like a beacon in the field. Good luck!

In the liner notes to Stop Making Sense, David Byrne got it right: “American money is the ugliest money in the world.” (Byrne also claimed that the best way to keep your money from sticking together was to crumple it into little balls. See what you miss when you buy all your music as MP3s?)

Anyway, someone at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing felt that the five dollar bill unfortunately wasn’t quite ugly enough, so they stuck a big Barney-purple 5 on it (note the carefully-clashing sans-serif typeface—wouldn’t it be great if it turned out to be Arial?). Yes, this seems to be for real. Isn’t that the most jaw-droppingly hideous thing you’ve ever seen?

“We wanted this redesigned bill to scream, ‘I am a five. I am a five,”‘ Larry Felix, director of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing said in an interview with The Associated Press. “We wanted to eliminate any similarity or confusion on the part of the public between the $5 bill and the $100 bill.”

Well, Larry, I don’t like to tell a man his job, but have you ever considered not making all the bills the same color and size? That seems to work pretty well for, oh, every other country in the world. Actually, I know what Larry would say—every American says the same thing when you point this out to them. “Monopoly money!” Yes, it’s true. Even a child’s board game has better-designed money than the USA.

The original Monopoly design has an appealing simplicity, with slabby serifs and ball terminals in a classic transitional typeface, rather than that ludicrously bloated font on the greenback. The numbers are big and clear. There’s an anti-counterfeiting pattern, and a rather sweet repeated train and house motif—in the real world, those could be little transparent windows in a polymer bill. Heck, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing should just adopt this design as is—after all, Monopoly was invented in the Depression so ordinary people could live the American dream of being property-owning capitalists. And its inventor seems to have stolen the idea. What could be more appropriate? It’s the USA writ small.

Ten things I could never get used to. Note that unlike most critics of the USA, I actually lived there for years and years. For what it’s worth.

1. Religion a routine part of daily life rampant creationism, abstinence education, and belief in the impending End Times people who are offended if you say “damn.”
2. Political conservatism no real Left, almost no unions poverty the fault of poor people.
3. Social conservatism death penalty and early marriage fine, interracial dating still controversial feminists that nevertheless expected me to pay for everything on a date.
4. A health care system at the mercy of insurance companies try not to get sick.
5. Deep-seated federalism state’s rights a culture of decentralization and a suspicion of government locally-funded public schools half of America doesn’t know the Earth goes around the Sun once a year.
6. Cheap gasoline urban sprawl, lack of public transportation and sidewalks, SUVs, and Texas a tendency to invade Iraq.
7. Protestant work ethic one-hour commutes acceptable, fifteen-minute lunches eaten at your desk, ten days leave a year, and sometimes no sick leave or maternity leave at all.
8. A food culture degraded by the drive for convenience flavorless produce bred only for looks and shipping, and processed foods laden with corn syrup ghastly industrial farming and entrenched protectionist agricultural subsidies Cool-Whip, Easy Cheese, and Twinkies
9. Obsession with slavery and the Civil War (because nobody else in the world ever had slaves or a civil war) omnipresent racial politics lack of engagement with other racial problems, like genocide and immigration.
10. American exceptionalism insularity educated people arguing that if everyone had a gun in their home we’d all be better off, despite evidence from the rest of the world that this might not be the case.

It’s interesting to note that a New Zealander in the US saying these things is accused (more than once) of “hating America” and told to go home. An expatriate American criticizing New Zealand would likely get rueful shrugs and sighs of agreement. OK, and then people would call him a wanker behind his back, but still.