Storytime: How I became a Freelance Illustrator

Hello and welcome to my blog. In this first post I would like to share how I became a freelancer

So aside from me graduating as a fine arts student major in advertising I work as a flash animator in the animation industry. And then a year later I became a motion capture data tracker and keyframe animator and worked there for about a decade.

And then came the economic crash. We were laid off from our work because the company is starting to really bleed out but we were the last batch to be laid off so basically when we got out the company fell. Fortunately I was already working some side gigs in deviantart doing chibi commissions and character art illustrations.

At first of course like everyone else I felt devastated from losing my job.

I just got married at that time and just after our honeymoon we got the news that will be losing our job in a few months so just imagine the predicament that we were in because at that time we thought that we are finally going to start our life as a married couple and then we are losing our job.

We were forced to take a drastic step of leaving the city behind and going back to my hometown in the suburbs and live with my side of the family for a while.

Of course living with another family is going to be hard but we had no choice until we are able to get back on our feet again.

At the same time personally I don't want to work with a company again (except as a my client) after what happened because it felt like I had no control with what's going to happen to my career if I let other people decide on it.

Quick Disclaimer: This is just my personal opinion and it's not going to reflect everyone's opinion but for me being employed is basically having someone else decide what's going to happen to your career, to how it's going to go up or go down, and see what happened in my case, or at least, in the case of everyone that I work with, is that we worked our butts off but we still got retrenched because of something that we can't control because it is something that the higher ups can control but they didn't.

I can honestly say I was bitter about what happened because at that time I really did gave my all for the company and I felt like they didn't gave their for the company or it wasn't enough and what happened happened. And of course I don't know their side of the story and I don't really wanna know because I'm still bitter about it and it is my honest feeling and that's why I never wanted to be employed again but of course like everyone else I had bills to pay so I need to work. And I want to work.

So how's that going to happen and that's where freelancing came to my mind basically it is being on a business for yourself by yourself and doing it everything on your own so basically as being a freelancer you are a business owner yourself, employing yourself.

And as a freelancer of course I have control of what happens to me or what happens to my business if it goes up then it means that I'm doing everything I can and if it goes down then probably I'm not doing enough, it's a simple as that. But of course like any other business it doesn't always work with what you had in mind or what you initially imagine in your head and there are times that even if you do everything you can it doesn't really go well but at least on my own I can do something about it and I know that I have control on how I would react on those.

So for a couple of months or let's say about a year I double time on getting clients. I reach out to my previous commission clients and ask if they have any work for me. I send a lot of proposals to other job posting that I can find anywhere on Google, on oDesk at that time, now it's called Upwork, and Guru, and there was conceptart.org.

I can safely say that sending a hundred proposals I only got about one or two clients out of those proposals so I have like 80 to 99% rate of rejections and that's normal. The reason varies but thankfully none of them were about my skill level. The most common reason is the pricing and to all artist out there , unless it is reasonable, never budge on making it lower or cheaper. It’s unfair to you. The other common reason is the mismatch of style required for the work. And you can always improve on that by adapting different styles in the future.

Of course at first it felt like I have no hope but I kept on pushing on it and now years later this is where I am. I can safely say that I am living off as a freelance illustration artist and this take a lot of heart to do. You have to be committed and you have to work really hard for it and sometimes you may have to cry for it.

So basically that's how I became a freelance illustration artist and you could say that it is out of circumstances and that's OK. I mean I am thankful that we are in this position that we are able to stand on our own and I cannot imagine any different or staying on the path don't believe anymore.