8. A magazine cover, a Risograph bootcamp and my first genuine pricing enquiry 🫰
Plus some illustrations I did in October
Hi, I’m Libby. I’m trying to find my feet in the world of illustration. I’ve done a load of research and I’m sharing it here, along with my progress on how my illustration journey is going. I’m so glad you could join me on this bumpy ride!
Hi!
Happy Halloween or Samhain to you.
Alas, I didn’t come with any themed illustrations.
Everyone else is doing such a good job at spooky posts on social media, that I thought I’d leave it to those who do it best.
I’m in Poland this week. We’re working from Warsaw.
No cat responsibilities for a whole 3 weeks!
Here’s a glimpse into my mobile illustration studio…
It’s been a fun month full of learning but I’ve also been trying to maintain the balance so I’m prioritising key course assignments at the moment.
A magazine cover
I’m finally able to reveal that I was working on a proposal for Ferment magazine’s October issue - celebrating Belgian beer.
It was a live brief set by Adele Juzara, art director at Ferment, the craft beer magazine and subscription service, as part of the Inky Goodness Make Your Mark Bootcamp.
This was a really fun brief and I felt a bit more comfortable with it compared to the Guardian magazine one on grief.
Perhaps because beer is a physical thing (I’d like to work on my conceptual illustration skills!)
Here are some initial sketches I made.
If I’m being totally honest - I preferred my first two concepts
a tapestry-style design
stained glass-style design
I went with the third monk swimming in beer idea because everyone on the course was drawn to it because of its direct humour.
I was super nervous as this was my first ever brief set by an art director (it came before the Guardian brief.) If I were to go back, I might have stuck to my guns and gone for one of the other concepts, integrating some humour into them.
Here are my colour roughs:
The Belgian flag colours
More traditional colours with a pop of red
Yellow and blue pops with an outlined title
I ended up going for blue and based on Adele’s feedback, adding a bit of texture to the image.
Adele was extremely kind and helpful with her feedback. She spent extra time on this and it was greatly appreciated by the Inky Goodness cohort.
A Risograph bootcamp
I got the chance to participate in a 1-day hands-on workshop this month, in Lewisham in London, all about Risograph.
Risograph is a type of printing that prints layers of individual colours, usually in large volumes as the machine creates a stencil for each layer.
It’s a super cool way of printing and can produce interesting effects.
Everyone in the illustration community seems to be talking about Risograph printing so I had to find out all about it!
Luckily we had a cat-sit near the Pagemasters, the riso studio in Lewisham, so it was a short walk for me.
It was 7 hours of Riso fun learning about gradients, alignment, trapping and formatting.
We produced our very own Risograph guidebook.
Disappointingly there was no consensus on how to pronounce Riso.
There was a mixture of R(ee)so, R(igh)so and R(ih)so.
Apparently, that’s the charm.
There’s no right answer.
I’m sure someone’s going to enlighten me after they read this… please let us know in the comments!
Here is a piece I created during the workshop. We handmade some designs on tracing paper that were scanned into the machine, a method that is rarely used now with digital files.
The brilliant thing about Risograph is that the community seems to be so sharing and kind.
I’m looking forward to planning a future Riso project!
My first genuine pricing enquiry
In the last week, I received my first pricing enquiry through my website.
I say genuine because illustrators tend to receive random DMs from people on Instagram, from accounts with zero followers that seem to disappear after a while. These end up in my blocked message folder…
In the email I received, I was asked to price an advertising/branding opportunity.
After initially thinking it was (obviously) spam…
I checked the following:
Name
Email address - was it from a weird email not associated with the person’s name or company?
Email contents - was the wording iffy?
Website - where was the company based and are they likely to be enquiring about illustrations? Was the name of the person contacting me on said website?
The name was there, plus a nice picture.
So unless someone had hacked into this lovely person’s email account and worded a very polite project brief, I made the assumption it was genuine.
To price, thankfully, as a member, I had the AOI pricing calculator for a bit of help. It doesn’t suggest prices but more helps with the terms based on what the illustration will be used for.
The key considerations I made when quoting were:
Time to illustrate based on the basic brief provided
Number of revisions - I shared an expectation in my reply
Licence term - I shared a term based on the price quoted
Having a licencing term up front when pricing is the single most common advice I’ve seen from illustrators in different online communities.
Artwork that’s expected to be used for a long time, should pay back.
Usually, this kind of enquiry goes out to several illustrators to quote so we’ll see if anything comes of it!
… I’ll keep you posted as and when I can.
What I’ve learned
This month I’ve tried to keep my head down and focus on a couple of key projects. I’m prioritising balance and allowing some personal briefs to go on hold while I focus on those that will bring the most depth to my portfolio.
One of these is my greetings card brief although I have made a good start.
I loved getting hands-on with real people and Risograph. I felt part of the illustration community and comfortable sharing my story which was a great feeling.
After discussions with friends and others, I’m learning my journey has only started. I need to keep reminding myself that it’s ok not to have everything figured out yet.
This month’s resources
Materials I’ve used
Affinity Designer mostly
Collage and sketching in the Risograph bootcamp
Clubs, Workshops & Tutorials I’ve attended
As part of Inky Goodness Make Your Mark Bootcamp:
Craft your passion project with Julia Praschma
Mentoring with Lisk Feng
The Plum Agency and Picture Book Illustrator Jess Mason
Non-fiction book planning with Owen Davey
Risograph Bootcamp at Pagemasters
What I’m excited about for the next month
My first illustration coaching session with Tom Froese - very excited about that…
Finishing my Inky Goodness passion project - I’ll share all about it next month!
Continuing wth greeting cards as part of my latest brief.
Has any of this month’s update been helpful for you? I’d love to know if you’ve tried Riso before and how you got on?
Thank you for reading!
Libby
So many exciting things this month and coming up!