Starting From Zero: A Strategic Approach To Building A Career As A Pro Illustrator

I’m very lucky to be married to a former management consultant and online marketing whizz and so have a live-in marketing and strategy coach which I plan to make the most of while I transition from full time graphic designer to full time illustrator.

One of the most important lessons I’ve learned is that everything I do needs to be based on a sound plan and marketing strategy rather than making things up as I go along.

Having a strategy from the start ensures that I’m not wasting time (something I don’t have a lot of with a baby on the way in 3 months time), that I know exactly where I want to be and a plan of action how to get there. It also ensures that I have a set of measures along the way to gauge how my progress is going and where I need to focus my efforts.

When I finally decided to take this seriously and get over my self-doubt, here is how I got started with planning a more strategic approach to creating an illusration career…

Deciding On The Overall Objective

The most important thing for me to do was to work out what the overall objective was for my illustration career.

This is the really fun part - take some time to focus on what you want to achieve with your illustration career. Don’t limit yourself here, think big - it may be that you want to be the most famous wildlife illustrator in the world, be the go-to guy/girl for medical illustrations, get a contract with Marvel comics or in my case be able to comfortably sustain/support my family through illustration commissions (that I enjoy) alone by 2011.

Breaking This Down Into Goals

Now that I have my objective, I can begin to break it down into specific goals. Here is where I started to ask myself specific questions like: What do I enjoy illustrating? What medium do I most enjoy working in? Is there a specific style or medium that best suits my lifestyle?

This last question is a very important one for me as we are Location Independent meaning that we don’t have a base and instead move around the world every 2-3 months (although we are now based back in the UK for 6 months while my wife is pregnant) so the obvious choice of medium for me would be to work digitally with my laptop and a Wacom drawing tablet.

My goals look like this:

To generate £50k profit from Illustration Commissions every year
To be regularly commissioned to do 2 book/comic book covers
To have regular monthly illustrations in 4 international publications
To work published in 2 children’s picture books every year
To have work featured in 2 illustration annuals every year
To be running one of the most comprehensive & informative blogs about becoming & being a professional illustrator within the industry as a resource (and hopefully inspiration) to others on this journey.

Now that I had a list of goals, I needed to reconcile them with my overall objective to make sure that each one takes me closer to achieving my main objective.

For example: What income I could realistically expect to make from a regular gig of 2 book/comic covers per month? When added to the figure I would make from my other illustration goals like 4 editorial illos per month and 2 childrens books per year - does this take me closer to my objective? Here the answer is yes.

Or would having work featured in 2 illustration annuals every year take me closer to my objective? The answer again is yes, as the invaluable exposure I would gain could generate commissions from new clients.

Deciding Upon The Strategies

So I had a list of goals and checked them against my main objective, I now needed to work out the strategies that I’m going to pursue in order to achieve them. Strategies are all about honing in on specific ways to achieve each goal.

For example, if one of my goals is to have regular monthly illustrations in 4 international publications, my strategies would cover what subject matter I’d like to be illustrating, which publications I want to target, what style of work I’d like to have published etc. It is essentially about making the strategic choices I want from all of the options available in order to achieve one of my goals.

Making An Action Plan

The great thing about working through this process of defining your objective, then your goals and your strategies is that it’s then easy to create a comprehensive action plan to help you achieve all of this.

Actions can be broken down into as much detail as you like - take for example the strategy above, the action plan for this could be broken down as follows:

Research the publications that I would like to work for
Find the Art Directors details from the chosen publications
Create specific portfolio pieces that would suit this publication
Contact Art Directors pointing them towards specific illos that you think they would be interested in
Follow up with Art Directors

Tracking & Measuring Progress

It’s important to know where you are in your process as you are progressing and this is where measuring and tracking your progress fits in. It will really help to keep you on track as you work through your action plan.

For example, my timeline for achieving the goal of having regular monthly illustrations in 4 international publications is by 2011. So, by 2010 I should expect to be half way to achieving my goal and already have regular monthly illustration commissions from 2 international publications.

By following this method of strategic planning to help achieve my goal of a professional illustration career, it is really helping me to focus my time and efforts towards achieving the goal.

I will be including weekly updates on the blog of what I have achieved each week and also my action plan for the following week so that you can see how the process is working and my progress is coming along.