Workflows to creative business breakthrough.
Workflows to creative business breakthrough.
An argument for guaranteed success
In the beginning, you want as few people as possible to see your work, and you want to make as much work as possible. Which is why instagram is a good place for beginners.
- Adam Ming
Last week I attended all the seminars in the illustrators circle pro series . I learned about SEO, PRICING, NEGOTIATING and BUILDING a BUSINESS from an illustrator’s perspective.
What I came away with was this.
It’s extremely difficult to make a living making art. That’s because you’re trying to do two difficult activities separately
Make a living, in our case, running a freelance business.
Make art.
We love doing the second and imagine we will do it so well that the making a living part will take care of itself.
How’s that working for you?
Instagram is good for beginners
In the beginning, you want as few people as possible to see your work, and you want to make as much work as possible. Which is why instagram is a good place for beginners.
The feedback you get will help you develop your style and maybe even land you a few gigs.
Over time you need to develop a more efficient approach than feeding the machine, as your work takes on a commercial value. You’ll need to figure out what you’re offering and make it easy for people who are searching for that to find you.
The point I’m making …
All that is a pre-amble to what I really want to talk about which is workflow.
The most common workflow is probably:
Make art > Post it on instagram > wait for business
Here’s how I’m tweaking that a little:
Make art > Capture/Resize it for the internet > Name the file descriptively > Put it in a folder > Post it on my website > Describe the work > Maybe Share it > Maybe on instagram.
Here are some benefits of this new workflow.
If you’re going to go through all that work after making the art you’re going to make better art
If you name your files, people, especially you will be able to find it more easily, so when someone says they want to see some animal illustrations, it’s not a Steve Jackson Trilogy through your files to retrieve them.
If you put your named files into a special folder it will be even easier to find. And now, you won’t have to post it on social media right after you make it. Instead you have a folder of stuff that you can use to post at scheduled times or use up this pockets of in between time
By putting it on your website and describing it, people can discover it and know what ‘it’ is. It’s like that little card in the art gallery next to the art that tells you who made it and what it is. Except you just made the world your art gallery.
If you keep popping up, you’ll get the job.
Now you may still need to ‘do’ instagram, but you can do it different, and it’s may not be the priority.
💎 I think little workflow like these will increase my chances of getting work in the future by a percentile. As those percentiles add up to 100% it becomes a guarantee.
And that’s my argument to why workflow improvements guarantee success.