Starting over

I graduated from Falmouth University with a BA in Illustration in 2016, it’s now 2024 and I’m starting a fresh journey onto the illustrators career path. Why? Because putting yourself out there is scary, because I never felt ‘ready’ or ‘good enough’ to send my work out to potential clients and agents. Because I was too much of a chicken to face the idea of hosting a stall or a shop and having zero sales.

The thing is, those failures for most people are a necessary part of the journey, and avoiding them means you can’t actually get to the end goal. I’m a bit older, wiser and braver than I was 8 years ago and I’m more willing to fail and learn and try again.

Do I believe it will be easy now, 8 years later, after putting my pencil down numerous times over those two years and sometimes loosing it to the cracks in the sofa for months at a time? Heck no! But do I believe I can do it? Absolutely yes.

“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” - T.A. Edison

The thing is, I love to draw, but I do not love to gilrboss. Sales are not my strong suit, nor is social media, marketing, or really having the business sense to know where I should direct my pencil next to help build that killer portfolio my future client needs to see.

But then again I wasn’t a sporty kid at school, and now I run marathons and climb rocks. I couldn’t always build a website, but here we are. And I frankly couldn’t always draw beautifully, but now even I (my very own worst critic) think I can whip up a pretty nice illustration. The point being if I can learn all that, then I can learn the other skills I need to build my illustration career. With a chonk of bravery and a relentless quest to treat everything as a learning experience rather than a failure, I’m pretty confident I can get there.

According to ‘linearity.io’ 2.2 MILLION people make up the current illustration workforce, so why not me?

Let’s see shall we!