getting paid to draw

Hi there. Is this microphone on? I have a confession to make.

My name is Brian Biggs, and I’m an illustrator. That’s not the confession — if you’re here, on my website, you already know that. My confession is that I’m new at this. I’m just starting out. After thirty years of getting paid to draw, I think I’m finally figuring out how this works.

Let me explain.

The first book I published, Frederick & Eloise, was published by Fantagraphics back in June 1993. That’s the date I’m thinking of when I say thirty years. At the time, I was an art director in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, writing and drawing my comics and graphic novels at nights and weekends. Somewhere in there I started drawing illustrations for local newspapers and other clients, and in 1995 I quit the art director life to pursue the drawing-pictures life full-time. Other than a four-year stint as a teacher of illustration, as a full-time professor in the Illustration department at the University of the Arts from 2002-2006, I’ve been doing nothing but drawing pictures. And even then, starting in 2003, I was drawing late into the night and over weekends, working on my first break into the world of children’s books, Shredderman, for Knopf.

I’ve drawn pictures for pretty much any market you might imagine: advertising, editorial, toys, games, animation, surface design, greeting cards, music, theatre, etc and so on. I loved the variety of work. Around 2012, as Everything Goes was in full gear, my work in children’s books began to squeeze the rest out, and for the next decade, everything I did was for kids. This led to a lot of great books and amazing opportunities: A New York Times bestseller. A couple of big national book tours. Terrific reviews and interviews. I love making work for kids, and happy I was.

The pandemic shut down publishing for almost a year in 2020, and the dark societal mood and suddenly non-existent deadlines (as well as both of my kids adulting and moving out, I’d suspect) gave me a chance (read: forced me) to slow down a bit and open the door up on another side of my art brain, one that is closer to the graphic novels I was making in the 90s. Things a wee bit darker, maybe more subtle, 50% weirder. I picked up analog art supplies for the first time in years and ended up creating my book My Hero without the use of a computer at all. I began playing with collages again. And I loved it.

Don’t get me wrong — I love making books for kids. I published four books in 2022. I just completed work on a new Little Golden Book. I’m in the middle of a new picture book I’m illustrating and have another one lined up to follow. I’m in the late stages of writing a new picture book, the early stages of another, and have outlines for two more. All is well! But man, drawing weirder things, things for people who aren’t six years old, that’s a delight. And I want to do more. And I want to get paid for it. I’d love to put these things onto book covers, and on beer or wine labels, and in magazines. But I ran into a problem: things have changed in ten years — no one knows I can and want to do work in these other markets, and I haven’t the faintest idea how to get this work in front of the people who buy it. A friend who is a creative director at a local design agency had no idea I did anything but work for kids. When she saw some of this new stuff, she 1. Suggested I overhaul my website — it did nothing but scream KIDS. 2. She insisted I start a new instagram account. The personal one I had was all bike rides and family photos. Done and done. And I waited for the phone to start ringing.

And I’m still waiting.

Waiting and hoping for the algorithms of Google and Instagram to bless my drawings is no way to make a living or find new clients and markets. So there must be another way. Right?

A few weeks ago I was showing the work of Mike Lowery to my students at Tyler School of Art. I ran across a page on his site advertising an online workshop called “Getting Paid to Draw.” I read the synopsis describing the class’s goals as developing a portfolio of work, researching markets and clients, and learning how to get that work in front of the art buyers in those markets.

The thirty-year veteran in me who has been getting paid to draw since 1993 sort of dismissed this as I went about teaching the senior illustration class and riding the bus back to my professional-illustrator studio. Oh you know, it’s for people who do a lot of sketching, wishing that they could get art directors to see these sketches, but haven’t really developed the sketches into actual work nor learned how to get their work in front of… oh, shoot. That’s me.

So, I signed up!

I’ve been enjoying the class, especially the perceived accountability. I had a super-productive week last week ramping up to the class beginning as I freshened up my iPad and Procreate skills, turning several pencil sketches into work that looks like it maybe belongs somewhere. The videos are smart and useful. The community feedback has been good. I don’t do Twitter and I don’t like forums talking about work, so I thought I would’t enjoy this. It shouldn’t have been a surprise that a lot of people taking the class know me and know my work, and appreciated the intro post I wrote, sort of a much much shorter version of this. And I’ve liked seeing their work and answering questions as well. So six weeks of this learning and doing and chatting and yeah, I’ll get something out of it.

But then the hammer dropped (in a good way — I just can’t think of another metaphor) yesterday at about 2:10 pm. Allison Cole was doing a live Zoom with 75 participants about her work in surface design and licensing. And as she was showing examples of her own work and discussing the markets and clients for this kind of thing, something came into focus, something rang loud and clear and sounded just right. My sisters have bugged me for decades that I should, you know, get my work into Target stores. Get card companies to license my drawings and hand-lettering. Make art for bedspreads and rugs. As if it’s that simple, right? Like it’s easy. I always explained, well, you know, it’s a specific market and they want specific things it’s kind of out of reach and blah blah blah baloney baloney, and yesterday all those cobwebs were cleared away and I thought of the hundreds of homeless sketches and drawings I’ve made over the last three years, of birds and bugs and the plants and buildings and construction vehicles and robots and UFOs and cats and the patterns of planets in The Space Walk and my old dinosaurs and OH MY GOD. It feels like it’s RIGHT THERE WHERE I CAN TOUCH IT. I haven’t felt like this in a while. Years.

So now what?

Now I get to work. Line. Pattern. Texture. Color. Make the work that the lovely people who hire this stuff want to see, samples they can use. Put it on a page here on my site. Get it printed. Get it in front of them.

Watch this space. More to come.