Contacting Professionals

To help further my research I want to learn more about the creative industry and the best way to do this is to talk to professionals in it and interview them about their jobs, for this I will be contacting five different practitioners to hear their say and learn from their shared knowledge.

The five practitioners I have contacted are, Hackett Illustrations, Built from Sketch, Manière Noire Shop, Rivulet Paper, and Karin Rytter. For each individual practitioner I send out a set of five questions with questions which are written specifically for that practitioner to get the most out of the interview. Unfortunately out of the five set of questions I sent out only one replied, though I will still be going over the other four.

The first of the five I send  set of questions too was Karin Rytter who is an illustrator who works in lino and block printing, she makes the majority of her work through self-directed freelance work creating illustration of myths and legends for her work through intricately cut block prints. When designing the questions to ask her I took this into consideration as well as the fact this was a full time job, the questions I asked are:

1- What inspires your work?

This is a common question I ask throughout as a first question, mainly because it’s interesting to hear other people inspirations especially as you could look into them and be inspired yourself, but it is also a nice simple question to start with.

2- Did you attend university or any other type of professional leaning? And if so was it beneficial?

I ask this as it isn’t clear through her online presence whether she has attended any professional learning and it could be an interesting to discuss which could help with my future decisions.

3- Do you struggle with the work-life balance? If so do you have any tips for helping mange that side of the job for a beginner?

I ask this as she quite prominently features her three young children on her Instagram and regularly talks about the topic, and as it is something I myself struggle with it would be interesting to learn from a professional’s perspective

 4- How did you get into lino printing? What attracted you to it?

I ask this since this is her main type of illustration medium and it is an odd choice compared to most. It would be also interesting to hear how she got into it

 5- How do you see your business in five years? 

This is a good question to ask as she makes the majority of her income from her popular Instagram page and the question is whether or not that is a sustainable business practice which could last and so it would be interesting to hear her opinion on it.

The next artist I asked was Built From Sketch, I wanted to ask him since he works of multiple sauces of income such as selling online through Etsy, holding stores at conventions and markets, and doing commission work; making him an interesting and successfully diversified illustrator. Here are the questions I asked-

1- What inspires you?

For the first question I went with the same as previous as for the same reasons.

2- Do you find it’s harder to be successful as an illustrator focusing more on traditional mediums?

This is because of his almost exclusive use of watercolour and ink illustration and the fact that digital; is becoming such a huge part of modern media

3- How do you find commissions?

This would be interesting as he has a less mainstream style of illustration with very traditional media and it interests me as to how he gets them as it could be useful to my future.

4- How sustainable is the business?

I ask this as it’s obvious that he has gone in to different ranges of illustration to help make it more sustainable and it would be interesting to hear just how sustainable that is.

5- How do you see your business in five years?

Again as his business relies heavily on internet interaction and it would be just interesting to hear his opinion the future of his work.

The next illustrator is Hackett Illustration, I wanted to feature him as he is mainly a editorial and advertisement illustrator amongst over commission based work as well as selling through his Instagram. This a bit different to the other illustrators and will be interesting to get his opinion; these are the questions I asked him:

1- What inspires your work?

This starting question again to easy into the questions and learn more about their method.

2- Did going to university help with your career?

He states in his bio that he went to uni, so it would be interesting to hear his opinion on that and whether it has helped him.

3-Is working in an agency something you would recommend? How has your experience been with it?

This is because he works with an agency to get the majority of his commission work and it would be good to know if it has been a positive or negative experience and if it would be something he’d do again.

4- Why digital over traditional? Does it have a greater advantage?

I ask this as he almost solely works in digital and it would be interesting to hear his explanation and reasons to why he prefers it

5- Where do you see yourself in 5 years’ time?

This will be interesting to answer as he is much more dependent on editorial and advertising based illustration, but with the potential downfall of traditional media it would be interesting to hear if he is at all worried about that.

The next illustrator is Rivulet Paper who makes intricate and detailed watercolour illustrations on Instagram and sells through the website, I choose her as she is almost solely reliant on Instagram for sales compared to the others making it an interesting interview; here are the questions-

1- What inspires your work?

I ask this for the same reason as the others.

2-Why watercolour? Do you find using a traditional medium to be a hold back in a digital world?

I ask this to see if she thinks that using a traditional medium is harder than digital and what her opinions on that might be.

3-How sustainable is the business?

This is again in reference to the fragility of social media and whether she finds it a reliable income for her work.

4-How hard was it to get the business of the ground? Do you have any tips?

This is in reference to the use of Instagram and building a large community on Instagram to sell work too and how she managed to do that.

5-How do you get your commissions?

I ask her this as while she may be mostly reliant now she use to do a lot of illustration work for companies and it would be interesting to hear how she ended up with those commissions to work on.

For the final illustrator I interviewed Manière Noire, which is an Instagram/website run business. They create a variety of content, mainly small decorative pins, printed T-shirts, patches, and original illustrations plus prints.  I choose their shop to do as it was more a business type account which a variety of different sale items and not just illustrations which is something I could see myself doing in the years to come. They were the only illustrators to reply the message, though to begin with these are the questions I asked-

1- What inspires your work?

I asked this for the same reason as the others, to both gain potential new inspiration sauces which could benefit my work and to ease into the questions.

2-How sustainable is the business?

I asked this as the business is heavily linked to the internet and social media and was interested on their own opinion on this matter and whether it was for the long term.

3-How hard was it to set up and get the business of the ground?

This was asked as I wanted to know a bit about their story and maybe gain a few tips on how they managed to raise the company.

4- Why did you decide to do pins?

This is asked because it is an interesting way to go with illustration and could be a potential path to go down in the future to diversity my products.

5-Do you prefer digital or traditional? Which one is the most essential to your business?

I ask this as with in the business they use both, the traditional to create the illustrations and prints, and the digital to create the pins, patches, and T-shirts; and so it would be interesting to hear what they say on that.

When emailing them I did the same for all the emails/messages and polity explained who I was and what the questions where for, Manière Noire replied with the message below, answering the given questions:

So to start analysing the response I will start with the first question, to reiterate her response she says her main inspirations are old movies and books, horror, the Victorian era, and medieval period. This something that I could learn from as I am mainly inspired by other artists and the occasional historic piece of artwork, I’d never really considered that much looking into the periods of time which I’m interesting in like that and so this could be a great new resource of new inspirations. For the second question she answers it by in short saying that she moves with trends and translates her illustrations into different mediums such as pins in order to keep up and keep sustainable. This is again something I could learn from and apply to my future especially if I want to run a similar small business as this makes it clear that diversifying it the key and paying attention to what is popular and trending is essentially to keeping on top of things for the future. The next questions she answers by saying that it took time but once she had found a strong brand identity that it was key to the success of the business and the products quality. This is great as it fits in the research form earlier about how important brand identity was; she also shows how important it is to the products which makes it an imperative thing I need to get right in future if I take this path. For the next question she simply replied with ‘What’s not to like about a pin?’ and I agree they’re great, I guess the ting to take from this is to make products you actually enjoy and believe in to make sure your passion translates into the quality. For the last question she answered it by saying that both traditional and digital are important, though for different reasons: for her digital is used to make and produce products such as the pins and t-shirts but traditional is more her love and what she uses to create her ideas in and experiment with and create the originals and prints with. From this I can take the importance of understanding and being able to work in digital for the future as it does help greatly with the production of products and could potentially increase the quality of them if I learnt more about digital. There is a lot to learn here and take away, from this use of digital to the importance of brand identity and following passion as well as trends, making it an important interview. Though in hindsight I do wish I had been more specific or more direct with some of the questions in order to get more direct answers which could have been more useful but overall it was still a very useful experience.

Overall though this has been useful to get in and see better as to how partitioning illustrators work and keep their businesses afloat even if I did get one reply that was enough to teach me some information which will hopefully help my career in the future making the endeavour worth it in the end.