This is the first of a blog series called Both Hands On The Pencil in which I am trying to make sense of freelancing. Prompted by fellow creatives asking for advice as much as a way to focus my own thoughts on my career, I was looking for a way to document what I think are key factors to a healthy freelance business. I took some time off last year to recharge and think about how to steer my work towards a more vision-driven practice and not merely sailing whatever waves freelance life happens to throw at me. Part of my motivation to begin writing comes from wanting to protect myself from some of the negative aspects of freelancing, hopefully helping others in the process.

I’ve been freelancing for as long as I can remember and that never was a planned career move. I went to graphic design college and landed an internship with someone I met and became friends with at a music festival. After my graduation we looked into ways of continuing to work together and the easiest way was for me to get registered as a freelancer, basically forming a casual freelancer-to-freelancer collaboration business model. I wasn’t trained to run a business – I was hardly trained to be a graphic designer – but there I was, trying to figure out what freelancing meant as I went along. The biggest step I took a couple years in was to focus my portfolio on illustration and throwing graphic design off my site altogether. It was something I felt was needed in order to grow and looking back it was the right decision. It helped me enormously to focus on one skill, one style and one portfolio because it gave me confidence to successfully pitch my story, do acquisition and promotion. Communicating only one illustration style on my portfolio also helped streamline the brief process: Clients started hiring me for my specific illustration style, eliminating a round of moodboards, the back-and-forth of inspirational images, and enabling a hitting-the-ground-running approach that I’ve come to really enjoy in my work. (Narrowing down the style of your portfolio is much talked about and I don’t think there’s a right or wrong way to do it. For me personally, focusing on one style has worked, but there are good examples of multi-style portfolios out there. More on this in a later post.)

A lot of self-help information for freelancers is based on practical steps, it often includes awkward software or productivity apps and it approaches a freelance career – or at least its marketing – too mathematically. You don’t always go from A via B to C and if someone has done it successfully it doesn’t mean it works for the next person. A successful career path is only successful in hindsight. That doesn’t sound right for a how-to freelance guide, does it? I hope there is good news, however.