ALL id

The great thing about art is it’s one of the few careers that you can break into that don’t require a degree or schooling of any kind. You can be entirely self-taught, but if your portfolio is rocking, then you’ll get hired.

If you’re starting at ground zero, I’d say start with the cheapest — but still the most impressive — art technology. A pencil. If you hone your skills and your craft so well even just with a pencil & paper, You can build a following, get noticed, and start earning money to save up for adobe programs and online classes in digital art.

A few ideas:

—Make great drawings and take pics of them and start an instagram or tumblr and start gaining followers and offer online commissions. 

—The best way to get into comics is to MAKE YOUR OWN COMIC. Scan it and put it on the web. So many comics artists launch their careers with their personal work as webcomics and cheap xerox printed comics. (Nimona being a great example. Noelle Stevenson launched her entire career by just posting a comic page once a week.)

—Go to the park on your off days, start sketching people for $20 and sell it to them.

—Put some work up in the restaurant for sale. Maybe they’d even let you sit in the corner and sketch customers, then sell them to the diners.

—If you get really good and really fast, you can get jobs doing storyboards for advertising agencies, or even concept art jobs freelance.

There are art jobs in every city in the world. There are plenty of startups and creative agencies and small game companies in Portland for sure. If you’re nowhere near a medium-to-big-size city then get creative. Look around your town. People need art for all kinds of things. Start drawing out in public. Start putting your work around bulletin boards in town. You’ll start getting hired for all kinds of little jobs that you can save up to get started digitally. Remember, you don’t HAVE TO start with Adobe programs. There are free clones of photoshop and illustrator online, just google them. Lynda.com is a great cheap resource to learn any computer program, and it’s only $25/month. There’s also a ton of free videos there. And literally anything you want to learn has a video on youtube.

Get creative. Use what you have, then upgrade as you go. If you really want this to work, then put the time in and people will notice.

—Agent KillFee

48. Bob Bitch II

If it’s something personal or genuine you can say about the AD or about the company then sure, go for it. But otherwise all that “look at my work, I want you to hire me” stuff is understood.

—Agent KillFee

Stephen King is an All-Time Great, arguably one of the most popular novelists the world has ever seen. And there’s a good chance that he’s inspired more people to start writing than any other living writer. So, as the Guardian and King’s UK publisher Hodder launch a short story competition – to be judged by the master himself – here are the ten most important lessons to learn from his work.

1. Write whatever the hell you like

King might be best known – or, rather, best regarded – as a writer of horror novels, but really, his back catalogue is crammed with every genre you can think of. There are thrillers (Misery, Gerald’s Game), literary novels (Bag Of Bones, Different Seasons), crime procedurals (Mr Mercedes), apocalypse narratives (The Stand), fantasy (Eyes Of The Dragon, The Dark Tower series) … He’s even written what I think of as being one of the greatest Young Adult novels of all time: The Long Walk. Perhaps the only genre or audience he hasn’t really touched so far is comedy, but most of his work features moments that show his deft touch with humour. It’s clear that King does what he wants, when he wants, and his constant readers – the term he calls his, well, constant readers – will follow him wherever he goes.

2. The scariest thing isn’t necessarily what’s underneath the bed

Horror is a curious thing. What scares one person won’t necessarily scare another. And while there might be moments in his horror novels that tread towards the more conventional ideas of what some find terrifying, for the most part, the truly scary aspects are those that deal with humanity itself. Ghosts drive people to madness, telekinetic girls destroy whole towns with their powers, clowns … well, clowns are just bloody terrifying full stop. But the true crux of King’s ability to scare is finding the thing that his readers are actually worried about, and bringing that to the fore. If you’re writing horror, don’t just think about what goes bump in the night; think about what that bump might drive people to do afterwards.

3. Don’t be scared of transparency

One of my favourite things about King’s short story collections are the little notes about each tale that he puts into the text. The history of them, the context for the idea, how the writing process actually worked. They’re not only invaluable material for aspiring writers – because exactly how many drafts does it take to reach a decent story? King knows! – but they’re also brilliant nuggets of insight into King himself. Some people might think that it’s better off knowing nothing about authors when they read their work, but for King, his heart is on his sleeve. In his latest collection, The Bazaar of Broken Dreams, King gets more in-depth than ever, talking about what inspired the stories in such an honest way that it couldn’t have come from another writer’s pen. Which brings us to …

4. Write what you know. Sort of. Sometimes

Write what you know is the most common writing tip you’ll find anywhere. It’s nonsense, really, because if we all did that we’d end up with terribly boring novels about writers staring out of windows waiting for inspiration to hit. (If you like those, incidentally, head straight for the literary fiction section of your nearest bookshop.) But King understands that experience is something which can be channelled into your work, and should be at every opportunity. Aspects of his life – addiction, teaching, his near-fatal car accident, rock and roll, ageing – have cropped up in his work over and over, in ways that aren’t always obvious, but often help to drive the story. That’s something every writer can use, because it’s through these truths that real emotions can be writ large on the page.

5. Aim big. Or small

King’s written some mammoth books, and they’re often about mammoth things. The Stand takes readers into an apocalypse, with every stage of it laid out on the page until the final fantastical showdown. It deals with a horror that hits a group of characters twice in their lives, showing us how years and years of experience can change people. And The Dark Tower is a seven (or eight, or more, if you count the short stories set in its world) part series that takes in so many different genres of writing it’s dizzying. When he needs to, King aims really big, and sometimes that’s what you have to do to tell a story. At the other end of the spectrum, some of King’s most enduring stories – Rita Hayworth & Shawshank Redemption, The Mist – have come from his shorter works. He traps small groups of characters in single locations and lets the story play out how it will. The length of the story you’re telling should dictate the size of the book. Doesn’t matter if it’s forty thousand words or two hundred, King doesn’t waste a word.

6. Write all the time. And write a lot

King’s published – wait for it – 55 novels, 11 collections of stories, 5 non-fiction works, 7 novellas and 9 assorted other pieces (including illustrated works and comic books). That’s over a period of 41 years. That’s an average of two books a year. Which is, I must admit, a pretty giddying amount. That’s years of reading (or rereading, if you’re as foolishly in awe of him as I am). But he’s barely stopped for breath. This year has seen three books published by him, which makes me feel a little ashamed. Still, at my current rate of writing, I might catch up with him sometime next century. And while not every book has found the same critical and commercial success, they’ve all got their fans.

7. Voice is just as important as content

King’s a writer who understands that a story needs to begin before it’s actually told. It begins in the voice of the novel: is it first person, or third? Is it past or present tense? Is it told through multiple narrators, or just the one? He’s a master at understanding exactly why each story is told the way it’s told. Sure, he might dress it up as something simple – the story finding the voice it needs, or vice versa – but through his books you can see that he’s tried pretty much everything, and can see why each voice worked with the story he was telling.

8. And Form is just as important as voice

King isn’t really thought of as an experimental novelist, which is grossly unfair. Some of King’s more daring novels have taken on really interesting forms. Be it The Green Mile’s fragmented, serialised narrative; or the dual publication of The Regulators and Desperation – novels which featured the same characters in very different situations, with unsettling parallels between the stories that unfolded for them; or even Carrie’s mixed-media narrative, with sections of the story told as interview or newspaper extract. All of these novels have played with the way they’re presented on the page to find the perfect medium for telling those stories. Really, the lesson here from King is to not be afraid to play.

9. You don’t have to be yourself

Some of King’s greatest works in the early years of his career weren’t published by King himself. They were in the name of Richard Bachman, his slightly grislier pseudonym. The Long Walk, Thinner, The Running Man – these are books that dealt with a nastier side of things than King did in his properly attributed work. Because, maybe it’s good to have a voice that allows us to let the real darkness out, with no judgments. (And then maybe, as King eventually did in The Dark Half, it’s good to kill that voice on the page … )

10. Read On Writing. Now

Okay, yes. 2017 sucked. But 2018 is an opportunity to do something incredible

One way or another, this will be a pivotal year for racial justice, immigration, voting rights, healthcare, education, and LGBTQ+ equality. So this year we all need to step up and commit to whatever political and social good we can handle. 

That’s the idea behind the first ever Art Action Day this Saturday, January 20.

What is Art Action Day?

Art Action Day is an opportunity to speak out and make a commitment to action in 2018. With our friends at The Federation, we’re asking you to post about your vision for 2018, and—more importantly—how you’re committing to making that future a reality.

On Saturday we’ll signal boost your posts on and off Tumblr to inspire others.

How you can participate:

You can draw, make a gif, write a song or a poem—anything you want! The prompt is simple:

What do you want the headlines and history books to say about 2018? And what will you do to make it happen?

Maybe it’s helping to pass the DREAM Act or electing a gender-balanced Congress. Maybe it’s ending the stigma around mental illness. If we all commit to doing one thing this year, 2018 will be a very good year.

How to submit:

If you want us to signal boost your post, submit it to action.tumblr.com/submit.

You can also just tag your post #ArtActionDay and #WhatWillYouDo.

No good agent is going to take on an artist without a strong portfolio. If you have a strong portfolio but haven’t worked a lot yet, then maybe. Good agents are good talent scouts and know what Art Directors are looking for.

However, if you do NOT have a solid cohesive portfolio and an agent wants to sign you up anyway, I would be very suspicious and be wary of a scam. If you are a young artist, do not sign an exclusive contract with an agency (and by that I mean that the agent gets a cut of all work you do, whether they find it or you find it) - the agency should only be taking a cut of work they bring you. If you are a more established artist, and the agent may be working as more of a manager than a work-finder, then that relationship may evolve.

—Agent KillFee

Amber: aonartblog

Graphic:  https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WoQViJOvJ5FTZgFHB4e-ZvqWFcogQ7D7/view?usp=sharing