November Freelance Illustration Update

Hi, how’s it going? I hope you have had a good month? I wanted to give you an update on what I have been up to and how my First World War project is progressing. This blog post is definitely going to be the side of freelance illustration people don’t see, because it is going to be about a month of things just going wrong essentially.

I am going to get the bad stuff out of the way to begin with. This month has been very stop/start and quite difficult to be productive. I have been waiting on health-related news for a couple of family members which has preoccupied my brain. Client work has still been hard to come by and print sales have slowed down virtually completely. I have had 3 job interviews for art technician roles which has meant that I’ve had to take time out of freelancing to focus on those, I didn’t get any of the jobs unfortunately so all it has meant is a really interrupted workflow. About 10 days ago I managed to pick up this bug that has been doing the rounds and I had to spend 3 days in bed with it and I just can’t shake it. The fatigue has been very annoying and making it difficult to work past 2pm without a cracking headache. Then to top the month off we were out for my girlfriend's birthday on Monday and I managed to throw my neck and back out driving which has meant I haven’t been able to draw so far this week.

Now for the good news. A couple of days ago I did secure some design work with an Australian company to produce the visuals for a military card game which will be a fun project. I am not going to have to produce this project under a nondisclosure agreement which means I will be able to share updates on the designs and let you know when the game is out for release. I am looking forward to this project as I haven’t worked on a large-scale graphic design project this year, only small one-off poster designs and hand-drawn illustration commissions, it will be nice to change things up a bit.

I have managed to finish two illustrations for my First World War project and started a third. I finished the First Battle of Ypres map and the Battle of Gheluvelt map. I had mixed results with those maps. I tried to include less white space on the Ypres map, which I don’t think has worked and then I included contour lines on the Gheluvelt map which I think worked really well. The positive thing about both of those maps is I’m learning what works and what doesn’t so I can use that knowledge going into my next map on the Battle of Armentieres, which I have almost finished sketching out. I am hoping to get my neck sorted this week and then finish three maps for my First World War project before Christmas.

Hopefully, December will be a much more straightforward month!