These Are The Steps You As An Artist Should Take If You Want To Take On An Assignment For A Commission

while back, I made book illustrations for a few self-published writers. It was great fun, and I learned a lot. I wrote about it here.

The trick was to read their book first, so I understood the tone of the story, and to ask questions after that. Which famous movie celebrity did their characters look like the most? What did they think things looked like?

In this article, I will dive deeper into the steps you need to take to make an illustration assignment for a client you take on a success.

I will be making drawings I am happy with, of course, but the goal is also to make drawings a customer is satisfied with. You need to find out what they see in their mind’s eye. If what you produce doesn’t come anywhere near that, they will be disappointed and won’t use the art, which will be a gigantic waste of everyone’s time.

Next, you make “mood boards.” These are collages of images you found that you think are in the right style for the illustration. And you add photo references for the characters.

I can’t show you examples because they tend to be collages of copyrighted material, and you can only use them for private use. You can show this mood board to the customer to get their feedback.

Moodboards can be made and changed very quickly, and it is surprising how good moodboards are at conveying a concept.

You might need a second iteration after feedback from the client. I never had to make a third iteration.

Next come quick, rough preparatory sketches of the various options for the final illustrations. These can also be made in very little time and are easily changed or tossed for better options.

When you and the customer agree on the final design, you can set to rendering the final image. This stage can take a lot of work, which is why you do the moodboards and the preparatory sketches. You don’t want the customer to come back to you after working on a drawing for 160 hours and say they had second thoughts and want a different image now. You need to get them to agree to a preliminary sketch. You want to iron out the problems early on. The moodboards and preparatory sketches are for that.

This is why art contests never work. They give you some prompt, and you are supposed to spend days designing and creating something, second-guessing what a jury wants. You are setting yourself up for failure. Why waste so much of your time when the person making the final decision doesn’t even want to give you a half hour of their time?

Never create a finished piece for someone before you make absolutely sure you understand what they are looking for. This also means never participating in contests.

It is also one of the reasons why we won’t see A.I. replacing artists any time soon. The art being made by A.I. at the moment is stunning! But it is based on a short one-sentence prompt. It can probably replace cheap, free, barely suitable to the task stock photos, but they can not replace photographers who work for Vogue.

If you are a builder and a hotel wants to hire you to build a swimming pool, it is a good idea to interrogate the hotel owner. What does he dream the swimming pool will do for the hotel? If the hotel owner says they would love to see children running around the pool, you know you will need to use rubber tiles and that a pool bar that serves alcoholic beverages is perhaps not such a hot idea.

On the other hand, if the hotel owner dreams of seeing newly-weds getting romantically drunk together, then a pool bar is a good idea, and rubber tiles would look too ugly and not romantic enough.

It’s about what the customer sees with their mind’s eye: what they see when they dream of the outcome, and how they define success.

Then you can start to make all sorts of micro-decisions on behalf of the customer along the way during the project.

The customer has probably already thought of a partial solution and is conveying it to you. As the expert in your field, you can come up with better solutions if you understand the bigger picture of what they are trying to achieve.

You need to find out what the customer dreams of and what success looks like in their fantasy.

I read a story somewhere online where they said that during a job interview, one question would be, “design a house.” If the potential employee went to the whiteboard to draw one, they had failed the test. They needed to ask questions before. The interviewer would sigh and say, “it’s a house for giraffes.”

A while back, the design industry had a problem: customers were expecting agencies to pitch ideas to them for free. They would then vet the options and choose I’ll-know-it-when-I-see-it style. As I explained above, that setup is a recipe for failure.

And the agencies knew this.

They didn’t know anything about the company, its company culture, what the CEO was like, what the products were, what the competition was like, what the customers were like, or the specific problem the customer was struggling with.

“Now pitch a solution. We’ll tell you if it is the right solution.”

You can imagine the agencies did not want to waste time and money creating pitches for nothing. They were almost sure to fail.

What did the design industry do, clever cookies that they are? They came up with an additional service called “Design Strategy.”

It works like this: you hire the agency to do a “design strategy” project for you. They will organize workshops with you where many people from your company are invited, lunch is arranged, creative brainstorm sessions are held, to get all the information they need from the customer.

And then, they write a report where they analyze the problem and propose possible solutions.

Such a design strategy project will cost you north of one hundred thousand dollars.

And THEN they can design a pitch for you.

Brilliant, right? You need to interrogate your customer before you can design a solution for them. The design industry makes its customers pay one hundred thousand dollars for just the interrogation stage! Before they even start considering making a pitch!

Clever. Weeds out all the freeloaders who want something from you for free.

When I was hiring software engineers, I always had a short, simple test. It was to write a very simple function. From it, I could already learn a lot: were they experienced (e.g. making no mistakes), write clean maintainable code, efficient code, robust code, et cetera. It gave me an insight into whether they were as experienced as they said they were, and whether I wanted them to touch our code or not. All from writing a simple function.

But there was another hidden test in there: I purposefully gave them too little information.

If they enthusiastically lunged into the problem without asking questions first I knew they were junior. They’d rush off in the wrong directions on projects. I would still hire them! It just meant I knew I had to micro-manage them until they understood what we were doing.

If they asked questions first, I knew they were more senior. There was so much I hadn’t specified! Which programming language? Are they allowed to use standard libraries? Does the code have to be maintainable, efficient, robust?

Ask questions first before you start making things for someone else.

So that’s a “short” explainer on how to take on assignments: ask questions first. Interrogate the customer. Make sure you understand the assignment before you try to think up solutions.

If you don’t interrogate the customer first and find out what their dreamed outcome is, you are working off assumptions, and in my experience, the odds that the customer will not be happy with what you produced are almost 100 percent.

This holds for making art on assignments, also.

Yours sincerely,