GET YOUR ARTWORK PUBLISHED
DO YOUR RESEARCH, AND GET YOUR ART PUBLISHED!
Plunk down a five pound exhaustive art portfolio on some art director’s desk and it will not be nearly as impressive as a few sheets of paper comprising a published article that features your artwork.
When I was 20, I sent examples of my cartooning style to a magazine in Chicago. They sent me a sample article and asked me to illustrate it with five cartoons. The magazine liked what I sent back to them and as a result my first published artwork was out there … in the public … for everyone to see! Another magazine reprinted that same article and sent me a royalty check with a request to draw for their magazine. Within one year, I was drawing cartoons and illustrations for a total of six magazines.
Back in the day (and I am talking 45 years ago), artists had to bend their own unique style a bit to fit whatever was in vogue. I was, of course, happy to do so as I was still developing my own style at the time. I would swipe from one cartoonist the way he did the eyes, and from another the nose, or mouth. Then the layout and inking style from yet another artist, and so on and so on. Within a few months I had developed what I would call my own unique style and acceptable “look” to my cartoons. The reason I mention “style” is that now-a-days there seems to be a “zero” requirement of style or even drawing ability. On TV, the internet, in children’s books and newspapers, some cartoons are so poorly drawn that they, in fact, are funny just because they are so elementarily crude.
You may be thinking, “No big magazine is going to call me to ask for my illustrations.’ That is probably true, so I would suggest that you research smaller publications. There are magazines about canoeing, hiking, flying, jogging, fishing, pigeon racing, cooking, hunting, needlework, tattooing, cycling, pet grooming, teaching, homeschooling, the list goes on and on. When I Googled, “number of magazines published in USA” my answer was …” The number of magazines in the United States was at its highest in 2012, when 7,390 consumer magazines circulated throughout the Americas” The magazines that I started out with were six of the 21 faith-based youth magazines published at the time. Most small publications have little or no budget for cartoons, but usually offer a token $25 for using your artwork. Bottom line, it isn’t so much about the money as it is getting your artwork published.
Suppose you send the editor of a small kayaking publication a relevant humorous cartoon. I bet he’d be sure to place it into a future publication. If you contact and follow up with niche magazines, periodicals and websites in this manner, it won’t take long to have quite a collection of your own published work.
The top picture helps to explain why the very thought of exercising completely destroys any unlikely thoughts of actually working out. As usual, Dave has done it again. Here’s humor that is so visually right on. Thanks Dave, for your endless good clean humor. Still hoping you will write a book someday.