Sunday Mailbag: Very First Job?

Q: What was your very first freelance job?

A: My first truly professional freelance job, meaning for an actual company and not a personal commission or a live caricature, I did while still a student in art college, and it nicely opened my eyes to the realities of art direction and working with difficult clients.

During my third year of college at the then named “School of Associated Arts” in St. Paul, MN., I was approached by the head of the design department about doing a job for him. It was fairly well known throughout the small school (my graduating class: 40 students) that I did caricatures during the summer break, and he had a client that needed some caricature work done. Almost all the teachers at the school were professionals in their field first, and teachers second. This professor owned a design firm in the Twin Cities, and he had a radio station from Ohio (I think… this was 30 plus years ago) as a client. Their morning show personalities wanted a new logo designed that incorporated caricatures of themselves in it. I had to draw the three hosts of the show, which he was going to work into the logo design. I was thrilled! This would likely end up on billboards and advertising materials, T-Shirts and other merchandise. Published portfolio pieces were worth their weight in gold. I accepted and was eager to get to work on it. I got the photo reference a week or so later… studio head shots. Ugh. Glamour shots are the worst things to work from. Regardless, I worked hard on the pencils and gave them to him in short order. I thought I’d done a decent job on it… I was even kind of nice to them. He sent the drawings to the client for approval. A week or so later the client’s comments came back. They loved the caricatures and I should proceed to final art. I did that, and I thought the job was done.

A little while later my teacher came to be to say that, when the finals were looked over, the client thought the likenesses were not quite on target. They didn’t say why the pencils were previously approved and why they now had changed their minds. They also offered no specifics like “you made his chin too big” or “he has more hair than that”. If I’d been smart at this point I’d have asked for more reference photos, but I wasn’t smart… I was twenty. Okay, I did a new round and tried a more portrait-like approach. Off they went to the client for review again. I received essentially the same comments back. Another round, and off for review. They came back again… still no real direction, just ambiguous comments. Now I was getting frustrated. I then did a flat out portrait using an art-o-gragh to project the pictures and just traced the faces. According to the client it still didn’t look like them. Finally they sent a promo piece that they were previously using to give me an idea of what they wanted. In this example, the hosts of the show weren’t drawn as caricatures at all but as cartoons with big, white blocks for mouths and barely any resemblance to the actual people. Well, now I knew what they wanted so I did something similar. These looked nothing like the people whatsoever. Bingo! The client liked it and we proceeded to final again. Off they went, and I patted myself on the back for persevering. My first job complete!

A week or two later the design teacher took me aside and told me there was another problem with the caricatures. He explained that the original sketches I had sent in were shown to the hosts, who thought they looked great. Then some PR person at the radio station took it upon himself to “tweak” the artwork until HE was satisfied. The hosts didn’t see anything more until they were presented with the second final logo, to which they objected asking “what happened to the first caricatures that LOOKED like us?” That’s right, I had to redo the artwork using the first sketches I submitted as the art.

Being young and stupid, I did not get compensated properly for the enormous amount of work that went into this. I should have demanded more pay after having pencils approved and proceeded to finals once already. The design professor did not offer me any more money but did do a number of T-Shirts for me in trade (he had a silk screening business as well) because he felt bad about the headaches. I wish I had copies of the artwork, although in all fairness it was probably pretty rough and I doubt I did all that terrific a job on any of those sketches. I never did find out if they ever used the logo, and if so where it was used.

Thanks to Grant Jonen for the question. If you have a question you want answered for the mailbag about cartooning, illustration, MAD Magazine, caricature or similar, e-mail me and I’ll try and answer it here!