Jobs

I had a look at http://www.peopleperhour.com/ to look at what low paid commissions are out there. Here is some i found:

T Shirt designer and branding

Summary:

• Looking for help to set up a clothing brand for a new clothing company
• Wants is it the style of clothing brand CrossHatch
• Brand name, Brand design and also 6 t-shirt designs
• Budget £50 - £130 fixed figure

To come up with an entire brand would take a long time

• Brand name = 1 week
• Brand logos and design = 2 weeks
• 6 t-shirt designs = 1-3 months (3 month being 6 quality very polished designs)

That comes to about 4 months to do to a high professional standard.

If you obtain the full £130 of his budget, per week (as there is no point in doing hours) you would get paid £7.65. Minimum wage per hour in this country is £6.08.

This commission is extremely poor not only for pay but what is being ask of the designer. The client is asking the design to create him a band for him to make money for himself without putting in any work. There is no mention of royalties of sales or anything past the design stage. Id question what the client is bring to the table as it be easy for the artist so set up a brand themselves and keep 100% of the takings. There are shops and online shops that will only take commission when sold and not everything which is what it sounds like here.

This is a better commission i found.

Promotional illustrations

Summary:

• Promotional illustrations for website (Mazuma moble)
• Could be demand for weekly updates
• images produced at agreed fee
• Hourly rate of £10-£30 per hour
• Budget of £173

To produce a good simple Illustration i don't think would take a great amount of time.

• Character design = 2 day
• produce the illustration = 1 week

so 9am to 5pm for 9days. 8(hours) x 9(days) = 72(hours of work) - weekends = 56(hours)

So 56 hours at the lower rate is £560 pounds. On minimum wage £340.48.

As you can see these figures are far bigger than £173, but I think there is other factor which would make this commission worth while.

The image will be seen by a lot of people as its on quite an established company so i think your work would get some good exposer. The other thing that is good about this is there is room for more work on a weekly basis by the same client.

Im not sure if i would take this commission but i think i would consider it quite a lot. Its not a bad wage compared to other low paid commissions and also the images would get exposer. There is also a possible future with the company.

Copyright

Copyright by definition is:

'the exclusive and assignable legal right, given to the originator for a fixed number of years, to print, publish, perform, film, or record literary, artistic, or musical material'

Copyright basically in the world of illustration protects your work from being reproduced, plagiarised and used without the permission of you the artist. It also protect your artworks from being miss used or usage outside the time what was negotiated in the Commission acceptance agreement.

So how does copyright effect me?

It does a lot, as a student I have no legal help from agency which represent me, like the AOI, so any work that goes on the internet could be targeted and I may not have a leg to stand on.

There is a few things i can think of to try and prevent people from copying my works.

Watermarks

This is a very easy way to protect the images you put on the web and blogs. This is where you place a layer over the top containing a copyright logo, names and any other additional information. This watermark is normally slithy opaque so containing lines to the corners. This allow the image to be seen easily but makes it pretty impossible for someone else to claim its theres. There is one major problem with this method which is that it make you artwork look shit as the image can be completely blocked by these watermarks and can ruin the viewing of the artwork.

Copyright logos

If copyright logos are present on your site and not necessarily on the work itself, this could be enough of a deterrent as it shows that you understand copyright law. But this does not stop anyone from right clicking and pressing 'copy' or 'save as' so this is more of a warning which is good but offers little protection.

Disable right-click

On some artists websites, the ability to right click has been disabled over image to prevent the option to 'copy' or 'save as'. This is such a good way to protect you work and maintain the artwork in it original form. But unless you understand web coding, doing this can be confusing. I tried to do this disabling by following a tutorial online and i couldn't get it to work. The other thing is it does not stop someone from printing screen and getting your image that way but this is quite a lot of hassle for poor quality images.

Reflection

Out of these, I think that including a copyright logo somewhere on your page is a good idea as its easy to do and it may deter some. But i think that the disabling of the right click is the best thing possible, it does protect you images and a lot people will have to do back to your site rather than taking a copy, increasing views and interest around yourself. All thats left to do is ....

....to figure it out.

Online Portfolios

Here is some online portfolios.

The AOI

• The AOI is one of the biggest portfolio websites.
• The standard online portfolio costs £93.95 for non-AOI members.
• They allow you to have up to 20 images or animations.
• The major disadvantage is that, there is a very large amount of portfolios on the site and yours may not stand out or be seen in the mass of artists.

Carbonmade

• This is another portfolio site which has 436,369 as i am writing this.
• Different to the AOI, on Carbonmade you can get a free portfolio which allows you to upload 35 images compared to that of AOI's 20.
• By paying $12 a month you can upload 500 images and 10 videos.
• The face that there is a free option is good for professional illustrators starting out like myself, but the problem that may occur with this is that the quality of the work on the site is not monitor and non professional work may flood the site. This can make you harder to find through the large number of members and you could be putting your work into a place with a poor reputation for artwork.

These two portfolio websites differ greatly. The AOI seems to be more professional than what Carbonmade is offering but I feel the Carbonmade portfolio is a good place to start and set up you first portfolio. I think the AOI is for artist that have had some success and becoming more established and can afford the bill.

The locations are different. The AOI is based in London, Where Carbonmade is based is New York. I think that the views of Carbonmade maybe mainly an American audience, where i think the AOI would be more global as it is an established name in the field of illustration.