Money Matters for Illustrators

A collaborative post...

Hello everyone! I am here with a slightly different video today! I have teased this a little bit, and I am excited to be finally sharing it with you.

So… Firstly, I am very excited to be coming to you with a joint collaborative post with the fabulous Ema Malyauka! If you don’t know Ema already, then you must check her out - she is an extremely talented and interesting artist, based in The Netherlands, and originally from Belarus. Ema makes magical, rich, warm, imaginative illustrations, and always has an original take with her art, whether it is a fantastic composition, complex and beautiful colour palettes, and original and brilliantly drawn characters. I am very pleased to be creating a joint post with her, and we are hoping to do some more together, so keep your eyes peeled for those. You can also watch this video over on Ema’s Patreon, and then you'll get to watch all of her other posts too. Double win!

When Ema and I first chatted about doing a collaborative piece, we had a free-roaming conversation. After discussing a few ideas, we fell to chatting about money and business as an illustrator. Drawing the pictures is the easy part - kinda - but how to actually grow and support yourself as an illustrator, if you want it to be your full-time income, as I do, it feels like a complete mystery. So far, I feel like I have been stumbling around trying stuff, making a lot of mistakes, and as I say in the video, last year was a tough year for me financially. Because I am right in the middle of the transition from full-time to freelance work, it’s been hard to adjust to not having a fixed income. And scary.

So, we thought it would be interesting to see if we could find some coaches to chat with about it, and maybe give us some fresh perspectives. I knew about a lovely coach called Rebeca Lima because I know she has worked with illustrators before, and she seemed to know her stuff! So we reached out to Rebeca, and she was really excited to join us for a chat all about money as creatives - thank you so much to Rebeca! So, this is our introductory chat, we decided the first topic would be, loosely, money blocks.

To be honest, I find it awkward, embarrassing - all the feels - to talk about money, but at the same time, I think it’s so important to talk about, and maybe it’s a good thing to make it less taboo for us in the creative world. Why shouldn’t we want to be paid properly, just as much as an estate agent wants to be?!

I feel like there’s no one way to approach the topic, so we thought a free-floating chat with a coach would be a good way to start. In the video Rebeca talks about manufacturing better feelings about money, having money “dates”, how our early relationship with money can form a lifelong dynamic, creating a “menu” for yourself when pricing your art, creating an “abundance proof bank”! To be honest, it all feels like learning a new language, but a lot of it made sense by the end, and it was really useful to talk through some real-life scenarios with Rebeca. Thanks to her for patiently talking stuff through with us.

We’re hoping this will be a series of joint posts Ema and I will do about money matters for illustrators. Rebeca has kindly said she’ll do another post with us, and we would love to drill down a bit more. What questions do you have about money for her? What would you like us to ask Rebeca next time?

And Ema and thought we could make some posts about money matters for illustrators. What do you want to know from us? Just let us know what you’re interested in, and we’ll see what we can do :)

I feel like I am making the babiest of steps with all of this, and I hope this is going to help me make some slightly more confident ones in the future…! I hope you enjoy, and thanks so much to Ema and Rebeca!

Ella xx

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