Have you ever considered all of the unpaid research that an artist does before they actually get hired to do the illustrations for a book? Imagine getting a request for a bid on illustrating a “Crawdad Boy” children’s book. In this photograph, you can see some of the unpaid research work completed during the negotiation phase of a contract.
This client fishes for an illustrator.
He asks to see his character (an 8-year-old mixed-race boy), who loves to fish for crawdads in the southern swamplands of America. I do a quick watercolor sheet full of 10-12 different angles of how I envision the new main characters’ faces in different expressions. The next watercolor sketch is an orange crawdad climbing out of a red bucket. These two items could be very helpful after the contract award because they would be what I use to make sure I could illustrate the characters the same way throughout the book. So, this seems like a logical expense of my time and energy.
The client okays what I share with him, including the character face examples, and the crawdad personality along with the general illustration style. He then requests one more test image to be painted showing the boy catching the crawdad with a hand fishing line, using a hot dog for bait. Okay. He said that he would be willing to pay $75 for this one test illustration after it was done. At this point, my gut starts to feel uneasy but I go ahead saying, “Awww, don’t worry Val this guy is sincere.” I should have listened to my intuition right there, but live and learn.
