Don’t Work For Free. Don’t Accept Free Work.
Here’s something I don’t think gets mentioned enough in the discussion of speculative (spec) work. Artists like to say «you get what you pay for» and talk down about the quality of the work you get if you get it for free, but it’s not true. It’s actually really easy to find people with talent who are desperate enough to work for free. The difference is not so much about the illustrator’s artistic talent (though I agree that people that work for money will tend to be of higher quality) but about the illustrator’s ability to advise and develop solutions on a business level.
I look at everything I doincluding artas consulting, which means the giving of advice. A business should get their advice from people that understand business. People who are stuck in the belief they need to be beholden to an employer who will take care of their needs if they just comply with the employer’s wishes are not business people.
I’ll say it again. Employees. Are NOT. Business people.
Who are business people? Independent contractors. We all work for clients, but we also have to keep an eye on our own bottom line and we know (usually by learning the hard way) that every decision we make has a trade-off and that if something we get doesn’t do what we want it to do, it doesn’t matter how pretty it is, it’s useless. We know that it’s not just about making money or about making art, but about creating something useful in exchange for something else useful.
This is a perspective that you cannot nail into the head of a person who draws a salary and gets their healthcare provided for (they think) free. Not with a hammer. It’s a perspective that working for ourselves we cannot avoid.
This may sound counterintuitive, but anyone working for free or for exposure is begging. Yeah, their client is the one asking for something for nothing, but people working for free are expecting that if they are just well-behaved and nice and do nice things for other people that they’re going to somehow magically get ahead. They’re saying, «please take care of me; I’ll do whatever you want.»
If a client comes to me and wants a painting of a flaming skeleton wielding a broadsword to put on the cover of their retirement-home community brochures, I can have a conversation with that client about how better to put forward the ideas that they want to convey. As a businessman, I know that my job is to give my client the best advice I can and then follow through with the execution.
I have no doubt that many of the people out there who think they have to work for free exceed me in artistic talent, and are capable of delivering a much higher-quality painting of that flaming skeleton wielding a broadsword. But they will not be able to have that conversation about how an illustration forwards the goals of their company, how it communicates to the target audience. They can’t understand the idea of «goals of the company.» All they understand is doing what they’re told and hoping they get something out of it.
The moral is: don’t do work for free. Moral #2: if someone offers to work for you for free, don’t give them any real responsibility.
Great commentary. It’s not
Great commentary. It’s not just about both sides getting ~something~, as you pointed out. It’s about getting something ~of value~.