A FEW YEARS AGO I was giving a talk to a group of students about the business of being a freelance illustrator. After the talk one student came up to ask my advice: he’d been offered a job editing films, he said, but he didn’t know how to use the software. Should he take the job?
I asked how long it was till the job started, and he said two weeks. So I said to him, say yes. You’ve got two weeks to learn how to use the software. In the end there can be one of two outcomes: they can fire you because you don’t know how to do it, in which case you’ll be no worse off than you are now. Second outcome: you have a job as a film editor.
The point about being a freelance anything, as I explained in my talk, was that you have to do the jobs you’re asked to do. You might be here, I said, studying printmaking, or jewellery design, or modelmaking, and you think you’ll end up as a printmaker or a jewellery designer or a print maker. But you probably won’t. You’ll end up doing the job someone wants to pay you for.
Always say yes. Then you’ll find out if you can do it.
