The term ‘Jobbing Artist’ is one I first heard mentioned in a lecture by Martin Salisbury during last Semester. He referred to Barbara Jones as having been a ‘jobbing illustrator/artist’ – and really we all are… except, as I’m not yet published, and I got made redundant from my FE Lecturing post last year – I am trying to create ‘jobs’ for myself, in order to pay the mortgage… and well, I haven’t really ‘talked’ about that here – so, if it’s OK for Barbara Jones – it’s OK for me.
A friend of mine recently pointed out that I don’t have anything on this site that links to the business I am trying to develop, and I suppose that is a bit daft. The main reason for not linking the two, is that here my work can be as experimental as I like whereas on the event illustration site I need to put forward a coherent ‘style’ (to use that dreaded word). As people are paying for my services they need to know roughly what they are getting and I don’t want to re-invent the wheel each time. However, the two do feed into each other, and although I largely ‘play it safe’ with the event work – it is still much improved by what I learn along the way to being a storybook writer & illustrator…
This blog is about making progress towards finding an authentic way to work, what you might call ‘my real voice’ as an illustrator. Here I can revel in my mess-ups and my wanderings… (on that note I read an excellent blog post on this by Zack Rock (click to go read it) – it’s so wonderful to read about other illustrators’ struggles because I am frequently wasting energy thinking stuff like: ‘if I were a REAL illustrator I would not make this many mistakes’)… anyway, this blog post is fast becoming something else!
So here is a small selection of my favourite drawings from my ‘event’ work – for more, please go to http://www.eventillustration.com
Natalie Eldred 
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