Echo Chernik’s Blog

[First, let me say that I've always been very good at sports. Volleyball has always been my favorite, but I played on basketball teams, baseball teams and bowling teams and I love football. The only sport I've not been very good at is Golf - which as George Carlin said, is actually an activity and not a sport.]

School has one value to society that explains why tax dollars are used for it – to educate people to perform technical jobs. If all anyone were expected to do was work a sales floor or flip burgers, math and science and other classes would have no business in school. Having said that – why is there art in school? Art is for people who CAN’T do math and science, right? It’s all about snooty fine-art galleries and champagne for the elite, right?

Art is $70 Trillion dollar industry… Okay so that number is made up – but consider this. Publishing prints every book ever made and they need cover-artists, typesetting artists, prepress artists and press-men. Ever product ever made needs an industrial artist to design the final product, a logo artist, a package artist, product photographers, model photographers, catalog artists, web-site artists, technical illustrators and typesetting artists for the manuals, pre-press artists, sign-makers, and let’s not forget advertising! Every product or idea in the public’s awareness REQUIRES advertising which means creative directors, art directors, concept artists, layout artists, logo artists, product photographers, model photographers, location photographers, studio photographers, photo-retouch artists, pre-press artists, web-site artists, web ad artists, flash animators, film directors, cinematographers, lighting artists, make-up artists… gasp. I’m not running out of artist professions – I’m running out of energy typing all of this. In fact, there isn’t a single industry besides academia that doesn’t REQUIRE artists.

When public schools dump money from “the arts”, what they are saying is that they want to sabotage every industry known to man. Is this deliberate or accident?I have to believe that it is by accident. Consider that the education industry is usually run by well-meaning people who have never been in an business or industry besides education. While that may mean they know ‘how’ to teach children, it doesn mean they know ‘what’ to teach children and rarely do they know ‘why’ the children need to know the subjects they teach. Consider that in elementary schools, there is no specialization required to teach a subject. Any teacher can teach any subject – even one they personally got all “D”s in when THEY were in school.

But why keep sports? Worse – why dump money INTO sports? I will avoid the whole ‘hero-worship’ thing in all of human history and the obvious health benefits of keeping children active but there is no reason to take money from art and spend MORE on sports. For example, football is an industry – but there are less than 1,500 people in the entire country at the pro level in any given year. That 1,500 out of 400,000,000. That’s not even one person per COUNTY! Contrariwise, every football team wears logos, wears fashionable sport-wear an equipment, published programs and books, uses signs, advertises in print, the web and television, sells infinite numbers of products with their brand emblazoned across it… in short, there are TENS OF THOUSANDS of artists working on the products sold by football teams. Add that to Baseball – which has fewer players, and basketball – don’t get me started on basketball marketing (Nike anyone?), there are MILLIONS of artists working in the sports industry – but for no good reason schools think that the sport players are the ones worth spending money on.

Pretty soon, artists will become rare an expensive. That means that every products will cost more. That means that it will become elitist and the good ones will become ever more desperately needed. There may even be few enough to warrant certain celebrity status over time… maybe they’ll be worshipped and heralded… people will start desperately fighting to become the next art SUPERSTAR and reap all the fame and glory and money and sex that comes with it. Schools could start pouring money into art programs just to keep up with the screaming demands of student sick of doing anything so common as sports.

On second thought… I’ve changed my mind. Dump art. Dump it now. The faster we get through this cycle the better for all of us.

My two cents.

Laz

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How to negotiate as an illustrator/designer/artist – by Lazarus Chernik

11May09

How do you negotiate your rate?

Figure out your total expenses for the week. Divide by 40 hrs and that is your minimum hourly rate for you to remain breathing on this earth… IF you created art for 40 hours straight. If you can only do 20 hours of art per week than divide expenses by 20… or 30 or 15 or whatever it is.

Then budget your hours for each project and figure how much you want to make as profit. NEVER enter in a proposal for less than 25% over your expenses. That will give you some wiggle room if the client begs you down. Standard wiggle-room in retail is to offer 5%-15% off the original estimate. That will still get you your profit margin.

However – there is more to it than that. NEGOTIATE USAGES RIGHTS!!! If the client is making money off your art, then you are entitled to a portion of that. That includes logos. With logos, the compensation comes in the original profit-margin. In the illustrations, the usage comes in ‘copyright buyout’ or royalties.

How much for rights and royalties? The best resource is the Graphics Artist’s Guild Handbook: Pricing & Ethical Guidelines.

That’s it. Pretty easy huh?

Lazarus Chernik

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Illustrator Contract Blues – by Lazarus Chernik

11May09

By Laz – not Echo.

Here is some advice to artists and illustrators out there… READ THE CONTRACT!

A lot of businesses use art and will praise you endlessly on how talented you are and how they wish they were like you and how their entire brand or business model will revolve around your work – and then kill you in the contract. Learn how and why contracts are important and be vigilant in your professionalism. Your REAL client will appreciate it and you will earn more clients in the long run.

There are two reasons why this happens: First, there are always young up-and-comers dying to make a living making ‘art’ and will take anything on their ‘way-to-the-top’. Second, even established artists can get swayed by praise into expecting the ’spirit of the contract’ to be more valuable than the ‘letter of the law’.

Young artists are extremely easy to manipulate… They are often desperate for both money and praise. They are also inexperienced with contracts and often accept emails, handshakes or even verbal telephone requests as enough of a commitment to begin and complete a project. In the combined 30 years Echo and I have been dealing with clients – there IS NOT A SINGLE CLIENT WHO COMPLAINED ABOUT A CONTRACT THAT DIDN’T BREAK IT. Every client who was professional and signed our contracts without incident were polite, professional, responsive, pleased with the work that was done and paid on time. Every single time a client said “Um… I don’t know about this…” or “Can we work something out?” or “I don’t like contracts” they have been a nightmare client to please – and at times abusive – and without fail, every one of them refused to pay on time or at all. They teach entrepeneurs to get anything and everything they can for free – and to especially push those who are inexperienced or desperate. One of the classic tricks to get an artist to work for free is to exclaim “…I don’t know much about art or advertising or how it will make me money and I’m hesitant to spend the money on something I don’t know about – so what I’ll do is pay you as soon as it pays for itself. The better you do, the faster it will pay for itself and the faster you’ll get paid.” This is a lie. They have no intention of paying the artist. Without being able to look at the books, you will never know when it becomes a successful venture for the client. Often, the project will work perfectly and make tons of money and the client will poor-mouth the project and blatantly lie about the value the art had to the result. “Well, it didn’t work out as well as I had hoped but I enjoyed working with you and will give you another chance. Why don’t we knock down your rates and try again?” If this sounds familiar – you have been PWNED!!!! I know, because not only has it happened to me – I was an unwitting party to it on the client-side where my boss did it regularly to my vendors and insisted that I use that exact technique. Seriously!

Established artists can get into trouble too. Every once in a while, a project can arise that really intrigues the artist. It may be the lure of an exciting client, subject or medium. It can be the enticement of a long-term relationship or licensing deal. It could simply be pure fear of losing a project during a slow time of year. In any case, the experienced illustrator or designer can sabotage themselves by glossing over the importance of a contract. Worse – they may be poorly represented by a p.o.s. agent without the intelligence to ask for more money. Echo worked a project recently for an agent’s client and the client suddenly asked for $9,000 worth of more work. Echo contacted the agent who should have excitedly revised the contract and submitted for the new estimate. Instead, the agent whined “I don’t think we should rock the boat – just do the work for free”. $9,000 for free? So knowing the agent was a complete bozo, she contacted the client directly and renegotiated for the $9,000. The client wasn’t upset – they actually expected to pay for the extra work and signed without complaint. Better yet 0 they PAID IN FULL ON TIME. The agent – have I said exactly how much of a moron he was? – yelled at Echo for going around his back but still TOOK HIS CUT for the project. I must mention that this agent is NOT the one she lists as one of her contacts. She now only deals with reputable professionals like Tom Mendola – a great guy and good friend.

The biggest contract area an artist could dream about is art licensing. The business of licensing is huge – which means contracts are mandatory and reading them is default. I recent weeks, i have read proposed licensing contracts offering to market Echo as the origin of an entire line of products, to proposals where she would have to give up full copyrights to her art for 5 years without compensation while the agent ‘considered’ selling it. Obviously, the latter is a scam. Because there is so much money in it, there are many more unscrupulous business people involved. There are specific trade-shows where art is presented for licensing. Those shows are expensive and can make or break an artist. The business is about mass-production and personal relationships – art has little to do with it. Stick figure art can sell better than master paintings. Because of that, it can be a painful experience for an artist to venture into that arena. Be warned. However, if you find a good representative, agent or company, nurture that relationship well. Again – the contract is everything – and since the people in that business are IN BUSINESS they will not balk at contract talk and will only respect artists who do.

I could list dozens of problems Echo and I have had with contracts for the years – but it all boils down to this… Art and Illustration is a business and contracts are part of the business. Artists can be afraid on contracts because it can be confrontational, when one just wants to get the fun part and create art, hoping that they will get paid for their effort. The reality is that those who want the art will never question the contract. Anyone who questions the contract wants something else entirely – usually that means screwing over the artist to get what they really want. The most common of which is money from the other ’suckers’ they do business with.

The simple advice is to be professional about your business. Don’t be an ‘artist-first’, small-business owner second. You can’t. You have to be a business person first and an artist second. If you can’t manage paying work, then you will have no work to call yourself an artist with. 4 hours of business and 36 hours of art may get you $1,000 a week – but 20 hours of business and 20 of art could get you $2,000 a week. It’s all in how you negotiate.

My two cents.

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Better art survey…

06May09

Thanks Laz for creating this awesome new survey for my belt buckles question. Please visit my portfolio site and click on the survey link about belt buckles.

http://www.echo-x.com

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Which of my art should be used? Facebook surveys posted.

05May09

I’ve posted two polls on Facebook. One is for my art on buttons:

http://apps.facebook.com/opinionpolls/index.php?pid=1241559199

and another is for my art on belt buckles:

http://apps.facebook.com/opinionpolls/index.php?pid=1241561116

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Tags: art, illustration, poll

Finally! True Modern Art Nouveau

05May09

Latest work by Echo Chernik

People have been begging me to do a blog… I know I’m late – but that’s how it goes when you’re so busy. So to start with, let’s remind everyone that I’m an Art Nouveau Illustrator for businesses, products and celebrities.

My portfolio site is http://www.echo-x.com and my store is http://www.echochernik.com.

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Tags: arlo guthrie, art, art nouveau, celestial seasonings, echo, illustration, package design

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Laz has his own blog now.

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Why Art Should NEVER Be Removed From Schools by Lazarus Chernik

How to negotiate as an illustrator/designer/artist – by Lazarus Chernik

Illustrator Contract Blues – by Lazarus Chernik

Better art survey…

Which of my art should be used? Facebook surveys posted.

Finally! True Modern Art Nouveau

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