Back in 1984, when I made the decision to effectively junk my folio and create a new look from scratch, there wasn’t email or the internet to provide a list of possible contacts, as far as artists looking for new outlets, the folio was still the most effective calling card.
However to get to the point where one was actually showing a prospective client one’s wares you had to make an introduction via a letter and some printed samples of one’s work. Colour mail-outs were just becoming affordable, but they were small and the more you ordered, the lesser the unit price—but the greater your postage costs.
It was very much a matter of targeted marketing. So I created a new series of samples along the lines of areas which I thought were best attuned to my passions—comics and animation being foremost.
I then went to my local library where I could make photocopies of the samples and mailed them out to a variety of potential clients.
Unbelievably, my scheme succeeded beyond my expectations and by the end of the year I had a new agent as well as my own independent client list.
Here’s some examples of the sort of work I was creating.
