I quit my job in 2006 and went full-time freelance. And when I did, I kind of was

matching my salary, my design salary, so things are pretty stable. But then my wife lost

her job. And we were like also thinking about starting a family and she always wanted to

stay home with kids. And so the pressure was on for me to figure something out. So I wrote a

letter to, do you all know, Stephen Heller? He was the design director of the, or he was the, yeah, like,

creative director for New York Times book review, amongst other things. But he was famous for giving really, like,

honest feedback in portfolio reviews

normally for students. And I wasn't a student, but I just decided to do it anyway. And I just said to him,

like, I want to, I want to raise my game. I don't want to be doing all this alt-weekly stuff.

And he was just brutally honest with me. He was like, you can't just keep drawing floating heads and

floating people. You need to do more storytelling, do more environments, do more other things, and you'll get

bigger jobs. So I spent like a couple of months working with the existing art directors I had

to try and get work like that. I said, can you just trust me to draw some bigger stories and

draw stuff that has more of a story to it than just rather than just drawing this famous person or that famous person?

And they did. And then with a new portfolio, I went out and started approaching places like the New Yorker and Entertainment Weekly and bigger publications.

And very quickly, I started to get work from them and that really changed things.

So for a nice long while there, I was doing major illustration stuff for these bigger publications. But as you both know,

like, life gets more expensive. And so I started doing what I know you both are good at. But this

was new territory for me, just try and create something first

and then sell it rather than sit and wait for the phone during um so the editorial artists you know

that's what they do sit and wait uh and then promote um so my first stab at that was a 90 page

full color graphic novel huge mistake um It was such a ton of work.

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