Freelance Freedom

The best way to avoid traffic congestion…

by ncwinters on January 7, 2009

…is to work from home.

Freelance Freedom #1 was my first foray back into comic strips since college. My college strip Voice of Doom seemed to be well received and I’m planning on bringing it back some day. Maybe this year? We’ll see. The comic consisted of me ranting about various situations and obnixous people that bothered me. In addition to the usual strip, I also had a gimmick called “Stuff I Hate:” which was a box below the comic which featured, cryptically enough, something that bothered me, usually separate from the above comic. Just a one-liner about how I hated everything from people who wouldn’t turn right on red to hard waterspots or some such mild irritation. People who didn’t know me thought I had serious anger issues. People who did know me knew I had issues in general. It was more a way to vent frustrations at stupidity and write about situations that we’ve all been in. While it wasn’t so much therapeutic as fun; it was rather cool to find such a positive response- so many people shared my frustrations and had been in similar situations. Anyhoo, this comic isn’t anout any of that.

This is Freelance Freedom, a new comic strip for Freelanceswitch.com. The origin of the gig is funny, to me anyway. A buddy of mine from New York contacted me after Ginger and I moved to San Diego, to see how I was doing with freelance work. He told me about this new website and how it was a good place to get freelance gigs. Freelanceswitch has a job board where third parties with design needs can list gigs to liaison with designers for freelancing needs. I checked the boards and one of the first posts I saw was the need for a cartoonist for the actual site itself. Keep in mind, that usually outside parties listed jobs, Freelanceswitch just happed to be the hosting page. I applied, one thing led to another, and I had a regular cartooning gig again after 5 years off. In college the strip was due every day, while Freelance Freedom is a weekly post. Better for me, as the quality could now go (slightly) up and I wouldn’t be doing as many the night before.

So.

For the first post, I wanted to emphasive the real ‘freedoms’ of freelancing, specifically the lack of a commute. Get it? Freelancing-Freedom? Freelance Freedom? Get it? GET IT??? Stellar. Looking back, I see I quickly abandoned any kind of shading and went with very solid tones. This one was the first and as such, a little primitive. They’ve gotten slightly better, though I’m sure there’s plenty to find fault with. Enjoy.

*NCW*

Freelance Freedom #1

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A new year begins…

by ncwinters on January 7, 2009

…let’s start off by shelving some of the more useless resolutions.

So every year, much as I don’t want to, I end up making resolutions, or more accurately, deals and demands with myself. ‘If you can do at least this much per day’ or ‘you will do this this year’ or something of the like. Usually lasts about a month or two, then real life takes over and all of the best made plans pretty much turn into crap. Something different this year. Gonna try to focus on doing the best thing at the time and really emphasize taking some of the work out of all my work. In reading various articles on the best ways to manage your time, my problem seems to be (among others) trying to do too much and putting off the little things. Great article by the way, in this months’ Wired magazine about self-help for freelancers, take a look. What I got in essence, was to go ahead and do it now and quit overplanning some of the other stuff.

One of the first ways this will take effect is in this here bloggy-blog. As some of you may know, I currently write and illustrate two comic strips. You may have seen the sporadic postings of reminders for new ones. Here’s one now: Creative License #16 is online today at creattica.com. I’ve also mentioned that I cannot post the new days’ comic on the site, as the respective websites each pay pretty well (we’re talking millions of dollars here) for the comic strips and that one of the stipulations is to keep the content exclusive for awhile. Perfectly resonable, as that’s what helps push traffic and drive people to the site to see the new comics and bascially keep me writing comics. So to publish here, I will start re-posting after a month has gone by to give you good people who do not currently have freelanceswitch.com or creattica.com bookmarked. The comics will be a month old, but you’ll get some freshness in a new (hopefully) laugh. This saves me the trouble of having to do a new post every week about an old comic, thanks to WordPress’ lovely post later function, I can write the post the night I finish the comic and have it post at the appropriate time. More information than you wanted? Probably. To start with, I’ll post the older comics first. Keep in mind, I’m up to #86 on Freelance Freedom so you’ll get an onslaught of those for a while.

So that’s just one of this year’s non-resolutions. Anyone else have any special plans to cut back on the amount of work in order to be more productive?

Enjoy Creative License #1. I’ll post Freelance Freedom #1 shortly. For the first CL I wanted to go with the idea of inspiration. Talking with the site owner, he described creattica as a place for designers to go for daily inspiration, fun and cool distractions. So much of my work is self-referential or literal, I wanted to push the idea of inspiration from random sources in many comics, but so far have only used the idea for the first one. Enjoy.

*NCW*