We were lucky to catch up with Sean Loose recently and have shared our conversation below.

Sean, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Are you able to earn a full-time living from your creative work? If so, can you walk us through your journey and how you made it happen?

I’ve been on both sides of this, so I’ll try to speak to each.

I think the phrase “I want to go to school to study illustration” can conjure up images of hocking artwork at local fairs, but even when I got to school, the perception of what a “professional” illustrator could be was pretty limited. Almost always, it meant an individual who had made for themselves a successful freelance career with big-name, and mostly editorial clients (think, The New York Times). But as I found out much, much later, these “star-illustrators” were stars because they were rare, and editorial clients really didn’t pay that well.

Understanding this on some deep, anxious level, I panicked, and took a few graphic design classes in my sophomore year of college. Shortly after graduating I was lucky enough to find representation, and began splitting my time between client work and the graphic design job I’d been offered by a friend who saw me have a particularly bad night bartending. The jobs were small and the pay was bad, but I did learn a lot about working with clients, setting expectations, and my own worth. Still, it was hard to support myself on the mostly editorial work I was getting.

Through my agency, I started contracting with Indeed on simple, large-scale graphics for their conference rooms. By the time they decided they wanted to bring on someone full-time, I’d had a great rapport with them, and everything I’d learned about working with clients helped me snag the job. Soon, I was working in-house, a version of “professional” illustrator that had never been offered to me in college. In my 6 years in-house I learned so much of what makes me a hirable professional now – branding and craft, sure, but also creative flexibility, selling ideas, product design, taking feedback, and knowing my worth.

It may not be everyone’s trajectory, but these skills are helping me materialize a more successful second go at full-time freelancing. Pitching creative in-house and uphill for years is helping me do it better out-of-house. Knowing what someone was willing pay for my work full-time helps me better understand when a client is trying to underpay me. And of course, years of experience have made me a more confident creative. It’s anyone’s guess where things go from here, but I think with the right set of tools, and a willingness to learn new things, it’s been possible for me to make an illustration career work.

Sean, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I’m Sean Loose, and I’m an illustrator / designer with a focus on brand.

I was an avid doodler all my life, so at Savannah College of Art and Design, I studied illustration and tried to hone my hobby into a career. I loved watercolors and classical rendering, but after many an underwhelming critique, and more than a few existential crises, I added some graphic design classes to my curriculum, which opened my eyes to the the possibility (and validity) of digital art. I realized that illustration and design are actually best friends, and so I worked to make them *my* best friends, resulting in an obsession with shapes, abstraction, and composition that carries through in my work to this day.

Since then, I’ve been privileged to work with amazing clients in my freelance career, such as The US Open, The Washington Post, and Reddit, all of which helped me develop my own illustrative point of view. But no other creative undertaking has had as much impact as my 6-year tenure as lead illustrator at Indeed. It was in this role that I fell in love with branding, and realized that illustration could be a huge part of that endeavor. For the first time, I had to develop someone else’s illustrative point of view AND make something that scaled and expanded with the needs of a large tech company. It’s like a puzzle that I got to solve everyday, which, as a frequent crossworder, suited me just fine.

I’m incredibly proud of mine and my team’s work on that brand, and it sparked a passion for creating illustration systems that I’m excited to carry on into my freelance career.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

I think that as creatives, we’re taught (and expected to some extent) to be very passionate about our work. And that passion, to an even larger extent, is actually what should drive our work.

But how do you get passionate about an advertorial piece called “5 CRM Platforms to Change Your Workflow?” How do you feel creative ecstasy for your 17th spot illustration of “hand holding a cellphone?” If I’m being honest, I feel nothing. And that’s okay!

Passion is great – it gets you out of bed, gets you to sit down and work, makes you want to make great work even. But I’ve found that passion can hinder my work too, if I let it get the best of me. Passion can make me agonize over the aforementioned CRM illustration for too long. It can make me feel like anything short of my “best work” (whatever that means) reflects poorly on me as a person.

In my years of experience, I’ve found that sometimes a job is actually just a job, and that separating myself from the work has almost no impact on the quality, but a massive impact on my mental health. Passion doesn’t make the work, I do.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

I studied Illustration in college. It’s always felt funny saying that, and I think it’s because to some extent, I imagine it sounds slightly “made-up” to some people. But it *is* real and I studied it for 2 years before I really started to question that choice.

I was a big art history buff, and was obsessed with creating work like the Renaissance masters – realistic, technically rendered, and traditional. And while I was a competent enough draftsman, my work often floundered in critiques. “It’s a good drawing, but…” followed by any number of issues with color, composition, etc. Well, 2 years into my program, and with no accolades to speak of, I was for lack of a better phrase, freaking the **** out. So under some duress, I added a few graphic design classes to my roster, thinking of them only as a technical fallback in case I couldn’t hack it as an illustrator.

Little did I know that I would fall in love with design. That it wasn’t just something that people who couldn’t draw did, but a field that would completely change and improve the way I drew. I ditched the pencil and watercolors and embraced vector shapes and Photoshop brushes. I learned to see the beauty in Times New Roman. By the time I walked into my senior year illustration portfolio class, I had a skillset and a style that set me apart, one that’s been a huge part of my success to this day.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.looseillustration.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/looseillu/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sean-loose-illustrator/