Author: Jane Di Lieto-Danes

Halloween’s a-comin’!

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Yes indeed, it’s almost our favourite time of the year again, Halloween! We always love to show off members’ spooky news throughout October, so keep a look out for pumpkins, ghosts, witches, demons, zombies and all manner of other seasonal goodness taking over the website during the next couple of weeks. There will also be a special Halloween newsletter finding its way to inboxes on the 31st October, so if you don’t currently receive our regular newsletters and you don’t want to miss out, you can sign up on our home page or by popping your email address into the box below.

We also have a fabulous Halloween background on the main website by our very first Artist in (Virtual) Residence, Tom Martin 🎃

Image credit: Tom Martin, detail from the HAI Halloween background.

Wishing everyone Happy Holidays and a wonderful New Year!

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Well, we can hardly believe it’s that time of year again already! It’s been another super-busy year and we have had the privilege of working with so many fantastic illustrators, animators and clients over the past 12 months. 2016 will see even more things happening, including a faster, swisher and generally more fabulous website, and we’ve also started planning the next Showcase 100 exhibition, which we’re very excited about!

We’ll still be working over the holidays to help with job enquiries, but may be a bit slower to respond on the following dates due to an excess of mince pies and Christmas cake:

24th, 25th & 26th December
31st & 1st January

Please note that any other non-urgent emails will be replied to as soon as possible over the holidays, but it may take a wee bit longer for us to answer than usual. Also, please be aware that news submitted over Christmas and the New Year period may not be published on the site until 2nd January.

We wish everyone an extremely Merry Christmas and a happy and prosperous New Year!

The wonderfully festive illustration at the top is by Kevin Myers – check out his portfolio for more of his amazing work!

Post-Showcase 100 normality

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So, it’s been a couple of weeks now since we were in London with the Little Chimp Society for the Showcase 100 exhibition. The dust has finally settled and we’re pretty much back to normal here now (or as normal as things ever get!) 🙂 We had a fab week and a really good night on the Thursday for the private view – it was wonderful to meet everyone and we’d like to thank you all again for coming. It was very busy and we certainly had a great time – we hope you did too!

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The Framer’s Gallery were wonderful yet again (the LCS held the last Mail Me Art show there) and it’s definitely our favourite venue in town for this kind of thing. It’s easy to get to, everyone there is so helpful and the space itself is perfect for arty events of all sizes.

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A number of the 100 prints were sold on the night, but the rest are now for sale in the LCS shop at £40, unframed. They are very high quality archival prints and there’s a wide range of subjects and styles, so there’s sure to be something to tickle your fancy. Can’t decide which one you want? Then why not buy the SC100 book and be able to peruse them all at your leisure? There are still some books available to buy here.

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We hope to make Showcase a two-yearly event, with the LCS continuing to run the project for HAI members. Being able to offer opportunities like this to our members is really important to us. It adds an extra dimension to our community and provides the chance to meet-up with people and celebrate the wonderful illustrations that they create.

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Finally, a special thank you is in order to the lovely Eleanor, who travelled down from the Midlands for some gallery experience and did a sterling job taking photos on the Thursday night!

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You’re invited to the Showcase 100 Private View!

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There’s only three days left until the Showcase 100 exhibition at the Framer’s Gallery in London. There’s still lots to do, but it’s always exciting being part of a show like this. Showcase 100, in case you don’t know, has been run for our members by the Little Chimp Society (LCS) and consists of 100 illustrations that have been selected for the show and book by our panel of judges. All of the illustrations have been framed as high-quality, archival prints and will be for sale at the show. There’s a wide range of artwork created by an equally wide variety of illustrators, so there should be something for everyone.

The accompanying Showcase 100 publication, featuring all 100 final illustrations along with lots of sketches and notes about the artwork, will also be available to buy at the exhibition as well as online from the LCS shop.

The show runs from 7th – 11th April and the ‘private’ view is on Thursday 9th April, 6 – 8pm. Everyone is welcome to come along on Thursday evening to join us for an evening of excellent artwork, free drinks and general natter. The gallery is located in the heart of Fitzrovia and is easy to get to, with Goodge Street and Tottenham Court Road tube stations only a few minutes walk away.

Thursday 9th April 6pm – 8pm
The Framer’s Gallery
36 Windmill Street
London, W1T 2JT

If you’re on Facebook, there’s an event page for it with the latest updates too… https://www.facebook.com/events/710733742303427/

Merry Christmas and a Very Happy 2015!

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It’s been a fantastic year at Hire an Illustrator and we would like to wish all our members a very merry Christmas and a happy New Year! We’d also like to say a big thank you to all of the clients who’ve worked with and hired our illustrators over the period; may 2015 be a fantastic year for you too.

We will be operating a reduced service from 23rd December until 3rd January. This is due to reindeer playing havoc with the air traffic control and a Tribble-style infestation of Christmas puddings. Hopefully the abundance of mulled wine should solve these festive issues without compounding any Jack Frost problems.

Enjoy the holidays and we’ll be back bigger and better with a few notable changes in 2015! Ho, ho, ho and Finlay the office mascot says woof!

A special thank you to the very lovely Elly Walton, who has kindly lent us the above image. You can see lots more of Elly’s gorgeous work in her portfolio. 🙂

Santa, Snowmen & Reindeer, it must be the Christmas Mail Packs!

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The order of members’ (mostly) seasonal postcards for the final mail packs of this year have just arrived from the printer! We’ve also had some nice Christmassy ones sent to us directly from members, so the mail packs will be full of festive cheer.

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We’ll be busy getting everything organised and posting out the sample cards to the illustrators today, then we’re ready to start putting the mail packs together next week. Once these have been sent out to clients, we’ll be holding back on sending any more mail packs until around mid-January to give everyone time to get back into the swing of work again.

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It’s twenty days until Christmas and we hope everyone’s looking forward to it. We know we are!

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Illustrators’ skills and such…

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hire an illustrator – Search

Due to a simple change on the site (we changed the “Art Buyer” link to “Submit a Job”), we now have even more clients asking us to help them find an illustrator for their projects. To help us find the right people for each job even more efficiently, we’ve introduced a new section for our members to let us know about some of the many illustration-related skills they have. So for example, if a client needs someone who can do live drawing for a conference, convert an image into vectors, or use specific software, we’ll now be able to recommend members faster. This new information will be a big help to us in connecting the right illustrators with clients and overall improving the quality of our recommendations. Please note that the skills section is not currently viewable on our members’ portfolio pages. You can get in touch with us using the Submit a Job page.

We also thought it was time to introduce a few new portfolio categories and separate out a couple of the areas that were getting a bit big for their boots. For example, the children’s and young adult category has now been divided into two sections. You can see our updated categories on our advanced search.

Hopefully these changes will make it even easier for clients to use hire an illustrator to find the right illustrator for the job!

Art PACT

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We’re super-pleased to announce that we’ve entered into a pact with Art PACT! hire an illustrator members are eligible for a $10 discount off PACT membership, while members of PACT can get 10% off an annual membership when they join us!

But what is Art PACT, I hear you cry? Well, if you don’t already know, Art PACT is a fabulous resource for illustrators – think interesting articles, reviews of clients, sample contracts, advice and good old fashioned encouragement to succeed in the wonderful world of illustration. We heartily encourage you to go and take a look: http://www.artpact.com/

Showcase 100 has a website!

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We’re excited to announce that the LCS Showcase 100 project in partnership with hai now has it’s very own website! You can learn more about the project and exhibition, find out how you can get involved, and see some of the entries we’ve received so far at http://sc100.co.uk/

Once the judges have made their final decisions we’ll be adding the selected artists and artwork to the site, and of course, we’ll be making updates with more details about the show and book nearer the time.