Happy Year of the Horse!

Chúc mừng năm mới! Happy Year of the Horse!

My first project of the New Year is to work on a little bit of promo push, this includes my first quarter postcard! I just sent them off to the printer, and should get them sometime next week.

2014-tet-postcard

I did a postcard for Tết last year too, but I did a bad job of continuing to crank them out after that. I want – nay, I need – to be better about self-promotion this year if I want to keep this freelancing sustainable. In an effort to branch out and try to expand my client base, I signed up for Hire an Illustrator. It seemed like a reasonably priced risk to take, and from some reviews I read online, a lot of people seemed to get a decent amount of work the first couple of weeks. It seemed like they only used the online component, but the most appealing service to me was the mailer service. You can either print postcards up yourself and send them to them, or you can have them print them up for you. They then use those postcards and send them out on a weekly basis in their personalized mailer packets.

Anyhow, I’ll keep you updated as to how it is, but it seemed like a tiny way I could expand my reach a bit and like I said, it was much less expensive of a gamble than say, the $2000 Society of Illustrators membership.

Oh, and since it’s Tết, here’s the zodiac illustrations I did for this year’s special edition of the Asian Reporter.

jhill-2014-zodiac

I did them a little differently this year – completely digitally, and using a white-on-black mark making technique to just change it up. I’m really happy with how the print-like texture came out. If you’re interested in reading your horoscope for the Year of the Horse, you can check out the Asian Reporter online. Just follow that link and download the Lunar New Year section.

Hope you have a wonderful Year of the Horse filled with prosperity and good fortune!