The bit art school forgot to teach you 😅

🌎✏️ The Illustrator’s Income Atlas - exciting free workshop announcement!
🗓️ 24th Sept | ⏰ 1pm UK | 📍 Online
Let's sit down together and map out your illustration income. You'll leave with a plan (a map, woohooo) you can stick on your wall and use.
Save your spot and SIGN UP HERE!

https://www.thegoodshipillustration.com/atlas 

Ok, on with the shownotes 🤓

We’ve taken our Business Course, given it a fresh lick of paint, and made it eeeeven more fun.

It's now called Illustration Business Club...

And the doors open tonight! (19th September 2025).

You don't need your shoulderpads. Just bring yourself and a bit of an open mind to learn how the money-and-business side of illustration works. 

In this episode, we talk a bit about why we’re saying goodbye to the word “course” and what this shiny new Illustration Business Club is gonna look like. You're in for a treat - it’s eeeven better. 

By the way, if you're already in the Business Course, you don't need to do anything. You'll be inside Illustration Business Club automagically. 

Phew!

• Lifetime access
• Community perks: private Facebook group + co-working every 2 weeks
• Nice open chats about pricing, clients, and fees

It'd be lovely to see you in there!

Timestamps, for our timestamp fans.

• 00:00 Big news: the Business Course has changed
• 01:00 Why “club” feels right (and way more fun)
• 02:00 All modules unlocked: learn at your pace
• 03:00 Community: private group + live calls
• 04:00 What art school didn’t teach you
• 05:00 Honest conversations about money + fees
• 06:00 Adding new income streams
• 07:00 Pricing insights: Katie & Helen’s two perspectives
• 08:00 Guest interviews + insider knowledge
• 08:30 Bonus: live Q&A with copyright lawyers
• 09:00 How to join the Illustration Business Club
  
  

Links mentioned

• Join the Illustration Business Club HERE
• Sign up for our free income workshop HERE
• Come and be our Instagram pals HERE

Byeeee for now!
 x The Good Ship Illustration (Helen, Katie & Tania)

Come and say hello!

✏️ @thegoodshipillustration
🌏 www.thegoodshipillustration.com

p.s. We love answering your illustration questions. Click here to submit your question for The Good Ship Illustration Podcast 🎙

Transcript

Sept 2
===

[00:00:00] Hello. We've got the business course running again in the end of this month, but things have changed. We've changed some things. Yeah. Big news, big changes. Big changes. It's huge. So you have to wear a suit to join. Yeah, no, we've got really worried that the word, well, I, I got really worried that the word business is putting people off and the word business and course together.

They don't sound as much fun as it actually is when you do it. Do they? No. These two had to be dragged kicking and screaming to those nights. I mean, in terms of it does what it says on the tin. It is a business course for illustrators, don't worry. We decided to change it and take the word course out and make it a club, which is not just a tiny weenie change, but it means that people can come in on the course and take it at their own.

Start straight away. Everything available from a wanna instead of it being delivered to you once a week. [00:01:00] 'cause I think it was burning people out, wasn't it? Yeah. There was so much in the course that it's just not actually possible to consume it. Especially when you're hungry for business advice. You're like okay, how can I get my finances sought out?

Let me get in there. And then we only let them have one module at a time. They're like, I wanna have a look through it all. And there's such a lot to take in. Have we said what? We're changing the name to the Illustration Business Club. Illustration Business Club, which is gonna be like an umbrella. So in the umbrella of the Illustration Business Club will be the course, which is eight modules, lifetime access.

You're in the club for life, whether you want it or not. And they've changed it. So you get access to the entire course immediately. Yeah. So if you are really excited about a specific bit like search engine optimization or having a substack or multiple income streams, you can just go straight to that bit and do it immediately.

Yeah, you don't have to wait. And then under the umbrella is also community. Yeah. Because we have fantastic Facebook group where everybody's helping each other out. We have lots of really [00:02:00] experienced people in there and newbies, and we're in there as well. Everybody helps each other out. And then we have the calls as well, which is a mixture of the coworking sessions.

And we're gonna have Zoom calls picking particular topics within business, aren't we, Tanya? Yeah. Yeah. And then focus on those so that we don't, because people come at business from so many different levels. Like some people are new illustrators, some people have been working for 20 years and just want to up their income and find some different kind of advice and tricks and techniques.

And a lot of other illustrators just want some community and someone privately to ask, what do you pay? What do you charge for this? How do you go about dealing with these kind of clients? And in the Facebook community, which is completely private. I think you can ask a lot of these sort of iffy questions that you wouldn't want to ask publicly or answer publicly on threads.

So there's a lot of good exchange of advice in, in those kind of areas as well. I feel like it's the kind of stuff that doesn't get taught at art school as well. [00:03:00] Yeah. Like it's a, as soon as you leave art school, you're just hungry for the information about how you make this into a job, how you can earn money in an art school, quite rightly, you're learning the art itself and there probably isn't time for the business as well.

But yeah, A lot of people leave art school floating about with some gorgeous artwork. Amazing artwork, yeah. But not able to make a living yet because they don't have the other tools that they need. They need to get in their business car for a little while. And I used to be really angry about that. I was like, university should teach you.

It's terrible that they don't, they're just irresponsible shooting you out with a cannon into the world. But really I think it's a good thing now because if you do take the time to learn the businessy stuff, you have such a big advantage immediately over like. Everyone mostly. 'cause not everyone's been taught or people get the very basics, but you learn like a tiny thing and you already know more than most people.

Mm-hmm. That are in the creative industry. Yeah. And I think going back to the thing we talked about previously, the kind of lonely nature of being an illustrator means that you don't exchange [00:04:00] information. There's no one really to ask like, are fees really this low? You know, am I being ripped off individually because I'm too soft or too weak with clients?

And then you speak to another illustrator and they say, no, that's exactly the same fee I was offered. So there's a lot of kind of frank discussion about things like that, about money and fees that you wouldn't normally get access to, particularly if you haven't got a community around you at the moment.

And we've got people from all different areas of illustration coming on and talking about fees and design processes that are specific to those areas, like packaging editorial. Working privately with clients and not having a design or art director in between you and the client and how to manage those kind of things.

And they were things I always wondered about. The great thing is we can ask people to be guests on our course and they tell us all those things. 'cause half the time we dunno. Some of them, they're things we want to ask. For example, a packaging designer, how does this gig work? And how do you go about it?[00:05:00] 

So we're adding more and more interviews with people from different areas of illustration into the course. And it's getting fatter and fatter. And more like a club than a course. Yeah. We're gonna do a workshop, aren't we? Oh yeah, we are. Because tanya illustrated this gorgeous map and it shows you all the areas of illustration that you could go into.

So we're planning a workshop, talking about your income as an illustrator, so the illustration, income map Alice thing, and talking about all the things you could do. So, like for me, especially when I left art school, I thought you'd be a picture illustrator or an editorial illustrator, and that was the only options.

I had no idea that this. Entire other things like licensing and immediately my brain lettering. Live illustration. Live illustration. Yeah. And portfolio mixes of all those different things. Very few people just work on one specialism [00:06:00] anymore and in tight times. A lot of illustrators are saying, I used to be able to make an income solely outta this strand of illustration.

I no long, no longer can, what are people doing? So we've got loads of other brilliant ways to add, quite easily add stuff to your income stream that are related to what you do already, but perhaps you didn't realize that other people would really like a bit of that in their business area. So you can continue to do the same thing, but you can sample it into different, different places and to different clients.

Yeah, because I think sometimes people think if you're an illustrator, you automatically have to accept that you're just not gonna make very much money. You are always gonna need another job, but. I think if you just know a few strategic things like diversifying your income, having more than one thing going on, most people can make it work.

Illustrators have got really brilliant creative brains that can turn their hand to everything. It's amazing when you speak to illustrators, all the other things they do, like sewing projects, cutting. Yeah. They're, they're just [00:07:00] brilliant. Uh, you know, writing substack running shops, all the different things illustrators do.

So I think we've got, we've got the kind of talent that can be used in lots of areas, so you don't need a kind of boring side job. Your side job can be something just as interesting. Definitely. And you've got Katie talking about pricing as well. So Katie and I come from two different areas in pricing and at first I was like, you can't do it like that.

You just have to accept what you tell you. You're like, no, you can tell them the prices. So I think both of them have met in the middle, both of these kind of approaches and our real world doable rationales to pricing and, but I think having Katie's approach and mine together. And we've got inside info on picture book pricing, which is really what the publishers will give you rather than something that you can truly impact.

So you've got all this whole kind of 360 degrees on different areas of illustration and how those businesses run and what they pay. So you [00:08:00] put all of those together. You're not in the corner just looking at one niche illustration activity and only having the skinny on what they pay and how they do it.

But you can learn about all the other areas simultaneously. Oh, and we've also got we are gonna have. An early bird special with our lawyers, er, who are specialist lawyers on intellectual property, and they are gonna answer a few questions, which you can also send in too about things like copywriting.

Do you need copyright? What do you do if someone reproduces your work somewhere else? What are the impacts of AI and copyright? So we're gonna have a one hour session late September, which if you're signed up, you will get to hear that date. Yeah. And, uh, you can sit without, with the lawyers and find out all those juicy things.

It's gotta be so good. Yeah, it's gonna be brilliant. If you go to the good ship illustration.com/business, you can put your email in on there and you'll hear when the door's open, you'll hear when the workshop is about income. You hear about the early bird thing with and copyright and [00:09:00] legal questions. Yeah.

To get all the dates and proper information. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's it. Now. I've blown my own brain now. It's so exciting. The business side is a bit where it all comes together and you can make a career out of it and be part this ongoing club. Oh, and it's not subscriptions and it's not like membership subscriptions.

You just pay once and you are in. Yeah, because you part of the gang. Yeah. Okay. Goodbye. Bye bye.