Forging Ahead as a Freelance Illustrator

How I set out to become a freelance illustrator.

When I quit my day job as Head Illustrator at The Wall Street Journal, I was anxious to continue my artistic efforts on my own terms. Although I originated the iconic WSJ hedcut style that became so widely celebrated, I wanted to branch out into more diverse assignments, and I knew that my best chance was as a freelance illustrator.This post focuses on one particular client, Thermador, and some work I did for them. The Ad Agency who tapped me for the project was Ketchum Communications. Among other illustration work I provided to this top-tier stove maker, there were several distinctive images I did for use in two print ads.

Illustrating two ads for Thermador

One ad featured poultry, the other, lobster. I created three illustrations as spots for the lobster ad. I like the graphic quality of these drawings…Here is left page of the ad showing how they were used: The poultry ad used a similar format. Here are three more illustrations from that ad —-two of these were a bit more complex than the lobster drawings, and required more care in capturing the detail:

The final illustrated ad pages.

The ad pages looked like this:I hope you enjoyed viewing these Kevin Sprouls Illustrations as much as I did creating them. They were fun to draw, and successful.