The Freelancer's Guide: The Choice

Given enough time, every freelancer will eventually get a call from a very pleasant sounding person offering them a fulltime position. This person will tell them all about the fabulous benefits of working for their company, such as getting paid regularly and complimentary electricity. At this point, every freelancer must make a choice of whether or not to keep their lance free or not. If this should happen to you, I recommend you make a list. Here's an example:

Benefits of Freelancing:
Make your own hours
Pleasant commute
No annoying office mates
No stupid meetings
Pants optional

Benefits of Accepting Fulltime work:
Free office supplies
Attractive Key Fobs and Decorative Name Placards
Dirty coffee mugs mysteriously vanish from the sink and appear in the cupboards the next day. ( I'm told this is normal)

I recently faced this very choice recently. After some amount of consideration, I chose to accept this opportunity, at the very least for a few months. Unfortunately that means I'll not be posting project work as much for awhile, but hopefully I'll still find the time to put up sketches and whatever backlogged art that hasn't gone up yet. I'm not going to lie, I'll miss alot of things about sitting at this desk, but on the other hand, it's a nice opportunity in a new field, so it's forward progress, so that's something.

 I wish you luck when you get the chance to make your own Choice.

breaking

MORE ROBOTS AND JUNK

Yes that's right, everyone's favorite...but first some news!

Been very busy for the last few months wrapping up some work on Dead Space 3, and I'm just finishing an interactive graphic novel as well, so stay tuned for some fancy stuff in the near future!

 In the meantime, Ballistic Publishing has just released EXPOSÉ 10 which you can check out here! This time around, the good ol' Junkasaurus made it in, as well as this roboty guy, who got the Excellence Award in the Robotic/Cyborg category. So I got that going for me, which is nice.

Finally, I did a few concepts  for an upcoming tabletop game which will be up for funding soon over on Kickstarter:

go check out project THON and look for it on Kickstarter next month! They've even gotten some first sculpts of stuff going, which is pretty cool:

More news as it comes..til then, good night and good luck

Murder Miners box art

Another recent project that I'm finally able to post- The box art to Jforce Games Murder Miners!

 continue on for a little process work...

Offworld now out on the app store!

so everyone go out and start up you inter nets and navigate towards the Apple store and pick up your free copy today!

stay tuned for more roboty goodness soon!

The Road to Damascus

Goddess Warrior

from a recent project

And in Other News...

...after much bloodshed and gnashing of teeth, one of my longstanding side projects is now out! So if you're deathly bored and need to give your mouse a workout, checkout Pirates of the Stupid Seas HERE or wherever fine Flash games are shown!

Money on the table

Yes it's been ages. The life of a freelancer, as you know, is nothing but feast or famine, and since the start of the new year, it's been a continuous feast. While this may sound fantastic ( and to be sure, I aint complaining ) the downside of all this feasting is that when the jobs start to pile up, you have to pull alot of hours just to keep up.

Now when you pull extra hours, your efficiency starts to go down due to fatigue, requiring you to work even more hours to compensate. 2 months later you're a broken shell of the artist you once were.

Now the brighter ones of you out there may ask "But Jim, why don't you simply turn down new work once you've reached your capacity?" Well you've got alot of nerve. But it's a good question nonetheless, and the answer is: because a freelancer should almost never turn down work.

This is so ingrained into me that by now if I even consider it, I hear a voice in my head telling me what a jerk I am. I don't know whose voice it is, but it sounds like an old fat guy, the type of guy who's always lounging around in old fashioned delis in the afternoon, usually named Sal or Connie or something. " Hey Mr. Big Shot" Sal will say, " in my day we didn't leave money on the table. We worked until there was no more work"

"No, Sal, it's not like that..I only got two hands..." I think to myself, but Sal, he don't listen to nobody, so he keeps going on and on about the price of stuff and how all sports stink these days and how blessed I should feel to have work " Money on the table, big shot!"Around this time I give up and just accept the next job. 

So the point of all this is not to highlight my mental illness, but rather that I'm finally freed up enough to post something, and I'm choosing something from a job I really should never have taken, looking back on it all. But then again, the piece itself actually turned out alright so maybe Sal was right after all.

 And, now that I think of it, sports these days really do stink.