Hiya :)
If you’re after illustration tips in general, the best one I can give you (and seeing as you’ve done a degree youself, as I have, you’ll probably have been told this a billion times) but networking is absolutely the key. Keep making people aware of your work, use your final year to build up a really strong portfolio so that you can just send your work to as many agencies as possible (I’ve been buying the ‘Illustration NOW!’ books, published by taschen, and they have a bunch of agency contact details in them. Find an illustrator with similar work and see who represents them). With any illustration work, unless you’re already famous, you have to always go to fetch the work yourself. Work really hard to get noticed in what is a ridiculously busy market. Expect to get a lot of rejection, because it’s not about being good or bad, it’s about finding the right client with the right job for you. You just have to do a looooot of leg work. You know, virtual leg work.
I applied to teefury, and signed up for tumblr, as a way of promoting myself. In the past year Ive focused more on my comics work rather than commercial illustration, hence all the just-for-fun fanart on here, but Im still trying to get myself known. I’m developing my professional website alongside this.
With the teefury thing, I just sent them an image based on something I did for tumblr that was oddly popular. Im working on some new ideas now, which have a stronger design aesthetic to them, rather than being so high-concept, but we’ll see how that goes. There’s a bunch of other t-shirt sites that take submissions, but I have the worst memory, lol, but try them all out. (I can’t speak for the others, but teefury have been very very friendly and helpful throughout the whole process)
I hope I’ve been some help, you’ve probably heard all this a million times, but if theres anything you want me to elaborate on (unlikely, as Ive just rambled for ages. I should probably read this over before clicking ‘publish’ lol) just ask.
