Kelley Goes to New York

Last week I visited New York City in order to have some meetings with art directors. Some of these AD's I had worked with before, namely Joann Hill at Disney-Hyperion and Elizabeth Parisi at Scholastic. The other two meetings were set up by my agent Justin Rucker.

The publishers were located in impressive-looking buildings where I had to check in with security at the front desk and stuff.

Did you know that the Flatiron building is full of MacMillan imprints?

At these meetings I brought my portfolio - currently one of those plain black Itoya portfolios, nothing special - and showed it to art directors. Their offices and cubicles were filled with beautiful shiny books. We talked about what projects they were working on and what projects they might be able to use my work for.

With you, my dear blog readers, in mind, I made a point of asking all the ADs how they found illustrators. The answers were, generally, 1. agency websites 2. random internet searches on sites like Pinterest 3. emails from illustrators 4. postcards. Yes, they do look at postcards. Rich Deas, art director at Feiwel and Friends, allowed me to take this photo of his inbox.

The general gist I got from AD's was to be persistent. Keep sending emails and postcards and posting work online. You never know when you might reach the right person at just the right moment, when a new job opens up and you've got the skills they're looking for.

I also got plenty of sightseeing in, so much that my feet where aching at the end of each day.

And I met with some good friends. But we were having so much fun that we forgot to take pictures.

New York is an interesting city with a lot of fun things to do, but I have no desire to live there. Frankly, it kind of smells bad and I got creeped on by weirdos on public transit twice. I'd like to make a second trip next year to visit more publishers, hopefully with a better portfolio, inside and out.