A couple of years ago I went through a difficult time in my life and for a moment I was lost in what I wanted in my life and with my career. I wanted to do something more with my creativity. I’ve always liked drawing and painting and I looked around for an education in that area. Part-time courses within the visual arts were too long for me (3 to 4 years). At one point I found an illustration course at the LOI for the duration of 1.5 years. The course also included a part about starting your own business. At that time starting a business didn’t seem something I would do. I applied for this course. In the meantime I had found a full-time job as a tester. The idea of starting my own business grew more and more over the year. Then I finally decided to start my company as an Illustrator. I took the plunge! Fortunately, I was able to continue working part-time for my employer and in the meantime I could start my own company.
The first months
I actually wanted to register with the Chamber of Commerce on April 1st 2020 (no joke), but because of the Corona crisis I postponed it. That actually came in handy, because I was still busy getting started. I continued to work out a plan: how do I want to earn my money by illustrating? What are the possibilities in this respect? Who are the competitors and how do I attract customers?
I also needed a website, of course. I already have some experience with WordPress and I thought ‘I can do this easily’, but it turned out differently. First I tried to arrange the hosting (I already had a domain name), and thought I could pay for per month for three years. It turned out that I had to pay for the three years in one go. That was not the intention. So that was slightly delayed. Learning to work with WordPress also took a bit more time than I thought.
The first month (April) I was busy thinking about the structure of the website and the content I wanted to have on it. I also searched for a WordPress theme that would fit my website wishes and that would have sufficient expansion possibilities. The next month I started adapting the theme to the look & feel of ColourFlux Studio. In the month of June, I was mainly busy filling content on my website.
Within these months, I have also been working on illustrations. I had an assignment for a dog portrait and I worked on my own projects, such as the butterfly illustrations on Red Bubble and the Japanese temple.
In addition, I am still working on the Illustration course. It is important for me to keep learning and to learn good basic techniques for making illustrations.
As of 1st of June 2020, ColourFlux Studio is officially registered as a one-man business! I fully support my decision to do something completely different in my career. I feel I am ready for it and now is the time to make my dreams come true!
I hope to do some nice commissions and projects in the near future. I’m also going to expand my website, you can read more about this in blogpost Kick-off with ColourFlux Studio. For updates on the website and about projects and assignments, follow ColourFlux Studio on instagram!
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