How to Establish Yourself as a Freelancer?

How to Establish Yourself as a Freelancer?
4 min read

Sri Priyatham takes us through his beautiful journey of establishing himself as a freelance illustrator in the digitalised world of today. Here, he also highlights the merits and demerits of being a freelancer.


Earning his very first commission from his bedroom turned studio, Priyatham took to freelancing by metamorphosing his passion into profession, without having to leave the comfort of his home. An ardent believer of a conventional lifestyle without weekends, he feels not working under someone allows a free-flowing lifestyle and an individuals' diversified growth.

Starting is Important

Facebook as a medium has worked wonders for Priyatham since his very start as an art student and a budding freelancer, for his communications, promotions and commissions. The outburst of other social platforms like Instagram, Reddit and Imgur helped him extend his reach to the continents of America, Europe and Australia to earn his clientele.

It is up to you!

Preferring freelancing over a day-job, Priyatham feels that freelancing is an individuals' choice to make. An efficiently flexible working method, freelancing lets a professional explore and expand his horizon, to develop and revamp his personal skill-set, much-needed for survival.


Having its own positives and negatives, freelancing can be quite challenging. Time flexibility and absence of a pressure factor, unlike day-jobs, calls for a lot of self-motivation and commitment to deliver within the self-created deadline. Freelancing gets one working throughout the week, devoid of weekends and a social-life, unlike the conventional lifestyle. Inconsistent income and unrealistic price negotiations are some short-comings of this profession.


Also, a lot of fake freelancer-artist profiles in the market lead to a generalization of genuine and false artists in the same category, leading to a region-specific freelance deficiency.

The Freelancer Way!

To enter into the freelance market, one needs to befriend and fellow freelancers through collaborations and social media. Acquainting to existing standards, price charts and market likes and dislikes. To be in the limelight and attract future-potential clients, a freelancer needs to promote himself and his work by nominalising prices and offering discounts, creating promotional content and upgrading the portfolio with new-refreshing content, besides delivering ongoing projects in time!


Illustrating by blending creativity with trends and expressing it by #hash-tagging and wordplay is a smart tool to grow the followers list. But to translate the 'following' into 'buying', (or convert the followers into clients,) a freelancer needs to maintain high-quality standards.


Apart from being an illustrator, Priyatham is a movie-buff and a trendy reader. The variety of reads on Reddit and Quora serve as an inspiration for him to illustrate and sketching his favorite actors and film-makers motivates him. He is happy that his passion for art is an obsession!


Reaching out to the budding freelancers, Priyatham says that this is a slow process and requires consistency to be successful. One should be inspired and draw every day, just how you breathe, in-order to be better than yesterday. Making social profiles public and communicating and presenting yourself in the best way to mark your presence in the digital world is most needed in todays' era.

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