It's a freelance life

Looking for jobs is a pretty big part of being a freelancer. Your eyes are always open for new projects, and your ears are alert, constantly trying to spot possibilities even in casual chats. Sometimes, when projects are scarce and your pencils don't get out of their pencil case as much as they'd like to, the "looking" turns into "desperate hunting". At that point, you are not searching for something - you are looking for anything!

Those times are always very frustrating. Next to writing tons of messages to potential clients, not having a big project leaves plenty of time for questioning things such as the meaning of life and being a "starving artist". I'm still learning to deal with the fact that sometimes cooking dinner will be the biggest achievement of the day. Indeed, the less work I have, the more time I tend to spend on cooking. Filling the freezer with homemade falafel or fish patties is my favourite activity on quiet days - even if my pencils would get sadly bored in their pencil case, cooking keeps me satisfied for having spent at least a few hours on something truly productive.

Next to excessive cooking and messaging, the quiet times might also lead you to do some small designs and test jobs. Most of the times, they don't pay much (…if anything), but hey, the freezer is full, you've got time and should definitely do something before your pencils want to get a divorce. That is why I have done things such as...

...grown some veggies...

...baked a digital Hawaiian pizza...

...and become friends with a unusually colourful lion.

And the best part of all this...? Sooner or later, one of the test jobs, chit-chats or applications will score you a new project. And then you have a reason to cook pasta in 10 minutes again. That, my friends, is real luxury!

By Will Bryant