Here we go. My very first blog!

Hello Internets!

My name is Wes and if you're reading this you are one of the first to take a peek in to my professional life as an illustrator living in New York City. The purpose of this blog is to both let prospective clients see the most up to date work as well as bring friends and family updates and insight to what it is to be a storyboard artist. Many people aren't familiar with what the job of a storyboard artist actually is and it's likely due to the fact that it's a very rare niche' job (God knows I've had to explain it enough). So there's a third reason for this Blog: to help explain my job as well as perhaps help those who are looking become storyboards artists themselves understand what they're in for. I've been at this for about 6 years or so and my very first job was for an NYU student (Robbie Pickering) for a short film called Prom Night. I completed the job is probably about a week and was paid about $200 bucks and after recently taking a look at those boards I think I should have been the one who should have been paying the $200. I think that I did maybe 4 or 5 more projects like that for $200 when I could work it around my job at the time which was as a graphic designer. After that, which probably constitutes for about a year of time, I started getting overflow work from a friend of mine who had been a storyboard artist for years for a whopping $500 per day. When ever given an opportunity to get this type of work I would take vacation time to do it (or fit a couple sick days in there if it was for a day or so). After another year or two opportunity struck and there was a merger in the design department with the company that I worked with and I was given the option to leave with $10,000 and the option for unemployment and I jumped at the opportunity. Over the next year I grew my clients and became a professional storyboard artist (a dream come true) and I'm still doing it today. It's a very fulfilling career with great pay and you generally only work a couple days a week per ad job which has been the bulk of the projects that I've had the opportunity to work on (if you're interested in what clients check out my resume at wessimpkins.com).

Well that's enough for now but I'll be playing catch-up this week and adding attachments of recent work as well as beginning a job to job status update of what's going on in Wes's world of storyboarding!