Local Link is a recurring series by The Central New Jersey Guide which profiles notable people in the local community.
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Turn to the business section of Sunday’s edition of the New York Times, and you just might see the published work of a local resident.
“I do one cartoon every other week for the Times, and there is no typical day,” said cartoon illustrator Chris Reed, who lives just over the Metuchen border in Edison with his wife and three children. He works out of his home as an independent freelancer.
Reed’s cartoons appear regularly in a New York Times column called Career Couch, which he describes as an “Ann Landers advice column for the business world.” He says he enjoys his work with the Times because it allows him to be creative.
“My clients include the New York Times, Scholastic, BusinessWeek, McGraw-Hill, and many others,” he said. “I am at my desk most of my day or at my computer doing artwork. For a New York Times assignment, I will first draw the picture before scanning it into the computer as an image file. I then alter it there, add a black and white tone, and then email it directly to the paper’s art director. But it usually all starts with a drawing on a piece of paper.”“The Times’ editors give me the copy on Tuesday or Wednesday, and I give them rough ideas, usually three, on Thursday,” Reed said. “They pick one, and I give them the finished piece of art on Friday afternoon. They just give me the copy, and then they leave it up to me. And I figure that by giving them three choices, they can’t go wrong.”
“In comparison, I also do a lot of artwork for textbooks as well, and that is relatively straightforward, as they tell you exactly what they want,” he said. “There is less room for creativity and fun with textbooks, but on the other hand you don’t have to rack your brain for ideas. Right now I am drawing illustrations of kids that are three to four years old. The illustrations help teachers teach kids certain things, so they are pretty specific on the instructions on what to draw.”
Reed, 50, has been working as an illustrator for virtually his entire career, which spans the last 25 years. He knew he wanted to be in the field at an early age, majoring in graphic design in college.
“That’s what I focused on, but I always took cartooning classes or illustration classes on the side just because they were fun,” he said. “When I graduated with a degree in design, what I wanted to be was a cartoonist and do gag cartoons for magazines. I thought, ‘Let me give it a try, and if it fails, I can apply for an office job.’ It was fun, and I was making progress, so I stuck with it.”
After graduating college, he started out working part-time in a related field until he was able to concentrate full-time on his freelance work.
“I started off working part-time doing what they call ‘paste up in mechanical’ – really just preparing stuff for the printer – until I was able to freelance full-time. It took me about two years before I could be strictly freelance. I suppose it would be remarkable to become a successful freelancer so quickly today, but it was less so then, as there was more work.”
Reed has been creating artwork for the New York Times for the last three years.
“I started working for them by sending them mailers,” he said. “I got a list of art directors and sent them samples of my work. I have worked for three different people at the Times, but over the last three years I have worked for one art director in particular in the business section.”
As a freelancer, Reed says there may be a week here and there when he may have no paid assignments, but he says he is always working regardless.
“I am still sitting at my desk creating artwork even if a phone call doesn’t come in from someone requesting artwork,” he said.
Reed has his own website, chrisreedstudio.com, on which much of his work appears.
“My main website has been up for four years,” he said. “It used to be that you physically took your portfolio around, but now people just want to link to your website. It makes it easier for everyone. I don’t have to hop on the train to go to New York, and people don’t have to make time to see me. They can just view my portfolio directly on the computer.”
In addition to paid assignments, he also focuses a lot of his time on licensing deals for his illustrations.
“Licensing is designing artwork for merchandise,” he said. “You then try to entice manufacturers to license your work and put it on their products. This means creating artwork with the hopes that you get a product manufacturer to use it. The down side is that you have no specific assignment or any promise that someone will use it.”
Reed and his wife have also recently started a venture called monkeybarsdesign.com, which includes products such as illustrated journals and bookplates for students. He hopes to partner with area schools for his products’ use in student fundraisers.
“We did a Parent-Teacher Organization trade show last year that brings in a lot of people from New Jersey schools and got a great response,” he said. “We’ve also got responses from Maryland, Virginia, and California, and we are hoping for people to take that next step and bring it into their schools.”
Reed’s advice to younger people today who are just beginning their careers as illustrators or graphic artists is to be persistent and proactive. He believes they can succeed even in today’s difficult economic climate.
“I wouldn’t change the way I did it, but if I were coming out of school now, I would say that you really have to be proactive and have a lot of drive,” he said. “You have to reach out to prospective clients and do whatever you can to get your name out there, such as participating in a gallery show or cold calling art directors. And make sure you have a good website – there is less work out there than there used to be and more competition with the Internet, so you have to be very proactive. It’s a challenge, and it’s not easy, but if someone has the talent and the drive – where sometimes the drive is more important than even the talent – then the opportunity is there.”
A Day in the Life of local resident Chris Reed, cartoon illustrator
8:00am: Walk my daughter to the crossing guard as she takes the bus to school. Make lunch for my sixth grader. Wife works in the city, so she is already gone by this point. Come home, take a shower, make breakfast, read the newspaper, and check my email.
9:00am: Sit down at the desk in my home office and do some more emailing. Start drawing for an assignment, which I do for a few hours. The night before I was up most of the night cranking stuff out because I procrastinated for a few days before that. There really is no typical day though.
11:00am: Walk the dog and run a few errands like picking up the dry cleaning and going to the store.
3:00pm: The kids start coming home, and I’m done working for a while. When they were younger, we had a babysitter whose job was to keep the kids from me, since once they come home it’s hard to get work done. As such if there are no errands to run, general rule is to do as much work as possible at my desk before 3pm. By then will usually have to drive my daughter to a soccer game or to an orthodontist’s appointment. Run other errands and make dinner.
7:00pm: Wife comes home, and I spend some time with her. Have dinner.
9:30-10pm onwards: Work for a few more hours before going to sleep. I am most productive when people are either out of the house or when they are in bed. Used to be more a night owl, in that I would get chores done during the day, go food shopping, and watch the kids, before working late at night when everyone was asleep. But I’m getting too old for that.
