During the Illustrators Australia 2025 membership drive, we are spending each week looking at a different period of time: Past, Present, Future.
Here in week 1, reflecting on the past, we have Katie Bell sharing a story from when she got started as an illustrator.
"When I first started getting paid illustration work in my mid twenties, (the first was 1998) I was asked to do a poster design for the local Masked Ball in Northcote, Melbourne/Naarm. This led to a lot of community work and poster designs, (the characters of which were even turned into soft sculptures and paraded down the street). They asked me to design the poster three years running as well as commissioning me to do the logo design for the precinct. Along with many other artists, I also earned the opportunity to paint one of the street poles too.
I was influenced by children's book illustration, 80s protest poster design (which I did a lot of), fantasy art and Dungeons and Dragons. They are all hand drawn and painted of course, I couldn't even clean them up in photoshop as I had no computer!
I did a lot of work for the community, even live painting for festivals! It was great fun. It was a cool thing to be part of: the local traders and community knew the arts would help revive the faded shopping strip. So they started these sorts of cultural events, street parades, festivals, music and arts events and the street life and prosperity of the area turned around! Just look at the culture of Northcote now.
I was young and at the time it seemed like a lot of money to me, I felt cheeky just asking for it! I think I got paid between $150-$250 for each of these jobs back in the late 90s early 2000s. So we should definitely be getting paid a lot more now!"
