What is a good way to start getting your illustration work seen?

Start looking into agents – a good one will be able to hook you up with a relatively steady stream of work providing you can produce quickly enough. Those I know who have done well have all ended up moving to large cities where there are a lot of publications’ offices but I’m not so sure that would be necessary at this point in time. I would think it odd if you couldn’t just submit high-res images by email or ftp.

I lucked out and got a full time illustration job at an online education company so I never took the agent path (and subsequently gave up illustrating for other things after about 4 years). However, I did go to school with a few people who had overall good experiences with agents.

I often think about getting back into it. Aside from the stress of multi-deadline days, it was really a lot of fun and such a great way to improve your abilities. Good luck to you.

deviantart.com is a great way to put together a gallery. Then you can send a link to it to people and potential employers or individual jobs

Flickr is also good for this, especially now they’re happy with illustration as long as you flag it as such. I love seeing stuff in Flickr, since it’s full featured and I already know how to use it, unlike an illustrator’s custom web site. A lot of the illustration students I teach at university have taken to Flickr readily unlike, ironically, most of the photographers.

I don’t think potential employers are going to be looking for Illustrators on a known photography site. It’s fine that they’ve added this feature. But, it’s not known for that.

Fair enough damianmann, I didn’t mean to imply they were. You could send them the link though, or use it on cards the same way you could with deviantart, and the use of one doesn’t preclude the other for many of my students. Having a web presence is about getting seen all over the place I think. Those Moo cards are a great way of promoting work stored on Flickr, Facebook, Livejournal, Vox, and a variety of other places.

@shari – MOO CARDS! I have been trying to remember and find that site for a week. Thanks for reminding me! (Duh, I could have posted the question here!)

Glad to help. I use and love the moo photo cards. They’ve become very popular with art and design students here, especially for end-of-year shows.