Big Orange: Andrew Pavitt

Big Orange is a studio is Shoreditch, London, which is partially shared with the Association of Illustrators which is useful to share the rent and to gain valuable advice, where illustrators pay £200 for shared use of equipment, set-up, cleaning and the phones. This environment is useful to the illustrators as you are able to feed ideas off of each other and get advice and working freelance can often be lonely and make you quite insecure.

Big Orange was set up 15 or 16 years ago with illustrators, such as Darryl Rees, who now runs the Heart Agency, Dan Williams, who now teaches in Glasgow, and Tom Morrison, from the Royal College of Art. Andrew Pavitt joined about 6 years ago. When setting up a studio, location is important though it is not everything. There are now good studios within the Manchester area. An important part of being an illustrator is self-promotion. You need to make people aware of who you are on a regular basis to ensure commissions.

Peepshow is a similar studio set-up. The advantage of joining a studio such as Peepshow or Big Orange is that it is already established and you are able to share contacts with each other, though you should also make an effort to gain your own contacts.

Another advantage of the Big Orange studio is that its working hours are 24 hours. This is extremely useful as you are able to get work done at anytime in order to meet short deadlines. This is also relevant when working with contacts outside of the UK. If you get a commission for the US, they will not take into account the time difference, which means you may need to work through the night to get work done. An advantage of working with US contacts is that the pay is often double that of what you would get in the UK.

A disadvantage of working within a studio with other people is the dynamic can often be too much and if personalities clash, this can cause tension for everybody else.