Emily So

First, here’s some new artwork I’ve done for a client working on a game inspired by Ace Attorney. I’ll stick the rest of them throughout the rest of the post to break it up a little. (Then the rest of the images are not client-related 😛 ) Thank you, Paul Nagami, for such a fun project!

Executing Penalties and Damage Control

A lot of the times, there is just nothing you can do to get your client to pay if they simply do not pay after you’ve done your part in the contract. But you can take precautions. Here are some tips.

• In your contract, specify payment due dates
• Specify penalties for late payments
• Limit access to your deliverables
• Withhold services accordingly

The penalty I use for late payments usually involves imposing fines or having the client give me down payments for any deliverable they’re requesting. This kind of makes the contract into a fixed-price contract, but you can always over-estimate the fixed price for the piece you’re providing the client and make that part of the penalty.

For limiting access to deliverables, what I do is put filters or water marks on my images, and/or shrink the image size, thus lowering the quality of the deliverable. I then notify the client that once I have received the full payment for that deliverable, I would only then provide them the final product.

And of course, on the last bullet point, your services should always be prioritized towards paying customers.

It’s important to enforce these rules strictly, otherwise you will be signaling to the client that you’re a push-over. I don’t consider myself to be that harsh. Clients only pay for the exact amount of hours I’ve worked, I’m pretty transparent about everything, and I give them at least a few days after the billing date to pay off their balance. Most of the time I only ask for down payments on the very rare occasion I take on fixed price contracts and when I’m enforcing penalties.

If and when any problems arise between you and your client, always remain professional and do not ever try to embarrass your client. Whether they’ve incurred delinquency in their payments or they are trying to cheapen your services or they start calling you names, you must think in terms of the next step instead of reacting personally.

In my experience so far though, most of the problems with my clients I’ve had could have been prevented by me not having taken on their projects in the first place. Perhaps I wasn’t so great at screening them before or I was too quick to take on projects that were “pseudo-hourly” but were actually fixed price. What I did was I thought of it as “Okay, fine, it’ll be fixed price but I won’t work more than a certain amount of hours to make sure my hourly rate doesn’t drop.” This is very risky, because clients easily took advantage of me this way. I was either desperate for clients at those times or just way too naive.

But after that damage is done, then when it comes down to the 500th revision on a fixed price contract, because you (or myself in this case) didn’t specify a limit to the amount of revisions in the contract, and the client is clearly taking advantage of you, you may want to speak up.

You basically have two options (or perhaps three). You either drag it out and do everything the client asks you to do at the risk of reducing your hourly rate down to the single digits per hour, or you terminate the contract. Option 3 could be re-negotiating the contract, though in my experience, I never really did well with that and ended up with option 2.

So now you want to terminate the contract. Most ideally this is done in amicable terms, but this isn’t super mandatory to me. I’d also advise that you never try to burn bridges when you can at least say something like “I’d love to work with you in the future if the opportunity arises.”

So far the best way for me to end contracts (they’re usually pretty short) is to give the client a full refund. This has so far definitely prevented my clients from giving me bad ratings on the freelancing sites.

One of my contracts that I terminated was a contingency contract. I’d never done one of these before. It involved my client having to deliver my work to one of his clients, though only through him. Thus, my success was contingent on satisfying the whims of his client. I learned after a few days of working on this contract that this was going to be extremely difficult for me, and in the end, kind of impossible. On top of that, it was another one of those fixed price contracts disguised as an hourly contract (strict budget). The biggest problem was the sheer amount of revisions required, and again, I did not specify a limit to the amount of revisions for the price.

(Basically, one great tip I have for you to prevent bad experiences is to always specify how many revisions you will make for the price being paid. If you are working on an hourly contract, always tell the client to expect revisions as needed and that they need to be paid for at the same rate.)

I could have explained to the client why I decided to terminate the contract, but one of my old clients (probably the best client I ever had) suggested that I keep everything strictly professional and to the point. Basically all I said was, “I am no longer working for you, you will receive a full refund.” I was pretty much screwing this client over by leaving him suddenly with unfinished work, but that was none of my concern.

So, in the bit of experience I have with clients I ended up terminated contracts with, I’ve learned that in overall negative situations:

1. Remain professional at all times.
2. Do not get personal with your client.
3. Focus on only what’s necessary to terminate the contract.

So on the last point, basically just keep communication limited down to only what is necessary. If the client asks a bunch of questions, you really don’t need to answer them at all and you can ignore them. A lot of the times these questions will get you personally involved. I find it much easier and simpler to end things this way, even if it’s kind of a cold way of dealing with someone. I know others would choose a different approach, but in my experience, things just got too personal if I talked too much.

On just a quick little note, once your client is refunded, they shouldn’t be allowed to use your work for any purposes because they do not own your work any longer. So technically, if you find them breaking this rule, you can sue them if you really wanted to.

I hope you found this post helpful, and happy freelancing! 😀

I haven’t posted in so long. Well, this usually means I’m swamped with clients, which is good in the long run. I thought I’d share some of my work I did for my brother, one of my paying clients 😛

10 hours budgeted for each illustration.

Now here’s some advice I’ve got based on my first-hand experiences as a freelance artist:

Why Your Rates Should Be Higher

If you were employed by a company, the usual standard is that they provide you with:

• A medical plan
• A work space
• Paid leave
• Paying for their side of the income tax as the employer

On top of your salary/wages. Usually if you work for a company, ideally you’d be working for them for more than a year at a time and there is a certainty to that lifestyle that freelancing doesn’t have.

To explain the last bullet point, freelancers pay twice as much income tax than those employed — if you are self-employed, you are both the employer and employee. You pay the income tax for both parties.

As a freelancer, your rates should be much higher because not only will most clients NOT provide the above, but also because:

• You need the money for your “dry seasons”
• Your services are highly specialized and unique
• You need to signal to others that you are the premium service provider
• Your pricing filters out clients

One interesting observation I’ve made though — I’ve found my best general clientele seem to be not only at least somewhat affluent (I think), but also often tend to be software engineers or something along those lines. This is probably the result of the kind of art and graphics I provide. I only realized what my client base is like after years of working on my business.

To explain the first bullet point here, the freelancing life isn’t a constant, guaranteed 9-5 kind of job. You don’t know for sure if you’re going to be able to work some 40 paid hours in a given week, some weeks you have more, others you may have less or close to none. Where the employed 9-5 life can be described as flat terrain to traverse, the freelancing life can be described as a rollercoaster. Thus, you need to charge more so that you can make up for the times when you have no customers. Think of it as putting out the rain barrel during the wet seasons.

The last bullet point is pretty much an explanation for the bullet point before it. A higher rate does help to filter out less ideal clients for you, but it should be a supplement to your screening them through e-mails or Skype interviews.

I have not really experienced any complaints about my pricing. For the most part, potential clients simply say “Your artwork looks great, but unfortunately this is out of my budget,” and they politely move on. If anyone says your price is outrageous, well then they should know that there are tons of other contractors out there who are much more affordable. No one is pointing a gun to anybody’s head.

I raise my rate in $5 to $10 increments, usually when my demand is getting higher. This is my way of controlling my work load and signaling that my services are very desirable. To be honest though, recently I’ve been raising my rate like crazy because the clients these days have been coming out of the woodwork. I suspect that having a decent reputation after a few years with some good testimonials, and a body of work that I’ve completed professionally helps a lot in attracting more clients. But every time I’ve raised my rate higher than I’d ever gone before, there’s always someone who comes along and doesn’t seem to bat an eye and hires me (I have anxiety issues…) The moment someone hires you at your new highest rate, you are definitely worth that much and no one can argue against you on this. You can experiment all you want with bumping up your rates. If you run low on clients, you can always lower your rate, or simply keep your displayed rate up, and try to close a deal by offering a discount. It could go something like this: “My rate is X dollars right now, but I can give you a 20% discount because your project looks like a lot of fun and I’d love to have it in my portfolio.”

Customers love deals.

Value yourself and your work. If you have doubts about the value of your own work, put some more value into it while keeping your rate. Learn some new skills, refine the ones you already have, do some research in your field. For example, what makes me stand out as an artist is that I have a lot of experience in making video games, from concept to marketing them. I can give very valuable advice in this field and other related fields.

I also picked up a bunch of skills by myself. Technically I can sell myself as a graphic designer, even though that’s not my main focus, and people would hire me for those gigs. A lot of the times I end up finding myself doing what I specialize in during those gigs anyway, as that skill of mine is just lying around for my client to utilize. I also picked up on font creation. People can hire you for a certain task that is usually high in demand (graphic design, for example) as a gateway to working on tasks you like doing anyway. On a bunch of game projects, I was originally just going to do the user interface, but then got asked to do quite a few character designs.

It’s definitely worth it to put in a few hours to pick up a new piece of software or skill, if it’ll help you cast a wider net for getting more clients and increase your value.

Cheers 😀

I haven’t updated in forever. I felt the need to post something, and here it is:

The character was pretty much already designed in the form of really small pixel sprites, as well as the portrait. All I did was create a full-body shot of the character, thus designing the detail of the armor.

Thank you James for such a fun little project 🙂

I have so much work to do!

This started out as a demo painting for one of my drawing/illustration students. Then after class I decided to put a little more work into it as a speed doodle.

Ori and the Blind Forest is such a great game. It combines a bunch of the gameplay elements of the first Prince of Persia on the PS3 (the one with Elika), but without the cheese, and it’s pretty much an homage to the Rayman games on the PS3 (Origins, Legends). Great graphics, really beautiful music. The music I have to make a huge deal out of because most of the time these days music is treated as an after-thought, I feel. But this soundtrack is so beautiful, I listen to some of the songs on like endless loops.

The gameplay very smoothly builds on itself, easing itself into higher difficulty and has a real wit to its problem-solving moments. People have complained about the “boss levels” where you constantly die because you didn’t jump far enough or time your movements to the millisecond, but if you have patience and persistence, you can beat the game. But that is seriously the ONLY complaint about this game.

I’m grateful to my older bro for buying me this game.

This game made me cry and I tried so very hard not to.

Get on Steam and play this game.

An animation I did for one of my clients 🙂

I just did a random landscape doodle as a demo to one of my students today. It took about 45 minutes or so.

And here’s some progress on an illustration I’m working on. The inspiration came from one of my favorite games of all time… XCOM (or XCOM 2) 😛

If I painted 24 more illustrations like these, my life would just be better in general 😛 I really need to make more ambitious paintings.

Queen at Arms has been released on Steam!

Thank you so much, Aqualuft team, for all of your hard work! 😀 This game has been in development forEVER! @_@

Here’s some new animations:

Here’s a relatively detailed sprite of Big Ben:

And for the visual novel game, here’s a line-up of most of the character art I’ve done:

Hopefully we’ll hear of release dates for either game soon? 😀

This blog post is dedicated to to my main pole instructors from 2015, Ashley and Yumi. I’d also like to thank Virgil, Emily, Berna, Amina, Shantel, Casey and Nicola for giving me formal instruction, especially in my earlier days. Thank you all not only for the instruction, but also for supporting a wonderful athletic and artistic community, and maintaining such a great business (Foxy Fitness and Pole) for students such as myself.

Just a quick disclaimer, nobody asked me nor paid me to write this blog post. It’s kind of just incidentally an extremely positive review of Foxy Fitness and Pole, though I can’t say I’ve had that much experience with other pole studios. 

2015 was arguably the most athletic year I’ve had in my entire life. I may have been hyper as a kid and ran around a lot, but never with any real discipline or planned consistency. I may have run track and cross-country when I was in middle school, but once the season was over, my muscles atrophied back to that of an inactive slob. I may have gone on a few “panicking 2-mile runs” in college when I was afraid of gaining weight from the imposed college meal plans, but I was never consistent. Plus, running is super boring to me.

As I’d stated in my first blog post about my earlier pole dancing experiences, I was mainly inspired by casually watching Youtube videos of Britain’s Got Talent or America’s Got Talent (I feel like Steven Retchless really did it for me.)

Why Should You Pole?

Because it’s good for you and all the goodness is contagious. I’m not exaggerating when I say this. Granted I socially prefer solitude and I live under a rock by working from home all the time, going to Foxy Fitness and Pole gives me tons of positive energy. This positive energy radiates off onto other people and back. The main thing going through my head about pole dancing is not even really about the fitness aspect of it, it’s the real sense of purpose and fun from committing to this activity consistently and also the people I associate with as I’m training.

I hear that most pole dancers have never been more fit in their life, and I’m no exception. You work out every muscle in your body, and you cover strength, flexibility and cardio. This in turn makes the rest of whatever’s going on in your life feel much better, assuming you eat and sleep reasonably well.

[excerpt of Yumi’s warm-ups:]

I can’t vouch for other pole studios, but I can safely say that if you train at Foxy Fitness, just about every single person you meet is super nice to you and supportive. If you happen to live near Manhattan, NYC, then I highly recommend training at Foxy Fitness. I kind of expected the more advanced pole dancers to be snooty, but they totally aren’t. (I guess my grade school social anxieties will never wear off.) But at least at this particular pole studio, you can expect everyone to be pretty supportive of you, regardless of your level. If you’re a beginner, it’ll be awkward but it’ll also be fun and amusing, especially when other new students are in the exact same boat. Very easy ice-breaker right there.

Everybody will at one point or another experience awkwardness that ends in some sort of laughter, because no matter what skill level you are at, any new move you attempt will probably not go that smoothly. In this case it is a true win-win situation (assuming nobody gets seriously hurt), because someone either messes up and it’s just plain entertaining for everyone, or people watch you succeed at a move and get amazed and inspired. Even if you do mess up, you can always try again and most of the time, you improve.

So not only is pole dancing great for your body, it is great for your emotional health and for bonding with other fellow classmates. In 2015, I trained for the Northeast Aerial Arts Championships, mainly to put myself over a flame and train really hard. But the experience was truly exhilarating. Nothing makes me work harder than the pressure of a deadline (plus the prospect of public humiliation). But if you prepare for a competition at Foxy Fitness, you’ll find yourself in the same boat with at least a dozen other girls. The energy just rubs off on you and it’s inspiring to see all the grit driving everyone to work so hard.

Pole dancing is a great artistic outlet for me, and a great way to be part of a cultural front. New pole dancing moves are still being created or “invented.” There are so many styles of pole dancing and moods that one or more dancers can portray in a pole performance. The possibilities are limitless — with costumes, the visual effects of different styles of movement and the myriad of methods of demonstrating impressive feats of physical fitness. One of the other reasons I highly recommend pole dancing is that just taking part will help establish the respectable reputation pole dancing deserves, in contrast to the stigma of it being associated with strip clubs (not to discredit strippers) or rather, more explicit adult scenes. Pole dancing should be for everyone, for better health, entertainment, community and… well, I guess just general happiness. It’s hard not to sound all gushy when I’m talking about pole dancing because seriously,  pole dancing really is the most viral positive experience I’ve ever had and witnessed. 

Be Prepared to Have Fun Hurting Yourself

I’m not a hardcore athlete in any way, but I can tell you the kinds of struggles you may go through when pole dancing. I strongly suggest having fun learning new daring moves, but also to ease yourself safely into it. The expectations in your brain may exceed the capacity that your body can take on, and as a result you may hurt yourself — so be careful! But also, as a way to get yourself to keep going, know that your body is truly amazing. I had no idea that within the same training session, my stamina can increase noticeably. I was running through my 3-minute routine and the last time I did it during that same session, I wasn’t as out of breath as my earlier run-throughs, which I didn’t think was possible in such a short period of time.

[This specific episode when Emily gave me a much-needed push]

I thought to myself, “How can people train for more than 4 hours every day?” For the first few weeks of having some 3-hour sessions every week, my body would hurt for a few days after each session. Then I bumped it up to about 5-6 hours a week and tried to cram a little more when we got closer to competition time. During those 2 to 3-hour sessions, you could tell everyone felt the same way after half time. By then everyone’s pretty much sitting and stretching instead of getting on the pole because we’re too burned out, or literally have too much pole burn, perhaps our calluses have ripped open or we’re too bruised.

But in the later weeks, I was able to be on the pole pretty much the entire 2 to 3 hours, and the same was the case for everyone else. While our stamina had evidently increased, I also noticed I didn’t bruise as much at certain frequent points of contact on my body.

Here is what my arm looked like from using the elbow grip (gripping the pole with the pit of your elbow). I’d always have a bruise on my bicep that I used for the elbow grip by the end of each training session. But in the later months of training, I didn’t get the bruise anymore.

For most pole dancers though, you can expect bruises like these. This is what you can expect from floor work, especially when you work on your knees, or if you roll on the floor repeatedly. When I first started climbing the pole the standard way, the method seemed like it was for bruising by design. I always got super bruised on my shins and especially on the tops of my feet.

But here’s the good news. While each new move is going to be awkward, it’s going to be painful. But eventually, if you do it enough, it becomes no big deal at all to your body because your skin will toughen up, you won’t get as tired from doing it, and you may not bruise from it anymore. Your body adapts!

There’s another part of you that you also need to deal with when learning certain new moves. Your fears. For some moves, they’re actually pretty safe if you end up not actually being in terrible danger of hurting yourself, but you’re still scared of it. In my case, one of them was the shoulder flip.

After I had people spot me on this move in the beginning, I told them that I was still scared of the move. They then told me “You’re doing fine on this move, Emily, you just gotta get over your fear.” I was always afraid of not landing on my feet, or the grinding of the pole on my collarbone was just annoying and scaring me. But I never failed to land on my feet with this move. The only remedy to get over your fear is to just keep repeating the move. If you still need a spot, then get a spot to help you or work with a crash mat.

But look at it this way. The more often you get over new fears and you heal up from soreness, exhaustion and bruising, the more fit and healthy you become. You will also be happier, and assuming people around you feed off of positive energy, people around you will also be happier.
Now I’d like to briefly express my appreciation for Ashley Fox.

I find it astounding that someone can build such an amazing business that brings together such an incredible community. She’s truly put a perspective on cultivating a healthy lifestyle, which includes keeping yourself physically healthy, maintaining good self-esteem and building a strong, positive and supportive community. One of the things I really appreciate about her is that she has a fierce drive and grit as a pole dancer, and she pushes her students to their respective limits as well. All this energetic fierceness is tempered by a bubbly personality, which is kind of the mood I feel when coming into the studio and leaving the studio, after an exhausting but productive training session. I’m truly grateful for having an instructor who works so hard to share her experience and knowledge.

And seriously, one of the big things that influences me every time I relocate is the proximity of my next apartment to that of one of Ashley’s pole studios lol. I’d seriously be really sad if I parted with the Foxy Fitness community.  Ashley’s business makes NYC that much more appealing to me.

Anyway, thank you all so much — and thank you to all my pole-mates/class-mates for being awesome and supportive. I admire and respect anyone who takes life by the reins and works hard to improve themselves and helps others around them along the way. You all inspire me to work harder and to look forward to getting better. I want to become a better dancer, I want to crack down on my flexibility, I want to be able to train for more hours per week, and I want to see all the creativity that comes out of all of your hard work.  You’ve made my 2015 truly amazing, and I look forward to spending more time and training with you all 🙂

Here’s a small new line-up of characters I’ve done for a visual novel game I’m doing some graphics for:

I worked off of some very interesting character descriptions. Don’t know if I could come up with these character ideas myself. I’m excited about the game!

Anyway, the convention went alright. Though it was my first one, so I didn’t really know what to expect. The kids really loved my dinosaurs, it’s just that they’re not the ones with the money and their parents weren’t really at the convention for little kids’ stuff or something they hadn’t even heard of. The hardest thing to do was closing the deals, to get people to finally buy something from the table. The biggest response I got from my table was “Aww!! So CUTE!” from basically everybody, and the kids couldn’t stop rubber-necking at the poster that I put in the front of my table.

I guess I could understand, though. I didn’t realize there was a whole lot of competition going on and it’s not easy putting your money down for an indie artist you never heard of. The biggest hook for our table was the free candy but even then, we had to shout it out to people passing by our table. Most people were too shy to simply take candy from a bowl that had labels “FREE” taped right in front of them.

I found that the demographic that Dinnersaurus Rex seemed to appeal to most were:

1. Younger children
2. Younger women/teen women
3. Anime fans
4. Anyone who isn’t shy about saying out loud that something is cute

I’d imagine Dinnersaurus would do much better at an anime convention, but I’m just not sure if it “belongs” there? Would I be allowed to table at an anime convention?

Well, I basically put all my earnings into the next convention already, which is the Big Apple Con in Manhattan, next March.

Everyone I met at the convention was super nice, though. The artists and vendors were all respectful, and the organizers/staff were attentive and accommodating. I really want to try to do more conventions the coming year — Comic Con, maybe the Newark Comic Con, and perhaps even the Liberty City Anime Con.