Artist's Resource Pack

Working as a freelance artist suits some people down to the ground. It can mean you can be flexible and in control, you can do exactly what you want to do, when you want to do it. But it is not always like that. It can mean struggling to get enough work, or trying to do too much work in too short a time, your income could change quickly from month to month and you need to be able to sell yourself and your skills. You have to be quite organised and good at motivating yourself to get the balances right to make freelancing work for you.

If you are freelance or self employed, you get paid for the work you do and are responsible for paying your own tax and national insurance. For more information on this aspect of being self employed, see the ‘you and your money’ part of this section. You can go straight to ‘you and your money’ by following this link. This will take you to the ‘you and your money’ part of the artist’s resource site.

There is lots of information out there to help you decide if being freelance is right for you.

‘Seven Steps to being Freelance’ was written for an arts organisation called Artquest to help people who wanted to take this step. A disability arts organisation, DADA South, has produced a version of this updated from a disability perspective.

You can get to the original version. This will take you out of the artist’s resource site and to the Artquest site pages on self employment (www.artquest.org.uk/create/materials/ seven-steps-to-self-employment.htm

Or you can get to the disability version. This will take you out of the artist’s resource site and to the DADA South publication (www.dada-south.org.uk/bookfactsheets.html).

Fased, an informal network offering support and development to freelance and self employed disabled people in the arts may be useful. Whilst no longer active or contactable, Fased’s website does still continue to be available online and includes information such as their ‘top tips for freelancers’. This will take you out of the artist’s resource site and to the Fased site. You can then search for ‘top tips’ (www.fased.org )

Arts Council England has an information sheet on ‘Starting a Business’ which looks at the various choices open to you when you start out, including being a freelancer or sole trader. This link will take you out of the artist’s resource site and to Arts Council England’s site, at the page where you can download the information sheet. (www.artscouncil.org.uk/publications/ information_detail.php?sid=3&id=70&page=2)

CIDA, the Cultural Industries Development Agency in East London has a series of factsheets that can help including one called ‘becoming a freelancer’ which gives you a list of advantages and disadvantages. If you follow this link it will take you out of the artist’s resource site and to the list of factsheets on the CIDA site (www.cida.co.uk/pages/resources/factsheets_70.shtml)

Remember that working freelance has the advantage of being flexible, which many disabled people like. It can be a problem though if you end up working every hour of the day or getting very stressed about some of the problems it can bring.