Gina Lerman on Going Freelance
Meet Gina Lerman, the illustrator who created the badass art featured on our website! Gina recently began working as a freelance illustrator and artist after working full time at a woodshop. She spoke with us about how she created the art for She Spends, what it took for her to go from full-time to freelance, and the work she’s doing for the Philly Socialists.
(editor’s note: this interview has been edited and condensed for clarity)
What was the transition from full-time to freelance like for you? What did it involve?
Last year I was working at a fine furniture fabricator and I realized that I hate working full time for somebody else. I’ve always been someone who draws and does art and that was what led me to design in the first place. But when you’re a high school student, you don’t necessarily see art as a viable career option in a lot of ways. So I ended up doing product design.
Gina’s cabin during her artist residency
Once I was out in the world, working, I picked up a bit of freelance work, but it was hard to sustain with my physically demanding job. I was doing organizing with Philly Socialists, I was going to therapy and yoga and I was trying to have a freelance career on top of working full-time. It’s tough to get all you want out of life and pay rent.
Things changed for me when I ended up doing an artist residency in Vermont where I was able to just live in a cabin in the woods and work on the cabin and make art for three months with The Secret Society of Ghostscouts. It was really amazing. It changed my perspective about things and made me realize that I really could just invest in myself for those forty hours a week and really just go for it. I have been full-time freelance since the summer. I’m finally just bringing kind of all my skills together to define my own career and path.
From a financial and logistical point of view, how did you make that transition?
Logistics were definitely a big part of it and what kept me from doing it for so long. I had been saving up money to do the residency from my full time job. I didn’t pay any money to do the residency, but I also wasn’t making any money during that time period. I had like $10,000 saved.
Initially my plan was to come back to work, but the experience of being in Vermont made me realize I didn’t want to. I hadn’t gone through all of the money, so I had some cushion to get started. As far as insurance, I’m lucky enough to be on my mom’s plan for now. That was definitely a big consideration for making the move to freelance. I realized that if any time is the time to figure it out, it’s now.
What was your process like in creating the drawings for the She Spends site? Jemma approached me with just the whole concept, and gave me a few prompts. So I started brainstorming. What is a visual representation of debt and what could it possibly look like? Someone drowning, or something having a huge weight on you. Just like being constrained by something like debt. Jemma and I talked about having different kinds of women represented. And we wanted to give the illustrations a friendly, empowering look. That was a good opportunity for me to play around with what my style of drawing looks like.
Tell me about your work for The Partisan and Philly Socialists.
Philly Socialists is a grassroots community organizing group in Philadelphia. They put out a free magazine called the Philadelphia Partisan, which I’m the art director of. It’s totally volunteer-run. It’s about Philly-specific, worker-specific community issues. My job is to coordinate artists to articles and make sure everything has some kind of art. I also do illustrations.
In high school I was interested in feminism and just kind of the basics of getting into social issues, and in college I was involved in feminist and LGBTQ student organizations. But 2016 was around the time I was getting more political. I guess I had been seeing all the issues more in terms of identity for a long time and that was how it was articulated in mainstream discussions. After 2016, I was reading and listening to different perspectives. The class aspect of social organization became more clear. Capitalism is the reason for a lot of the social ails that i was interested in combating before, but I didn’t see the bigger picture there.
What types of clients do you like working with? What type of work do you want to be doing going forward?
With every job that I take, I want it to be something I enjoy doing. That’s why I stopped sweating in a woodshop all day for somebody else to make money. There are plenty of illustration jobs out there that would not be enjoyable. I try to reflect that. I don’t take jobs that I’m not excited about.
One of my first big illustration clients was for a production company called Means TV. They did AOC’s campaign video when she was running for Congress. They have a leftist streaming service. They were my first big client. I did a post-capitalist utopia scene for them.
They found me through Street Fight Radio, which I’ve done some art for as well. They’re two dads from Columbus, Ohio who are anarchists and run a podcast. They talk about worker issues and they put out a zine pretty often, which I’ve worked on.
What books/movies/art/Instagram accounts, etc. have been inspiring you lately?
One of my goals this year is to get more into reading again. I’ve been reading some good comics. One artist whose work is like, super inspiring and impactful is Linda Barry. She does writing workshops and comics. It’s really juicy stuff. I have her book “What It Is,” and it’s amazing. It gets to the core of why we tell stories and why we communicate through images and narrative at the same time. And, I’ve also been reading Yoshihiro Tatsumi: A Drifting Life. It’s an extremely thick book about Manga artists in the 50s. It’s super good stuff.
How can our readers support your work?
If you’re looking for an illustrator or artist, you can check out my website and reach out to me. I also opened up an online shop a few months ago. You can buy original art there as well as prints and zines.
And I’m starting a newsletter, which you can sign up for here.
Anything else?
I just want to convey somehow that if you’re just not doing what you want in general, you have a lot more power to change things than you think. I would have never thought that I could just leave my job, but I’m out here doing it. You figure it out as you go. It’s worth really examining what you really want out of life and how you can do that. It sounds like an obvious thing. I had a teacher in college asked us, if you could do anything in the world, what would you do. You have to ask yourself and really listen to the answer and see what you can do about it. There’s people out there who can help you achieve that. You just gotta take the first step.
