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The Operating Manual for Being Human

Illustrator wanted

The book is written. The drawings are not. We know what all 42 of them are and what they need to do, and nobody has been hired to draw them. That is the job.

Before you spend any time on this: there is no publisher. The manuscript is finished and it is going out to publishers, and the full illustration commission depends on that sale. The trial drawing is paid either way, out of Mark's pocket, and that is the whole of what is guaranteed today.

The work

How many42 drawings. Thirteen full page, eighteen inside the text, eleven small details.
WeightedSome units carry one drawing, some carry four. Nothing is added to make the count even.
What you deliverOriginal hand-drawn line art, vector, with no lettering in the drawing.
LetteringLabels and notes are set in type over your drawing, so a wording change never comes back to you.
How it startsOne paid trial drawing. Batches of five after that if the fit is right.
Also deliveredOne sentence describing each drawing, so the book reads properly to somebody using a screen reader. Written by you, edited here.
Colour and trimNot settled. Interior colour, trim size and paper are a publisher's decisions and there is no publisher yet. Price the drawings as one colour line work and we will talk again if that changes.
When it startsThe trial drawing can start as soon as we agree terms. The full commission starts when the book is sold, and it is not sold yet.
Who decidesMark, and he is the only approver. Typography and layout sit with a designer, so the words around your drawing are not your problem.
What it paysThe trial drawing pays $300, flat, whether or not it goes further. After that the work is commissioned in batches of five, priced against the Graphic Artists Guild Handbook for a forty-two drawing interior and agreed in writing before you draw anything. Rights and credit are settled in that same agreement, and your name is on the book. Tell us your rate when you write and you will get a straight answer back.

The look

The drawings are technical. Think patent drawings, anatomical engravings, engineering sections and survey maps, not the soft shapes the wellness shelf is full of.

One rule holds throughout: people stay human and stay readable. The drafting explains forces, pathways, wear, load and repair. It never turns a person into a machine.

A drawing about grief shows a structure adapting around an absence, not a weeping figure. A drawing about boundaries shows something a person controls, not a fortress.

What we have so far

Everything below is AI-generated concept art. None of it is from the book, none of it was drawn by an illustrator, and none of it will appear in print. It was made to work out what the drawings are of and how dense they should be, and that is the only thing it is good for.

What they get wrong is worth naming. They are tonal and engraved; the real drawings are line art in vector. They have lettering baked into the picture; in the book every word is set in type over the drawing, including the words in these studies that this project does not use. Read them for subject and density. Do not read them for technique.

It is not a brief to copy either. It is here so you can judge the density, the register, and the way a drawing and the writing share a page, and decide whether this is your kind of job.

A wide drawing reading left to right from the cosmic to the molecular, all of it connected as one continuous machine rather than nine separate pictures. A spiral galaxy fills the left third and dissolves into a disc of planets and a solar system. Below them the earth sits in a ring of gears above a small landscape of trees and water. At the centre a standing human figure is drawn in anatomical section, and beside it a head in profile opens to show the brain. To the right the drawing passes through a web of neurons into a single cell and then into rings of bonded atoms. Numbered notes name each scale with its size.
The scale of what you are runningConcept art, not from the book.
Two facing pages. The left page carries the writing in short lines and closes on a ruled quotation: the mind is not a blank slate, it is a landscape shaped by where you have been. A single watercourse runs out of the text across contour lines and onto the right page, where a head in profile opens to show a canyon landscape carved by rivers. Four short notes name a well worn route, a developing route, an abandoned route, and the things that give a person the energy to change.
How a drawing sits with the writingConcept art, not from the book.
Two facing pages. The left page carries the writing beside a woman drawn in profile whose shoulders and chest are built as a rigged structure of struts, cables and fixing points around an anatomical heart. Tension lines run from her across the fold to a second figure on the right page drawn only as a dotted outline, the person who is gone. Short notes name empty fixings, messages with nobody to reach, plans that now lead nowhere, and memories replaying where a reply used to be.
Grief, drawn as a structure rather than a faceConcept art, not from the book.

If you want it

The full brief is being written. Email mark@tamethenoise.com and it comes straight back.

You can work in vector.
Your portfolio has technical, scientific or anatomical line work in it.

Mark reads these himself.

Can you work in vector?