Marketing for Illustrators in 2026
I’m not really old enough to remember the sound of dial-up internet, but I do remember watching movies on VCR, static shocks off the telly and the euro coming in.
I’ve been through many evolutions of the internet, the rise and fall of club penguin, the migration from facebook to instagram and now the pollution of these platforms with AI Slop.
It’s an interesting, actually no, disturbing time to be a professional creative. Marketing my services has become more complex and dystopian. But it wasn’t always this way, just four years ago, ‘Death by Power-Point’ was a buzz term in this industry of Graphic Recording. Boring information was the problem, and we sold the solution - fun drawings.
‘Death by Powerpoint’ is a simple story, it’s obvious, it’s easy to understand and it doesn't require you to think about the ethics of PowerPoints or the environmental impact of slide transitions. Now, in the year of the horse, 2026, things have changed. I market myself and my business as ‘Human’, the elixir to death by Generative Ai, and soulless uncanny valley faces.’
***Me! I'm human, I make mistakes, I don't need you to divert an entire river to cool me down, I'll just open the window for a few minutes***
Marketing is not simple or easy anymore. We could all agree that PowerPoints are generally quite boring, and although they’re good for keeping the presenter on track, I was never really worried about PowerPoints burning down the world as we know it. Yes, some people may have been encouraged to use PowerPoint, but was its use ever threateningly written into a contract? I doubt it.
It’s a bit scary to change my marketing from ‘’I’ll make boring information more palatible’’ to ‘’Let’s make a genuine human connection, I’ll use my fleshy hands to draw on real paper - isn’t that more exciting the generative slop?’’. Even more unsettling than my new skin themed marketing campaign is watching creators outsource their creativity to Gen AI. It’s an outsourcing of their humanity, of their soul. It makes me feel ill.
When I started off, I was told ‘’If 100 people click on your website, 1 person might fill in the contact form’’. This was the basic sales conversion. But now 60% of my website traffic comes from AI Crawl Bots in China. Writing a blog or uploading new work to my portfolio feels like the technological equivalent of breastfeeding a changeling.
Yes it's a scary world out there right now to be creative.
