Illustrating Your Work
The same thing goes for drawing illustrations. If you have drawing skills, then you can use them to your advantage by offering to produce illustrations that go along with your stories. As with photographs, you can often get package deals that will earn you a far better return on your time than simply writing the story alone.
Illustrations nowadays can be hand-drawn or created by computer programs, depending on the magazine's art direction and style. However, keep in mind that illustrations do differ from photographs in that they tend to be one-time use only. You can develop a stock library of illustrations, but unless they're technical or how-to in nature, you'll probably have a tougher time repurposing and reselling them than you would photographs.
Technical writers who can produce illustrations to help explain tricky concepts are especially in demand in most magazine genres. If, for instance, you typically write about waste-management systems, magazine art directors would thrill at the idea of your providing detailed computer drawings of how those systems work — thus saving in-house artists from having to figure out the concepts themselves.
