Do you like to doodle or scribble around on a notepad while you are talking on the phone? Are you a creative trapped in a business body because you adhere to the starving artist mindset?
I’ve found some professional artists as well as some hobby doodlers who have found a way to make money online with their art. These artists are definitely not starving. Don’t break the bank when furnishing your home office; shop on Shoppok for affordable office furniture and equipment.
I’ve always been into art. I used to love to draw as a kid and actually did some sign painting for a while. I gave up on it when other things got in the way. Then I got interested in writing and enjoyed that so much I decided that was the route I wanted to go.
There were a bunch of things I didn’t like about sign painting. First was the cost. I thought the only way to make money as a sign painter was with a brush and paint. I was into it just when vinyl plotters just started coming out. A computer set up with a vinyl plotter was ultra-expensive. There were professional sign shops that didn’t have computer plotters. PCs, in general, were expensive. I don’t think laptops were invented yet, let alone a tablet.
Then I didn’t like the mess of paint or airbrush. I lived in a small upstairs apartment and I had no spare room or garage to work in. The brushes and paint were expensive when I was barely making enough money to pay rent and eat. It wasn’t a decision to give it up, I just more or less just dropped out of the hobby for other things I enjoyed more and was a little cheaper.
Now, twenty-five years have passed. And I found people making money doing what I used to love to do as a hobby. Technology has caught up. Digital plotters and printers own the sign market. Ipads make it easy and pretty inexpensive for artists to create. And, the internet provides a gateway for artists to sell their stuff. Just like the book publishing industry, if you are an artist looking to sell something, the internet is your Wild West.
I’m going to show you some ways you can turn your art or just your love to doodle into some cash.
Designing and selling products.
Designing and selling products seem to be the most popular way of making money off the art. And, a lot of people are doing it in a lot of different ways. When I was doing it, there was no internet. The only outlet for getting your stuff into the world was selling art at street fairs, shows, or doing side jobs for people.
It was expensive for a booth at a decent street fair. And the promotion side of it was difficult also. You had to actually get out there somewhere with your art to build a following. As you did build a following, it spread organically through word of mouth.
The market was only as big as the message traveled. This is why so many artists were known as regional artists or local artists. The audience for their art traveled slowly and oftentimes never traveled beyond their local area.
Now, you can take something you’ve created, put it online, and be selling it halfway around the world within minutes. The problem now has become not the availability, but the competition. The tools to produce it and get it to market have become so cheap, more people are now doing it.
Just making art and selling it.
The artist I’m going to tell you about is a friend of my wife. He was a graphic artist at a company she worked for years ago. He’s now a full-time artist selling production runs of his work at street fairs and events. He also has a website and an Etsy store to sell his stuff online. His name is James Steeno and you can check him out here. He works both in the digital world as well as in good old watercolor and brush. He is a trained artist, but the cool thing about art is it is not something that not having a degree will hold you back. Produce something great and people will buy it.
Then there are the digital doodlers.
Doodlers are people who I consider to have no formal training, but just found a love for it by scribbling in their notebooks in school or scribbling on a notepad as they were talking on the phone. They have no formal training but have enough natural talent they have found a niche of people who want to buy their work. Like James Steeno, they sell their stuff anywhere they can. They might put their ideas on T-shirts and put them up for sale in some online store or hey, coffee mugs are pretty popular right now. If you are a doodler don’t let the naysayers tell you you’re not good enough just because you didn’t go to art school. I’ve seen work by people with an art school background I wouldn’t pay a dollar for.
The digital medium to create products.
I’m going to tell you about my path back into the art world. I went to a chakra workshop less than a year ago. Another friend of my wife, who has a lot of friends, invited me because she knew I was always on the lookout for cool things. I was skeptical but I went for it with an open mind.
The class started with the instructor handing out coloring pages and colored pencils. She told us to start coloring and said she could tell a lot about us through how we colored and the colors we chose. Ok, I’ll bite. She went through her orientation spiel as we began coloring. She then came around to analyze our work. She told me I was an artist. Wow, I thought. Was she actually mystical or was it just the fact that I managed to STAY INSIDE THE LINES? The chakra class did turn out to be hokey, but it did get the wheels turning again.
Then we are going to fast forward to about a month ago. I saw that Apple had a digital pencil out and people were creating art on their Ipads. I knew there were digital sketch pads before. I used a couple and they sucked. But, I’m an Apple devotee. If Apple makes it, it’s probably pretty good, and expensive. I watched video demos of this Ipad pencil system and got hooked back in.
The nice thing about creating in a digital format is the easy uploading right to the web. If you work on traditional physical mediums you will somehow have to digitize it to sell it or even have it printed in many cases.
The Ipad and apple pencil broke down even more barriers to getting up and running and creating art.
The software learning curve.
Learning software is a pain in the butt especially when all you want to do is create. I’ve used Adobe Illustrator before for small projects through the years. The learning curve couldn’t keep me interested. It was tough. I couldn’t figure it out. I wanted to create faster but I would spend an hour learning how to draw a line.
Then I tried Photoshop on a recommendation from a friend. He said it was much easier to use for certain applications. I was primarily doing simple projects using photos as a base, so thought it was worth a shot. Nope. It’s a little easier but still has a very big learning curve. Then I found Picmonkey. That software is awesome. The learning curve is almost nonexistent. I can whip out small picture editing projects now with ease.
Now Procreate comes into the picture.
My wife got me a new Ipad and Pencil for Christmas. Actually, she spent enough to cover my birthday and Christmas for several years to come. So, I started searching on the Internet for good software to use with the Ipad to draw and an inexpensive app called Procreate ( around $10) keeps coming up at the top of the list. I watched a bunch of videos and it seems as easy to use as Picmonkey. I bought it last night and have yet to use it. Head over to YouTube, there are a ton of videos of people using it.
Procreate doesn’t create vector images.
There are two downsides to Procreate. One is that it doesn’t do text. If you are into hand lettering this isn’t a problem. You will most likely be creating your entire image with text and doodles anyway, so there will be no need to have a text editor.
If you like the speed and easiness of using a text editor, you can either use Picmonkey to create the text and import it or you can use another program like Vintage Logo Maker to create a text file and import it.
The other drawback to Procreate is the inability to create a vector image. A vector image is an image drawn in a program that uses a math equation to draw the image. This is why Adobe Illustrator is so popular. A vector image can be rescaled and enlarged to any size without losing quality. If you’ve done any editing in Picmonkey you know when you enlarge the image, you start to lose quality. With a vector image, there is no loss. I will be searching around in the future to find a good vector image program that is a little easier to use or just bite it and learn Illustrator.
Once you start creating, what can you sell?
Basically, anything with an image on it. Anything from coffee mugs, t-shirts, posters, planner pages, and printable wall murals are all things that come to the top of my mind. I would get creative or take a walk through your local mall for your ideas. A big market is seasonal items. If you walk through the mall around certain holidays you may see popup kiosks that are just selling seasonal items. Take some notes and run home to create a similar line of products. Look in department stores. Most of the items in department stores come with a bunch of market research behind them. Those stores didn’t get big trying to sell losers. Take some of their ideas, give them a unique twist of your own and try selling them online or at other little holiday craft fairs.
Selling education about art or doodling.
Once you get good and you know what you are doing you can begin teaching others how to do the same. There are many ‘do it your selfers’ out there who will pay for education, And you don’t need an art degree to teach it to them. You just need to be good and have a good system in place to teach them.
I think it may have as much to do with how you teach as it does with the knowledge you may have about art. I’ve watched some wickedly good artists on Youtube which I couldn’t learn anything from because they can’t teach. So, once you get good and you decide you want to start teaching a course, put as much time into designing and building the course as you did learning the art.
Do freelance work for hire.
The normal amongst good artists appears to be also mixing in freelance for-hire work. The graphic design market is extremely competitive, but there is also a lot of work out there if you are good. Businesses need artwork all the time. Some businesses have in-house graphic designers and some don’t have enough work to keep a designer busy so they have to freelance it out. Book publishing agencies, as well as self-publishing authors, need book covers designed.
A hot thing now is wall murals and art inside businesses. If you were to design something at home, take it to a printer and have it blown up and printed on vinyl, you could sell it to a customer to stick on their wall. Since it would be printed on vinyl instead of paint, if it ever got damaged, you would just get it reprinted and reinstalled.
There are so many ways to make money from art and the barriers to entry are so inexpensive, the only thing holding back anyone with just a little talent or interest is the desire to just get started.