Are there any of you living off of creating original art?
The question is a bit more nuanced than the title suggests, which I kept succinct for clarity’s sake.
Are there any of you living off of their original art? By this I mean works that you create according to your personal vision, and without a “list of requirements“ for you to fulfil. So, if you are a visual artist - you paint/draw/design what you want, how you want, when you want. As a musician, you play the same. Etc.
Why I am interested in this topic: I struggle to call art a hobby, since I am borderline depressed whenever I don’t engage my mind & hands to create something. But from an outside view, that’s how it looks. I work a day job, and make whatever time I can for my art. I don’t earn any money from making it.
I’ve had some experience in the past with creating visual media as a commission, and it is definitely something I am not interested in pursuing.
Therefore, if there’s anyone here who makes a living off of art, without compromising their vision, I am really interested in hearing your story & advice for how someone else can get to the same point.
My cousin is retired. A few years ago, he got bored and made a couple of birdhouses, one from a large gourd, the other from scrap wood, for fun. They worked but he wanted to make them better, so he kept at it. When they didn't want any more in their yard, he gave them away to friends and neighbors.
Eventually he got good enough to start selling them online; I think it's likely he uses something like Etsy, but I'm not sure. Anyway, he apparently has a moderate demand for them, enough that he and his wife can go trailering around the country a few months a year; probably not enough to actually live on, but enough to allow them to do basic travel in retirement. He says there's enough demand that he could make a full-time job from it; instead, he scales his prices to how much he feels like working at the time: if he wants more free time, he raises his prices; when he's bored, he'll lower them. All that said, this is what my cousin is telling me, and I'm not sure how much exaggeration there may be.
Oh! and a friend who used to do drawings of people had a note in her listing, saying "prices double for rush jobs". She said, in her experience, almost every job was a rush job, and it allowed her to raise her prices without appearing to do so. (But those were custom items, which isn't what you're asking about here, but it's something to keep in the back of your mind.)
I think the things to think about are: what types of creation interest you? How much would you need to invest to produce stuff (scrap wood and large gourds are extremely inexpensive, and he already had tools)?
Realistically, hope much space do you need in order to work effectively and efficiently to produce your work? You also need to choose a product that's small enough that you can store a number of them from your work-periods without driving you crazy during your time off. And not just space for your work area and your finished products, but all the supplies you need: my cousin has storage for drying the gourds, sorted pieces of scrap wood he's picked up, screws and wires, paint and brushes and cleaners, little flourishes like fake windows and greenery and ribbons, packing and shipping supplies, etc.
Alternatively, look for something that has a relatively small production/storage footprint so it's not much of an issue, or where you can use public resources. I know a guy who used a cricut machine at his local library to make custom greeting cards (he had a stock of blank cutting templates, and would add in names and dates, or short messages), then eventually got his own cricut machine; he keeps all his printing stuff permanently set up in a closet so it's out of the way; he expresses his art by coming up with new cricut templates to print from.
Another consideration is that if you're producing a large item, your customer base is likely to buy fewer of them because they don't have the space for them either. Also the larger and heavier the item, the more your shipping costs will increase.
Ideally, you'll want to produce something small, that either has a potentially wide appeal, or that is off-beat and interesting enough that someone might want to buy multiple items. I do that occasionally, find something cool and buy a bunch of it for various people. The last two things I did that with were hand-carved little wooden pendants made out of 1700-year-old bog oak (you can buy bog wood blanks for surprisingly cheap amounts). I thought they were really cool when I got them for like $18 each a few years ago; the woodcarver is now selling them for $35-50, so good for them! And the other thing I've bought multiples of were little pieces of real meteorites; I just thought it was really cool to actually hold a tiny piece of outer space in your hands!
I'm not sure how much any of this helped you, but hopefully there's a little bit to think over here. Good luck, and I hope you start feeling better!