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.
I'm a self-employed cartoonist and game designer. I publish a weekly web comic which I've done since 2011, and in 2020 it was picked up by an app for publication, and now they pay me for each strip I post. It's not crazy money but it's one revenue stream. My other major revenue stream is self-published tabletop games. In 2017, on a lark, I crowdfunded a card game based on my web comic on Kickstarter, and it was surprisingly successful. I've made a few more games, all illustrated, designed or co-designed, and published by me, all crowdfunded on Kickstarter, and I've since quit my job to focus on that full time. I don't know what your definition of art is, but if board games and illustration for them counts, then I guess I do make a living off my own creative endeavours, directly to an audience of fans. I'm my own boss.
But here's the first caveat: I wouldn't call it "uncompromising." I wear multiple hats, as a publisher, designer, illustrator, graphic designer, marketer, logistics manager, product developer, etc etc etc, and each of those roles are in communication with the other roles, so it's a give and take. There are compromises at every step of the way. My creative ideas are always being scrutinized by my publisher self, and vice versa. I do have a lot of freedom and I do only publish things I'm happy with, but my bar for satisfaction is not "great art," it's "a thing people will get excited about and buy and play and enjoy." Personally I quite like this about it; I find it much easier to be creative within those restrictions and requirements than having complete freedom to do absolutely anything and no external metric for success.
The second caveat is, comics and games were never my dream or passion. I always wanted to be a film director, since I was a kid. I went to film school, I lived and worked in and around the film industry my entire life - until the comic started getting a somewhat serious following that eclipsed my film work, and especially after it started making me more money than my film work ever did. I love working in comics and games now, don't get me wrong - the industry is kinder, the stakes are lower, the pond is smaller and easier to be a big fish in - but it was entirely unexpected. I started the comic as a small thing for friends and family to read, and I published the game expecting to print 100 copies and that would be it. Instead, I got a bit of luck, and I took the chance to turn that luck into something more steady. In doing so, I effectively closed off the route to my true lifelong passion.
So it's worth thinking of creative work like lightning rods: you want lightning to strike, so the more rods you put up into the air, the better chance you'll have. If you work really really hard on a single rod, the chances are lower than if you spend the same amount of time putting out many different rods. This is why in my experience, more prolific creators are more successful, and also why quality =/= success. But of course there's always the chance that NONE of them will be struck, and that's just the way it goes! And then, even if lightning does strike, you've got to be able to actually run a business, as well, which has vanishingly little to do with artistic craft and almost everything to do with understanding the marketplace. And even THEN, you've got to keep putting up rods. It's a neverending struggle to get hit again and again and again.
But it's possible, and I gotta say, I wouldn't give it up for the world. Every day I'm grateful that I get to go down to my at-home office to draw my weird little drawings and dream up ways for people to play games. I'm living the dream :)
I appreciate your insights. Now I realise that I have no issue compromising with myself, in fact whenever I’m creating I am constantly engaged in the cycle of idea - mistake - compromise - new idea. But I’ve never noticed or thought about it until you mentioned it. So thanks for that.
And after I read your comment, I randomly happened to find out just how prolific Picasso was; so the goal of being as prolific as I can is definitely solidified in my mind.
My girlfriend has been making a living off her original art for about 9 years. Although it does come with a lot of stress and credit card debt. But the plus side is not having to work for someone else. She can call her own schedule.
She’s friends with a lot of other artists and by comparison I can say that she is on the upper tier when it comes to productivity. She paints nearly every day. Sometimes just a few hours but often 6, 7, or 8 hours. And then there’s the business end of it all. I don’t know of any successful artist who is only talented at making art and then everything else just magically works. To be successful you also have to be the CEO of your own brand. And that business aspect of the artworks is not usually a natural talent for creative types!
Try different styles, different scales, different themes, and see what gets more traction and where. Work on your social media posts, do the slog work of liking following tagging commenting. Try different platforms. And then don’t stop there. Go to art shows, exhibition openings, support other artists and network. Get in on a community art center, enter juried group shows. Get a nice website with a good portfolio and decent resume and reach out to galleries. Try your hand at an outdoor art fair, street festival, or any place that allows you to put up a tent and seems to have a good batch of other creatives sharing their work. Talk to as many other artists as you can.
It takes everything you have to get it going. It’s definitely not easy to do it all on your own. It can be done, but the dirty secret to a lot of other successful “full time artists” is that if you peel back the layer you’ll find that they came into money, married well, or have an endless financial support system, benefactor, or even a whole team working with them. Once you realize the deck is stacked against flying solo, you might get cynical. But if you’re determined and persistent you can get there! It means making art, getting inspiration, doing the social media, going to art openings, showing at galleries, selling originals and limited edition prints, getting commissions, running a sale on older work, boxing and mailing out items, it’s a never ending hustle!
Thanks a lot for the detailed response. There’s a lot in there for me to consider.
Edit: I’m left thinking, where do I find time for all of this? Full time job, working on my creative projects and also improving my craft - seems a lot to me.
Not trying to make up excuses. But I am curious: out of all of the things you mentioned your girlfriend doing over time, which one can have the highest impact?
I would say after watching different artist friends of hers push different directions, the least rewarding time vs payoff efforts would be the social media stuff. I’ve seen people dump lots of time into that only for it to be a bunch of hand shaking pat-on-the-back results without too many actual sales.
The best would probably be starting out at community art centers and small group shows. Don’t be discouraged by the broad range of talent. There may be pieces in the show that leave you wondering what you’re even wasting your time with! But no matter what, it’s excellent for building contacts. And people in real time will give you more specific tips for your region.
Bring a friend, try to engage with people, introduce yourself, exchange instagrams, have something to show of your work so when people do follow you they know what type of art you make and can share links with people they know. Get spectacular images of your work. Make sure the image is as flawless as you can make it, in terms of color, lighting, resolution. Submit your pieces to open calls. Typically these won’t be at established retail galleries but rather things like “Art Night at the Winery” or local art centers or things like that. Don’t count on sales happening right away. Although you might get lucky. Pricing your work appropriately is another challenging aspect for beginners that I found definitely gets easy the more places you show.
And depending on where you live, you may have to travel a bit to find more places. That’s not uncommon at all in this economic reality. Expand your google search. Search terms in google maps as well. Find other artists online who do similar work and comb through their profile to find the places they have shown. It may take time. Typically open calls are planning two to four months out for the actual opening. But I feel like eventually all the work you do to meet people in-person is what yields the highest growth rate for your career.
Great advice, thank you!
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!
I appreciate the concern, but I feel quite well. I was just trying to express that I don’t see art as a hobby, and yet I’m not making a living off of it.
The tip regarding “double price for rush jobs” is something I haven’t considered. Besides that, my main takeaway is: make stuff and put it in front of people. That’s definitely something I can do.
Thanks for taking the time to answer!
I'm an artist and sort of living off of it, albeit with major caveats: i) my income has been very low my whole career and ii) it mostly consists of artistic working grants rather than direct sales. The upside is that I do have a lot of freedom to create exactly what I want.
However, we are never entirely free to create if we want to survive financially. I still have to consider what kind of work is more likely to get me another grant. They are hard to get - nobody gets them every year, no matter how talented and insightful - and the criteria is almost entirely obscure, so it's a major source of stress. I'm looking for ways to make more commercially viable items every now and then that could provide an additional revenue stream, and for those, it's obviously important to consider what the end customer wants and how to make that happen in a way that justifies for the price of the item while still leaving enough overhead for you to live by. These questions are not easily solved.
I have experienced artistic freedom to the extent that I can shed light on the downside, too: being very free can also mean being very alone. Not caring about or considering how my work is received, I take on the risk that it in fact won't be received well, understood or seen valuable by other people. I am personally okay with this but in my estimation, most people wouldn't be. We are social creatures, deeply wired to care about others' opinions, and it's taken me years to dismantle that wiring for myself. Being able to not care in a direct way, there's still the challenge of finding a sense of purpose. Who and what am I doing this for if my work has no impact on others?
The same aspect also makes my day-to-day work more challenging. What framework am I using to inform my creative decisions, if not popular opinion? I have to create my own set of guidelines and values and keep refining them until I have something sustainable, which calls for a lot of effort and internal questioning.
I sometimes do commissions and the nice thing about those is knowing that I've made someone's life better in a real way. I understand where you're coming from and I wouldn't want to do them all the time. I try to choose clients whose thought process, values and ideas align well with my own, so that I can feel happy about doing the work that they want.
If the freedom of creating represents a major part of why you love your hobby, please know that this particular part will be destroyed if you turn it into a job. A job will never come with as much freedom as a hobby does, and if the freedom is important to your mental health (as I believe is the case based on what you wrote), you will then need to find a new hobby that gives you that freedom again.