Making money from your artwork

KARIE-ANN COOPER Author

Selling original art is one way to make a living but there are many other ways you can reuse your artwork

Did you know there are many ways to make money from your art? An artistic living isn't just selling original artwork and taking commissions, there are many other ways of reusing your content for more passive incomes which can add to your bank balance as you sleep! With minimal effort and some marketing you can sell your images repeatedly.

So here are a few ideas:

• Teaching. You can offer private lessons to individuals, to groups, demonstrations to many (sometimes a screen and video or webcam will help) or offer online lessons. I use New Zenler, an all in one platform, you can teach with videos, downloads, quizzes, community access plus much more - this blog is also hosted on there. Use my New Zenler affiliate link if you want more info

• Merchandise. This is one of the easiest ways of earning a passive income, simply upload your artwork and then post it all over social media. It's best to do your own marketing rather than relying on someone to find your merchandise as your followers already know and like the art you produce. Some examples are 
  • Redbubble 
  • Fine Art America/Pixels 
  • Cafe Press 
  • Society 6 
  • Zazzle 
  • Merch by Amazon 
  • Printful 
  • Printify. 
  • Once you have completed your artwork simply take a hi res image or scan and then upload it.You may need to edit it slightly to fit on each item but once done, that's all you will need to do. I use Redbubble for selling my merchandise and they have local printers who fulfil the orders and so cut the cost of import tax and duties from one trading area to the next. Redbubble is more for graphic arts than traditional artwork but I do very well on there.

• Prints. Offer professional fine art prints with the option of framing too. There are three ways of doing this

• Buy a fine art printer and produce them yourself. These printers are not your average home printer, they use pigment archival inks and you can buy specialist archival papers which suit your type of work. You would need to post these out yourself and you may want to offer framing which would be done by you at home. 
• Order fine art prints from a Fine Art Trade printing company, this just requires you to send them your artwork for scanning/photographing or you can do this yourself and simply upload the file for them to print from. Again you may want to offer framing which would be done by you, you may also need to order in bulk to hold stock for quick delivery. 
• Use a print on demand fine art printer which is what I do. Many of these print on demand companies have local printers but not all so do check them out otherwise your customers could have an unwelcome tax charged on delivery. I use Fine Art America/Pixels for this, they have more traditional art and photography and so their print options are fabulous.
  
• Licensing. There are many ways of doing this, one is to be represented by a licensing agency. I was represented by a company in USA and did ok but they have thousands of artists and so they don't market you individually plus a company will usually ask you to be exclusive for a certain number of years. I now license my artwork myself and also market on social media which much more success, I also have no reason to be exclusive and so can sell merchandise, prints plus license to various companies.

Read More:

• How to price your artwork
• Which colour paper should you use for pastel drawings?
• Using a colour picker

Categories: : business tips