Notes

I hired a law firm

I never thought I would need a lawyer.

I wrote previously about my most popular design. Unfortunately, a lot of people steal it and sell it in their stores. Reporting all those places where it’s for sale takes a lot of time, and it never brings me any compensation.

This time is going to be different.

"Not Today" - design by Justyna Dorsz — “Not Today”

A few weeks ago, I noticed that “Not Today” is, yet again, sold by a lot of sellers. I counted 19 of them! I hired a law firm to represent me. This week all those sellers got requests to remove listings with my design and pay me a small compensation. They have time until December 31st.

In January, we will sue those that will not have complied. I will write more about this as the situation develops. It will be helpful to other artists who want to protect their intellectual property.

Here’s the next part.

Advice for aspiring artists

It’s an advice for aspiring actors, not for artists, but it applies anyway.

Bryan Cranston is an actor, he played the main character in Breaking Bad. What he says is that you should do your job, as you can, and everything else is out of your control, so you should not even think about it.

His advice reminds me of what Elizabeth Gilbert said, that you should stubbornly continue making your art, even if people ignore or hate what you create.

When you are just starting out, it’s difficult to get noticed. For months no one may even know you exist, and no one buys your designs. Wait it out. Create more designs until, one day, one of them sells. It might be the one you expect the least.

Giving credit

I’ve been writing this blog for the past 6 weeks. Sometimes I have my own images to add to my blog posts. When I don’t, I browse Unsplash to find something that matches the topic.

I am amazed that Unsplash exists, with so many beautiful photos, and you can use them for free, even commercially. You don’t even have to give attribution.

But you could.

When I use any of those photos, I always add a caption below the photo to credit the photographer. I don’t even have to write the attribution myself. Every time you download a photo, you get a little pop up where you can simply click on a button to copy the credits.

When you use a photo say thanks. — When you download a photo, simply press the button to copy the attribution.

I browsed Unsplash so much that I now recognize a lot of those photos on blogs that I read. I notice that many bloggers don’t credit the photographers. Sure, they don’t have to. But don’t they remember that photographers are the same people as we are?

Bloggers, artists, photographers — we want the same things. We are all trying to find clients or reach an audience. We can help each other by simply adding an attribution whenever we show someone else’s work.

It doesn’t cost anything and can help another creator a lot.

What is this madness?

One of my designs has been added to the Threadless store. Yay! I received an email a few hours ago.

Now, what exactly does it mean that a design is added to the Threadless store?

First, what you need to know is that there are two ways to sell designs on Threadless:

One way is to simply create your own Artist Shop. For example, I have my Fox Shiver Artist Shop. You can add any design you want to your shop. You can have hundreds of designs. But, at least in the beginning, those designs might not be visible in the main Threadless store.
The second way is for Threadless to select one of your designs to add to their own Threadless store. Every time there’s a design challenge, a few of the best entries are selected. And sometimes Threadless might select a design from your own Artist Shop.

My first design that they selected was “Not Today” and it was one of the seven designs selected from the Black and White Design Challenge.

When your design is selected and added to the Threadless store, it means better visibility and a higher chance that someone is going to see it and buy it.

That’s why it’s so important to add all your designs to your shop. The more designs you have, the better chance that one of them is going to be selected. Same with challenges — submit your designs to challenges and you get a chance that Threadless likes them and wants them in their store.

And remember, you never know what is going to be popular, so submit every design. I very nearly deleted one of my best-selling designs because I thought no one was going to want it.

Oh, and one more thing, usually when your design is selected to be added to the Threadless store, you get a $250 gift code to be used in the Threadless store on anything you want.

Galaxy design – how it’s made

This is my Galaxy design:

Someone asked me about this design: how it’s made, why it looks kind of ‘silver’. So I am sharing it here in case you find it interesting too.

This is a close up:

And even more close up:

As you can see, it’s painted with the most basic hard pencil brush in Photoshop.

“Zen Maze” design sales stats

I think it might be interesting to share how much each of my designs has earned. For today I have selected “Zen Maze”.

“Zen Maze” is a moderately successful design, which means the sales are somewhat in the middle among my designs.

Sales Stats

Average Monthly Earnings: $58

Total Earned: $755

How long did it take to make?

It took me 2 hours to make and another 1 hour to modify it for different products.

The design on apparel is slightly different than the design on most other items. I didn’t want it to be a regular rectangle when printed on clothes, so I erased some parts and made it irregular:

But on other items it looks best when it takes up all the space:

Passive income with one hour a day

I am having a difficult time convincing my friends that they too could make designs and earn money. They say they don’t have time.

You don’t need that much time. One hour a day is enough to start.

You don’t even need any tools. I use a graphic tablet, and if you want you can buy a Huion Graphic Tablet, which is good and cheap.

You can also start with just a pencil and a piece of paper:

Draw something.
Take a photo of the drawing.
Clean it up in Krita or Photoshop. Follow a tutorial on cleaning up scanned line art, like this one.
Separate linework from the background. You need to save just the line art in a PNG file. Here’s a good tutorial.
Now that you have a PNG file with a transparent background, you can submit it to your Threadless store.

Now, what to draw? Choose something that you can sketch in a few minutes. Maybe there’s a funny saying that you or your friends use? Put it on a t-shirt. Can you create a simple sketch of an animal? If you can’t draw well, then try drawing just a cat’s head, make it easy on yourself. Do you have a dog or a cat? Take a photo and then draw over it to learn.

Start with simple designs. So simple that they consist of two or three elements only. You can make a design like that quickly. Once you get better at it, you can draw something more complicated.

How to spook an artist

I have been an artist for a while and I know a lot of artists. Sometimes, instead of making art, we do what other humans do — talk. Every now and then a topic of this one scary thing comes up and everyone chimes in with methods on how to deal with it.

If you are an artist, then you already know what I am talking about. If you are not an artist, then you must have googled “how to spook an artist” and now you are here. Worry not, you will find out soon enough.

As you may know, the first company that accepted one of my designs was TeeFury. It was in 2012 or 2013. TeeFury was then at the precipice of huge growth and the profits rose year by year. Around 2015 they must have run out of ideas on what to spend money on because they introduced a new incentive for artists to send in their designs. It was called an artist pack and it was a bundle of a few various gifts: markers, Lego bricks, pencils, stickers, gift cards, and so on. Every time your design got accepted for print they mailed you an artist pack and you never knew what you were going to get.

One time they sent me a small sketchbook. It was by a company called Field Notes, which I hadn’t heard about before, but it looked fancier than my usual sketchbooks, so I always remembered the name.

I’ve kept hearing about Field Notes over the years because every now and then they run a limited series of Field Notes notebooks. I’ve just checked their website and I can see that the previous series was based on National Parks.

Recently Field Notes did something new — they made a limited series called “Snowy Evening” and this one is truly unique.

Take a look at the picture below. Here are 3 sketchbooks, each with a unique cover:

Here’s the description from the store page:

Field Notes’ 49th Quarterly Limited Edition for the winter of 2020 is Snowy Evening, which features 99,999 unique cover designs created by artist Brendan Dawes. Just like the infinite shapes of a snowflake, no two notebooks are identical. Inspired by the physics behind how ice crystals are formed in the atmosphere, Brendan crafted an algorithm that produced and rendered 99,999 lovely snowflake illustrations.

There are 99,999 covers, every cover is unique, and the covers are NOT designed by artists. Every cover is made by an algorithm. An algorithm replaced the artists! Soon we might all be redundant when AI robots roam the earth and make art. That’s not what scares artists, by the way, I am just setting the context here.

Well, maybe some artists are scared that they will be replaced by computers, but no one’s worried enough to talk about it. Yet.

Now, there’s this thing that scares artists, which I mentioned at the beginning. And it’s this:

Blank sketchbook - or how to scare an artist. — Photo by Mike Tinnion on Unsplash

Yes. A first blank page in a new crisp sketchbook. The moment when you are about to start drawing the first thing in an empty sketchbook and you know that you will mess it up. The anxiety is so prevalent that there are “Conquering the first page” videos on YouTube and tutorials on overcoming the fear of the first page.

Now, starting a new sketchbook is scary, but let’s imagine something scarier. Here’s an idea. How about making the first drawing in a sketchbook that is special and one of a kind and so unique that among all 99,999 sketchbooks ever produced, there are no two identical ones? How about that? Would you draw in such a sketchbook? I can tell you that I would not, that if I ever got the Field Notes sketchbook from their “Snowy Evening” limited edition, it would sit on my shelf until I withered and died, and my grandchildren would inherit it, and they would keep it on their shelf until there came a generation that didn’t remember that the lonely sketchbook on a shelf was one of a kind, and they needed to make a grocery list.

How 50% off sale punishes an artist

It doesn’t. But we will get to it in a moment. First, let’s see why so many artists think that it is wrong and unfair when there is a site-wide sale and items with their art are sold for a discounted price.

Every few weeks every website that sells clothes runs a sale. And when that happens artists complain about it on Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit. Why? Well, when there is no sale, an artist gets, let’s say, $4 or $7 in royalties from a t-shirt sold with their design, but when there is a sale, an artist gets $1 – $2.

Let’s take Threadless as an example. When there is no sale an artist gets around 25% of the price of an item. But when there is a sale they get only 10%.

Now, you may ask, “Won’t artists make more money when there is a sale since more items are sold?” Yes, they do. More t-shirts are sold so artists make much more money during the sale, even though they get paid less per item.

How is it possible, then, that artist complain about it even if they make more money?

I am going to explain it with a story about “World of Warcraft”, which, on the off chance you don’t know that, is a video game. “World of Warcraft” developers didn’t want players to play too many hours in a row. So they devised a system where players got fewer experience points the longer they played. To get the usual number of experience points players needed to take a break and come back to the game later.

Players hated it. Gaining fewer experience points the longer they played felt like a punishment. To fix that, the developers changed it and implemented a resting mechanic. This means that when players are not playing the game, they gain a resting bonus. Then, when they finally come back to the game, they get more experience points based on the bonus they accumulated. The resting bonus gets used up over time, so after a few hours, players need to take a break again to restore it.

I haven’t played “World of Warcraft” but I heard this story here:

Those are the same systems, of course. The developers themselves even stated that those were the “same numbers seen from the opposite point of view.” It makes such a huge difference to think of something as a reward instead of punishment!

Now, back to designers. Designers think that the base price is the price when the item is not on sale. Then they get 25% of the price. If there’s a sale, designers get only 10%. It feels like a punishment and artists complain in Facebook groups about being treated unfairly.

What’s wrong with this situation and how to make artists see the situation from a different point of view? Can the solution from “World of Warcraft” be used here? Here are two things that any website working with artists should realize:

First, the base price of an item is not the same for a customer and for an artist. The base price for a customer is the full price, so, when there’s a sale, they feel they are rewarded for buying an item for less money: they get the item AND save money.
The base price, in an artist’s mind, should be the discounted price, not the full price. Why? Because the sale period is when artists sell the most items.

Second, don’t hide how much artists earn. Any website that advertises to artists that they make 25% of a price is guilty of making artists feel punished when they inevitably earn only 10% from items on sale.
I love Threadless, I do, I make a lot of money there and amazing people work there. However, look at this table, where Threadless claims that you get $7, or around 25%, per t-shirt:

From blog post: “Announcing a massive increase to artist earnings”

There’s no mention of the 10% profit that an artist makes most of the time when their design is bought.

Of course, it’s not surprising that Threadless advertises the $7 that an artist makes from a $25 t-shirt. Threadless wants to pay artists a lot so that artists publish artwork on their website. And in the case of Threadless and Teepublic and a few other websites, I actually do believe that they want to pay artists fairly and support them.

The table looks nice but overpromises. Artists expect a 25% profit, but instead, when there is a sale, they earn a lot less than they thought they would, and so they feel punished.

How should this table look to make an artist feel rewarded instead of punished? There should be two columns:

one column with a 10% profit for when an item is on sale,
and another column with BONUS PROFIT for when an item is not on sale.

Threadless does an amazing thing here, which they don’t advertise at all. When an item is not on sale, they give artists a disproportionate percentage of additional profits. This is an opportunity to make artists feel rewarded.

Lulled

What would happen if you were fired today? Do you have a plan? — Photo by Dan Gold on Unsplash

Matt worked at a large company producing branded fruit juices. He was a marketing director, one of the four marketing directors there. But when the profits decreased the company restructured, laid off hundreds of people, and fired 3 of the 4 directors. Matt was one of them.

They let him keep his business car. I met Matt when I took an Uber and he was the driver. He’s been trying to find a new marketing job for the past 3 years. He said there were no marketing jobs for guys his age, and at least he had his car but he worried about the wear and tear on it. He had to bide his time until retirement.

I talk with all the drivers that want to talk so I hear stories like this often. I used to worry that I would fall into this trap too — that I would be good at something and get comfortable but then somehow lose it all and not be able to earn money anymore. Every time I heard about someone being fired and not having any other skills, it was scary because I could see myself following those same steps.

A regular paycheck lulls you into a false sense of security. Most people feel safe when they are employed and then when they lose their jobs their world shatters.

“In times of peace, prepare for war.”

Does it sound dramatic to you? What would happen if you were fired today? What if no one wanted to hire you for a similar job? Do you have a plan? More importantly, do you have the skills to earn money anyway?

Notes

Sales Stats

How long did it take to make?

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