Notes

You will not starve

Be an artist, you won't starve. — Photo by Kon Karampelas on Unsplash

I watched Brandon Sanderson‘s keynote speech “Ten Things I Wish I’d Known as a Teen Author” and one thing stuck with me. When he was young people discouraged him from becoming a writer, they thought he would be unemployed. They told him that it was a one in a million chance.

It’s the same with artists!

When I was a kid my grandma told me that I should become a teacher because it’s’ a safe profession. No one took drawing seriously and people told me it was a waste of time. Maybe because in their mind they have this picture of a lonely artist making one painting after another and then trying to sell them on the street, and failing, and then dying poor and unknown.

It’s so at odds with what it’s really like to be an artist.

There are now hundreds of opportunities. Sure you can paint oil paintings, but artists are also sought after to illustrate books, design covers, work on video games and movies, make fabric patterns, design art for clothes, household items, tattoos, posters, greeting cards, and hundreds of other things.

Brandon wished someone had told him that being a writer was a viable job choice. I wish I had found out sooner that being an artist is a completely fine job. Only by, sort of, an accident, I found out you can earn money by drawing things and printing them on t-shirts.

Will this post be useful to anyone? Maybe an aspiring artist reads this and it will be a counterpoint to the people in their life insisting that they choose a safer job.

I almost deleted my best selling design

When you work on something for a long time it’s difficult to say how good it is.

This is a design I made 3 years ago and it’s titled “Get your own pizza, human!”

"Get your own pizza, human" - design by Justyna Dorsz — “Get your own pizza, human!”

It took me a while to make this design. It has a lot of details and colors, and the cat is more complicated than I usually draw. I could not get the cat’s butt shape just right. And I kept changing his fur color until I finally settled on blue.

“No one’s going to like it,” I thought. I was sure no one would buy it and that people would complain about the blue color and wrong cat anatomy. But I had spent over 5 hours on this design so I didn’t want to just delete it. I was too attached. And there was one thing that I liked about this design — the cat’s serious expression, not angry or scared, just serious as if the pizza was the most important thing in the world.

So I published it. It’s in my top 10 best selling designs of all time. Shows what I know about what people like. Now when I look at this design I really like it and the blue fur too.

I wanted to share with you this little story because we often forget that we are our worsts critics and we judge our art too harshly.

Let other people make their own mind about your designs. Publish them and see what happens. You might be as surprised as I was.

Designers give up on passive income

Passive income from digital designs — Photo by Cristofer Jeschke on Unsplash

Two years ago I talked to a fellow designer. She told me that she opened her store on one of the websites where you can sell your art. If I remember correctly, it was Society6. But she stopped uploading her art there and I think she might have even closed her store. She said that she didn’t get any sales and that she mostly earns her money by doing freelance work.

Which is all good — you definitely can earn your living like that. Designers are very needed now, it seems everyone has a project that they need designers for: to design websites, apps, marketing materials, infographics. The problem is that if you earn money for freelance work, you only earn when you work. So there’s a limit to how much you can earn and it’s defined by how much time you have for work.

You probably don’t want to spend all your time working.

That’s why it’s so important to find other income sources. And one of them is earning passive income from your designs.

The easiest way to do that is to upload your designs to one of the websites that will sell your art and you won’t have to spend any more time on that. You will simply get paid royalties every month.

In the beginning, my royalties were $2 or $3 a month. So I get it, it’s easy to get discouraged and stop publishing your art. Or even to close your store as my friend did. I told her that a significant part of my income comes from Society6, TeePublic, Redbubble, Threadless, and convinced her to give it another try.

When you upload your designs to Society6 or anywhere else you might not get any sales at first. Just wait. And upload more art. If you keep at it, it’s only a matter of time until you get your first sale.

Put it on a t-shirt

There’s a funny design I once saw that I now spent 15 minutes searching for. Here it is:

It makes me think about how I approach designing for t-shirts.

Some of the designs I made are just funny things people said that I simply wrote down or happened to remember. And then I put them on t-shirts.

A few years back I was renting an apartment with my brother. I ordered pizza at noon and knocked on his door to tell him. He woke up and said “wake me when it arrives” and went back to sleep.

A while later when I was designing t-shirts I vaguely remembered that. I drew a sleeping dog and experimented with different texts and finally shortened it to this:

"Wake me when pizza" - sleeping dog design. — “Wake me when pizza” by me

Now I write down everything that catches my attention or is even remotely funny – you never know what might come in useful.

Blog Stats after 4 weeks

3 weeks of nothing – that’s the best summary of my blog visitor stats after the first month. Here’s the graph provided by WordPress on which my blog runs:

Blog Stats: first 4 weeks for justynadorsz.com

I like it a lot because it means that you simply have to keep doing what you are doing to get results. It’s consistent with what I expected when I started this blog and with my experience with other projects like my design stores.

This graph is specific to my blog, but it’s the same for a lot of other blogs. In fact, everything you start will get almost no feedback or views from anyone at first. That’s why it’s so important to not give up in those first few weeks.

There is no shortcut here. If you open a store at Teepublic or Threadless, then your first 30 designs will likely bring next to none traffic to your store. And if you make an Instagram or Twitter account, then no one will see your first few dozens of photos or tweets.

It takes a while but consistency does create results.

No sales? Read this.

I belong to a few Facebook groups for designers and there’s one topic that keeps coming up, though it’s usually asked in various ways:

“No one buys my designs. Am I doing something wrong?”
“How to get customers?”
“I uploaded 5 designs already and no sales! Why?”
“Is it even possible to sell anything? Does anyone earn any money?”

I already answered that last question, but now it’s time to address the general issue here.

This is how it looks in the beginning: you make a design and publish it, then you make another and publish it too. Then maybe you make a few more. And then you wait for sales. But not only does no one buy anything, no one even sees your designs, they don’t show up in search results. You try to promote them, you post on Twitter or Facebook and you get no feedback, no likes.

At that moment we can divide designers into two groups:

Designers who get discouraged and upset and give up.
Designers who keep creating and publishing regardless of how their designs are doing.

There is only one key to success here. Ok, yes, there are a few important things that will impact how successful your store will be and whether you make money: you need to create something people will want to buy, you need to make your designs possible to find, and finally you need to put effort into marketing.

But there’s one thing that is more important than all that. Consistency. Yes, consistency is key. If you want to have a successful store on Threadless, Teepublic, or anywhere else, then you have to make a lot of, and I mean A LOT, of designs.

It’s not enough to make a few designs and hope someone will buy them. And you definitely should not complain about lack of sales just yet. First make sure that you:

Have at least 30 designs uploaded. Better yet — 50. I have over 130 in my store.
Add new designs consistently. Try to make a new design every few days or, if possible — every day.
Make sure all your designs have tags. I add 10 tags to each.

Only after you fulfill these conditions and there are still no sales you might start to worry and you might be entitled to a little complaining. But it’s a very unlikely scenario because consistently creating new designs will result in 2 things:

you will have a lot of designs in your store and a much higher chance that someone will see something they like and buy it,
after making a lot of designs you will improve. This is actually the only way to improve your design skill — make a lot of designs. So even if your designs are quite bad at first and, understandably, no one wants them, then it’s even more important for you to make designs. You will be much, much better after another 50 designs.

It’s very difficult to do something for a long time and not improve. To be successful, be consistent.

Learn from the best

I just stumbled on a 6 years old thread on the Threadless forum: Top 20 best selling designs. And if you scroll down the thread, you will see another slightly newer list of designs.

This one caught my eye:

It makes me want to paint something colorful too.

But what surprised me most is that they all are so different. So many various themes: games, animals, retro, movies. That’s a good thing because it means that every designer can find their own niche.

Another thing that I noticed is that only two designs are with cats and I always thought that designs with cats sell best. So I checked the most popular designs right now and among the 48 designs on the first page, just two have cats and one of them is mine! I thought there would be 10 cat designs at least but I was wrong.

This is the first cat one:

Death and a Black Cat — “Death Rides a Black Cat” by Obinsun

And here is the second one. This is a cat about to jump.

I like browsing through designs and get inspired. For example, this dinosaur design has been popular 6 years ago and is still popular now:

T-Rex — “Technicolour Rex” by electric_method

That’s pretty amazing — to make a design that people love and buy for years.

Make your first sale in the next 3 weeks

Tomorrow is Black Friday and after that the best 3 weeks for all the artists who sell their art online.

Everyone shops for gifts and so artists make the majority of their income in November and December.

Conversely, January and February are very slow months and I earn very little in those months. Good thing that all the income you can earn before Christmas more than makes up for it.

You need to take advantage of this busy time.

If you haven’t yet, then you definitely should open your store. I recommend:

Threadless – which is my favorite one, and
TeePublic – which has the easiest and fastest system for uploading artwork.

You can also publish your art in a few other places. Wherever you submit your designs remember to add tags!

Usually, when you open your store you have to wait for weeks or even months for your first sale. Internet is full of people who complain that they get no sales and then they get discouraged and close their shops. But if you open your store now and upload even just a few designs, you have an amazing opportunity to make your first sale in the next few days.

Can you make money on Threadless?

Friends, family, and other artists often ask me: can you make money on Threadless?

I’ve been a designer for 8 years now and I’ve been selling my art on Threadless for the past 5 years so I think I can answer that. The short answer is: Yes! You absolutely can make money on Threadless. Nearly every month I earn a substantial part of my income from Threadless.

When you are just starting selling your art online it might seem daunting. I know – I was there. So here are a few things that will help you if you want to earn money on Threadless:

Make a lot of designs. You never know which one is going to be popular.
Don’t get discouraged when no one buys your designs at first. Just keep designing and publishing.
Try to find your niche. I make a lot of designs with cats and space because that’s what I like to draw. Maybe you like dogs or hiking or pizza? Draw that.
Post about your new designs on Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook. The more people see your designs the better.
Tags! Add tags to your designs so people can find them. I try to add at least 8 tags to each design. It’s a good idea to also write a short description.
Submit designs both to your Artist Store and to Design Challenges. Even if you don’t win a challenge, more people will see your designs and you will gain new followers.
When you add a design to your store make sure you enable it on other products, not only t-shirts. Customers often buy hoodies, masks, tote bags, and pillows.
If you haven’t yet opened a store, you should open one now! I have no affiliation with Threadless, I just like them a lot and earn a lot of money there. If you don’t know how to name your store, here’s a short guide.

Hope that helps. Here is my store if you want to take a look.

My most popular design ever

Today I wanted to show you the most popular design that I ever made. Here it is:

I don’t know how many designs I’ve made in my life – a few hundred probably. This remains my best selling one.

Doesn’t look like much, does it? It’s really quite simple. My friends don’t believe me when I tell them that they too could design something and sell on a t-shirt. But as you can see it’s absolutely possible.

The important thing is to just have an idea.

Notes

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