Advice

Make your first 100 mistakes

Quality doesn’t matter, quantity does. It’s better to do 100 drawings than spend all that time on a single drawing.

Starting a blog is scary, but I knew I would only get better if I wrote a lot. The first 100 designs are going to be awful, get them out of the way as soon as possible. Same with photography:

Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.
Henri Cartier-Bresson

This reminds me of the story about a pottery class. Students who practiced a lot made better pots than the ones who were focused on creating one perfect pot.

Quantity over quality. This is the sort of thing that I need to remind myself of.

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.

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.

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.

Pottery Class Story

The story goes like this: in a pottery class students were divided into two groups. Students in the first group were asked to make a perfect pot. Students in the second one were asked to make as many pots as they could. When all pots were compared it turned out that all the best pots were from the second group.

The story about a pottery class is from “Art and Fear” by David Bayles which I haven’t yet read. I’ve first stumbled upon it here.

I like it a lot because it takes the pressure off. I don’t have to create that one perfect drawing. It’s better to draw as much as I can without obsessing over a single drawing. I don’t need to write a perfect blog post either — the more I write the better I will get at it.

4 steps for finding a name

I wrote before that the crucial thing is doing the work, not worrying about a name. But you still have to actually find a name. Here I am noting down the process that I use to find names for my stores, websites, companies, and games. There are 4 steps:

1. Write down all the words that come to mind when you think about your project. But don’t make it a list. Write the words loosely on a page. This way you will see connections between them better.

A few words that come to mind when you think about your project.

2. Use a random word generator and get words that you like or that seem connected to the words on your page. I use this one.

3. To get a few more unique words go to — poems! They are the source of words that are not often used in everyday life. Read some poems and write down the words that catch your eye.

4. Look for unique word combinations. If none, repeat steps 2 and 3 until you have more words and then look for connections again.

Wolf, story, home, and other words - look for interesting combinations.

This is how my brother and I found the name for our game studio Manic Hyena and all our games.

How to name your store

When I opened one of my stores a few years ago, I planned to draw little foxes and put them on t-shirts and tote bags. It was supposed to be dark and weird art, the foxes would all be alone in forests and caves, at night. And it would be winter.

I named the store: Fox Shiver.

Here is the first fox that I painted:

After the initial spree of dreary fox designs, I somehow ended up drawing lots of cats. I didn’t make a second separate store for my cat designs — I just published them to my Fox Shiver store.

It would be great to have a thematically consistent store with a fantastic name. But what’s even better is to actually open a store with any name that comes to mind and start publishing and selling.

When you look around, you will notice that plenty of people didn’t overthink their store names either. Go through the stores on any of the websites, and you will see lots of artists who often used a combination of words that they liked or simply their name or nickname.

One of my favorite artists is Nathan W. Pyle. If you don’t know him, here is one of his designs: