Advice

Start before you are ready

When I started making designs for apparel in 2012, I could see that my designs weren’t that good. Nevertheless, I submitted them all to Teefury. Sure enough, Teefury didn’t want them. I received rejection email after rejection email.

But I kept at it and slowly improved. I sent all my designs, regardless of how I felt about them. After a while, my designs started to get accepted for printing. It went like this: rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, accepted, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, accepted, rejected, rejected…

If I judged myself by all those rejections that I got in the beginning, then I should have known that I wasn’t ready. But I was desperate, I wanted to see my design on a daily t-shirt on TeeFury, I needed to earn money. So I ignored the fact that I wasn’t good enough, and kept designing.

Space Botanica

You’ve probably heard that you should choose a niche for your store and that all your designs in that store should be thematically consistent. If you want to make designs with a completely different topic or style, then you should create a new store for them. When customers visit your store or see your logo, they should know what to expect.

When I was starting with designing t-shirts, I heard that too. I had a separate store for my designs with ducks — somehow that store never got popular. And another store with monsters, it didn’t get any traffic either. I also had a store named “Fox Shiver” that was supposed to be about little foxes in frozen lands. I didn’t know it was going to be as popular as it is, so I kept adding different designs to it — a lot of cats and space art. Now my store is a mess, and I might need to fix it one day. Or maybe I will leave it as is.

Here’s one of the designs that should not be in my store. It’s plants and space combined. When I made it, I only had a separate store for ducks and another one for monsters, but not a store for space designs. So I added it to my Fox Shiver store.

When you decided on a niche and know what you want to draw, then that’s good. You are probably a more organized person than a lot of artists and definitely more than me. If you can’t decide on a niche, don’t worry about it. You can add all your designs to one store, and after a while, you will see what’s popular or what you like to draw the most. You can always move some designs to another store if you want to. The important thing is to create.

A note on promoting your art

Yesterday someone asked me for tips on marketing and getting traffic to your store. These questions come up often. Too bad, I can’t help with that.

My strategy has always been to create good designs. I assumed that people would find their way to my designs somehow, even if I don’t promote them in any way.

And they did!

If what’s stopping you from opening your store, is the fact that you have no followers on Instagram and Twitter, or that you know nothing about marketing — then stop worrying about that. Create designs, upload them, do your part. Trust that if you create consistently, then people will notice and buy from you.

Along the way, post your art on social media of your choice. The most important part is to create something and add it to your store.

Repeat it 50 times and you will get sales.

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.

My Mom is wrong

True to a mentality of any generation, I think my Mom is wrong about everything.

You can take any area of expertise and it seems my Mom manages to be wrong about it. Let’s take nutrition — she thinks potatoes and bread are healthy. Or managing money — she doesn’t invest, she doesn’t even save up. She is wrong even about how she spends her vacation — she answers work calls when sitting on a beach or hiking. And it’s never a life or death situation — she runs a small company that manufactures clothes.

But there’s one thing she has always been right about, since 25 years ago, and it’s something I agree with wholeheartedly. And who knows how much impact it had on me, so I can forgive that she tries to feed me potatoes every time I visit.

When I was a kid, I had lots of ideas of who I was going to be when grown up. I wanted to be an artist, a scientist, a secret agent, a soldier, a pilot, and probably many more occupations that I don’t remember anymore. And when I said I wanted to be, let’s say, an astronaut, my Mom would say, “that’s fine, but you need a second thing”. It’s not like she said it every time, but she said it often enough that it stuck.

Having a second thing means that you need a second way to earn money, just in case. You should always be able to do at least two things well enough to be able to do them for a living.

This is something that a lot of people don’t think about. And when they lose their job, all of a sudden, they don’t have a way to support themselves.

Those two things for me are: making art and programming. I am not a good programmer, but just good enough to make small games or to get hired if I need to. And I am also not an amazing artist, but I can draw well enough to make designs and sell them on t-shirts.

What are your two things? Do you have a backup thing that you can pick up if your main source of income dries up?

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.

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.

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.

I am lucky that my first two jobs sucked

When I was in my third year at a university, I got my first serious job as a programmer.

I wasn’t very good, but I was just good enough to have my contract extended a few times so I stayed there for three years while getting my degree in computer science. The first two years were fine, but then something weird happened with our boss. Initially, those were small things: he would get irritated or impatient, when he asked me to work on a Saturday and I couldn’t he got offended, he called me in my free time even when he knew I was meeting my family. From what I knew those were common things in any job so I accepted all that.

But then one day he slammed the door to the room we worked in. And I don’t mean lightly pushed the door so it closed without using the doorknob — I mean he used so much force to slam the door that the frame shook and I jumped startled.

After that day he never closed the door the normal way again.

He often left the room to make calls, go to the restroom or the kitchen, to go to talk to assistants, IT guys, HR, or others in the company. On average he would go out of the room every 20 minutes. He would walk fast, open the door and slam it. A few minutes later he would come back and slam the door again, so the glass in the door and windows rattled.

Was it my imagination at this point that the whole room and my desk and computer all shook? Yes, maybe. But I started dreading the job, my head and ears hurt, I could not concentrate, and every day I sat anxiously awaiting the next door slam.

What are you supposed to do in this situation? Should I have told him not to slam the door? I was shy and scared so I never said anything. Is it even possible that someone doesn’t know not to slam doors? Or was he doing it on purpose? I started suspecting that he wanted me to resign but didn’t want to fire me directly. But I couldn’t leave right away.

Finally, I got my degree and found another job — and it too was a bad place to work.

That was enough. I never worked for another company ever again.

If I had a slightly higher tolerance for noise and rude behavior, or maybe if he closed the doors a bit less forcefully, I would still have a regular job. I was lucky it was so awful for me and that I never got used to it or I would not have made the jump to freelance.

My experiences are not some horror stories, of course. I have a friend who cried after work and a friend who had to work overtime without pay. And another who got fired and not paid at all for his work. What did he do next? He looked for another job.

The thing is, you get used to people yelling at you, demanding you work evenings and weekends, you answer phone calls on vacation and accept that you are not being paid fairly. So get out now. Because working for dishonest or rude people builds tolerance. After a few years of this, when someone humiliates you in front of your colleagues or takes credit for your achievement, you will think that it’s not that bad. At least you get a regular paycheck.

Advice

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