As an Artist who wants to go full time and do this as my living, as opposed to, working on jobs going things I am not interested in like flipping cheese burgers. I spend a lot of time thinking about how to make my dreams possible.
I think it is something every artist, that is serious about there career, has to take into consideration at some point. How do I make working for myself profitable enough to be financially stable? Well, I think the first thing you have to do is get out there and start asking some questions. Talk to other artists that actually do make a decent living doing what they are passionate about. It can be hard though because many of us honestly don't find ourselves around other artists that are doing the same thing. That is if we are able to be around other artists at all.
I was listening to Bobby Chui today, and you may hear me mention him a lot because I love his work, and because he is very successful as an artist. He was able to turn his one man show into a corporation. Not only that, but it lead him to be able to do character designs for the new "Alice and Wonderland" Tim Burton film. He is making a huge name for himself, in fact, as the next Disney, because of his appealing design work and his drive. He also is a teacher, as much as, he is an artist. In his video blogs on youtube he offers a lot of advise about turning this talent that many people possess into a career.
Lets face it. It is hard to be a artist and get taken seriously if you are not creating art do to being tied down financially and working in a field that is taking you away from being able to actually create. You can't just walk around telling people you are an artist, but not actually having any artwork to show them. One of my biggest issues the last 6 -9 months has been not being able to do my thing.
I started this job that literally took up 16 hours or more of my day on a sometimes daily bases. But, the bills have to get paid so what can you do. Last year at this time I was living soully on my freelance work and now I barely have time to give you guys a new sketch to look at. I have to squeeze it in during the day between the diaper changing and the drive between jobs. This is absolutely no way for an artist to live.
One of the things Bobby Chui talks about as being very important as a commercial artist and a freelance person is having lots of arms extended to help you actually be able to sustain your living as an artist. I know way to many comic book artist that complain about having to make it 6 months before getting a pay check on a book they might have worked on. In fact, it took me almost 1 year to get a $50 dollar pay check from a certain company that I did 50 sketch cards for last summer. In a time when I really needed it I was not very happy to have to wait.
Which is why we need to have more than one arm extended in this field to help up make ends meet. This means, selling prints, original art, commissions Personal Sketch cards, t-shirts, our own comics, sketchbooks, you name it. There are a lot of options. We have to find ways to promote ourselves and sell other things besides our talents. Especially, when first starting out.
It wasn't till this past year that I realized just how important this could be. At one point I got into a cramp and I took the last of my convention sketchbooks and put them on ebay and sold every last one of them to get myself a train ticket to visit my family for the first time in like 2 years over the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays.
The crazy thing was I never actually expected people to want to buy them. I had been looking at those books for months, in fact, I probably had them for a year. The lesson I learned though was valuable. There was a value to what I did even if it was just for fun in my spare time. People wanted to be a part of that.
They say, why work hard when you can work smart. I am coming to understand that saying more than ever now cause drawing 100 individual pinups just so you can make enough to pay the rent gets old really fast.
So one of the things I want to do in order to turn my life back around is extend some arms. In the coming future I want to start making prints and books of my work available for purchase. It is very important for my career that I am able to be financially stable if I want continue as an artists and not as a glorified maid.
