Perhaps you have been drawing since you could remember, or always enjoyed sketching and doodling but never invested enough time to develop your skills as you’d like.

Perhaps art has always been your bread and butter, your beating heart and soul, and this is the year that you have decided to really dive into drawing courses and practice daily and challenge yourself to grow the way you’ve always wanted.

Whatever the case, if you want to turn your creative work into a genuine, monetizable business so that you can create art for a living (or side hustle) and do what you love – this article is your 101 guide to get started.

1. Strategy

Any business, even one for your art, begins with answering the tough questions and defining what your goals are. You need to get clear on your strategy, on how you want to go about setting up this new business:

• describe your artistic style
• define the themes and topics of your art, for your own clarity down the line
• what kind of products do you want to offer? (original one-time products, or printables like stickers, tshirts, prints and more)
• what platform do you want to use for your e-commerce business? (Etsy, RedBubble, Society6, Shopify, etc)

2. Grow Your Audience on Social Media

In case you don’t already have social media accounts, create them. Instagram particularly is ideal for artists, creators, designers of all sorts because it’s all about the visual presentation, right? If you already have accounts, re-brand them, change the icons and update your bio to reflect your current goals. Change the username and name to make it clear who you are (make it crisp and professional, “sklumen.artist” is good, “skl2021hey” is not). You want to make it clear to any new visitor what your account is actually about. Make sure to add an interesting yet informative bio, useful contact info, and a website link (to your store, which we’ll get to in a bit).

Furthermore, make it a focus to grow your audience count using this new artsy account. Do your research on the best hashtags for your particular niche, so you know what tags to target with your new posts. Create a schedule for your posts, use apps like Later for free to get started. Create sketches or pieces in bulk when inspiration hits, and then package them in pretty posts to schedule across a month, if you wanna go the smart & savvy route.

Wherever you are on your artistic journey in terms of skills, don’t worry, just start! The only way you can grow is if you keep practicing. Sure, you could start this whole process only after you reach a level of skill you consider “worthy of social media”, but chances are you’re doing yourself a disservice by procrastinating and not owning up to your true path. If art is what you want to do, chin up and get down to business!

Look up YouTube videos or blog articles on how to draw/paint this or that, and keep exercising. If you keep up this exercising along with sharing your journey on Instagram – in even just 1 year I guarantee you’ll be so much further ahead than if you never started. Building an audience on social media often times has a snowball effect. You grow and keep growing, and after you reach a certain count, it only gets easier.

At any point through this process, don’t get discouraged by results. Organic growth is progressive. The key is to stay consistent and keep posting, and keep interacting – that’s how you get on the Instagram algorithm’s good side, but that’s a whole other ballpark of research (which will definitely help your IG growth).

3. Set Up Your Store

When you’re ready to go big and start monetizing your art, it’s time to set up your store. At this point, you should research the best platforms for this. This depends on what type of products you want to offer, here are a few ideas to get you started:

If it’s handmade, manual artwork: Etsy or Shopify, or WooCommerce (as plugin on a WordPress platform) is your go to.

If it’s printables: then sites like Redbubble and Society6 are one of the many that do all the hard work for you – all you have to do is upload your designs, tweak some details and settings, and they take care of manufacturing, printing and delivery all the way to the customer. If you want to go the extra mile, you can buy your own printing setup for prints, but note it may be costly to begin with.

4. Create a Buzz

Once everything is ready to go, don’t forget to create a buzz before you actually launch the store. You want to pique the interest of your Instagram audience, your website viewers, whatever the case is. When the launch day comes, you want to capture enough attention to get the ball rolling and start the first orders.

And once it does, maintain your business strategy and ensure that there is a clear path from your social media to your stores/websites for making purchases. The last thing you want is do all the right work, get all the attention, and then have your customers get frustrated by confusing, missing or broken links and not knowing where they can find your products. Rule number one for any successful business is focusing on UX (user experience) by making it as easy and seamless as possible.

Conclusion

That’s all for today’s short & sweet article in my Artist Series.

I hope this gets you started on your age-old dream of making it as an artist! Remember that the market can never be oversaturated with creators that are doing what they love. Everybody has their own tastes and interests, their own style, and their unique way of executing a work of art.

If you enjoy creating something, chances are the perfect audience is out there waiting for your unique, special creations – because nobody else is you! Now go out there and get started, my brave and brilliant artists.