When it comes down to creating things for other most designers don’t have a chance to fully live out their creative souls. Somehow we all have to make ends meet, but besides doing stuff for bread and butter, what should you do in between jobs? As a creative you always have choices, you can create stuff for yourself, paint pictures, take photos or design t-shirts to name a few things.

Two of the easiest things an artist can do are Photo or Vector Stock, or selling Art as art prints. But what is better? What gives the better revenues?

The fun of Stock Art

When you are creating stock art you have some very nice and interesting challenges! One way to approach Stock is to sell leftovers of others jobs that were paying your rent. For example you created a set of icons that are left over now and can sell them at a stock site. Or, which is one of my favorites, you can actually approach stock art with a scientific approach, research and look what people buy, or create your own killer art for niches where you think the potential is high. The best part is that you can create whatever you want, at least if it is on a high technical level. You can do what you want and test if there are people buying it. The more you have, the more you can potentially sell. As with everything else stock can be a numbers game, but it must not be. You can upload 20 pieces that you love, but no one downloads and then the next piece is making a killing. You never know what you will make. Some people might call this a risk, but no risk, no fun

The love for Art Prints

Art Prints are even better than Stock Art when it comes to do what you love. You can simply create your art and upload it to some site that offers art prints of your work. Zazzle for example. You can promote those pieces on your site and get a share of the revenue. You don’t have to get files approved, can do whatever you want to do, you just have to find people that dig your style and buy your art. Simple as that. You can make a lot, get a name, whatever. You weed out a lot of people in between when you self publish your art. The problem is that you have to take care of marketing and presentation. If you rock at this you can make a killing with art prints, and if you already have a name, you can probably get some better deals, or use this as an additional source of income.

Passive income for the Win

No matter which way you choose, or if you do it both, passive income should be what every artist strives for. Corporate art like stock art is a great way. Especially in financial crises when people don’t have much money to spend you can make a good living from a lot of people with a little money. It’s no substitution for your real art, photo’s or whatever you do. It’s something you can easily do in between, or use leftovers or you specialise in it. There are people with 400-500 files being downloaded 60.000 times +, each download worth a couple of bucks. Especially generic vector stock sells very well considering the amount of time spend on the files. Try to create a few income streams that might grow into real rivers, but even a few raindrops are a nice addition for the notoriously underfunded artists that are out there.

In one of the recent articles I wrote about the need for an artist to have a website. Now you need a hosting company. You better pick a good one, which is not necassarily an expensive! A webhost is a company that takes care about your website. It makes the site available to the world wide internet population so it is an important factor during your online adventures.

• If your website is slow, visitors are annoyed!
• If your website is offline, your business is closed!
• If you have too low volume on your hosting plan, but create killer artwork and content and recieve high traffic, you might pay more or the host might take your website offline or put it on a slower server.

Things to consider when picking a webhost

• How much webspace do you get?
• What does the webhost offer besides webspace? php, mysql, shopping carts?
• How much traffic is in your package?
• How fast are the servers? How many people are on one server in case you pick shared host?
• How many email accounts can I create?
• Linux or Windows?
• How is the customer support?

There are a few very solid hosting companies around, two I have had experiences with and would recommend are Hostgator, which is the hosting company of my choice. The other one is Bluehost, which a few of my friends use and is very good performance wise.

Hostgator – smashill is hosted on hostgator servers, so you can get an image of the server speed. I really like the great customer support and fast shared hosting. There are a lot features and I will list a few more … unlimited Disk Space, unlimited Bandwidth, Host unlimited Websites, Instant Setup, 99.9% Uptime Guarantee, 45 Day Money Back Guarantee, CGI, PHP 5, RoR, Perl, MySQL, SSH, SSL, IMAP, POP, 24/7/365 Upgraded Support starting at $7,95 per month

Bluehost – Is another solid hosting company. Fast hosting, cheap prizes, unlimited Hosting Space web hostingHost UNLIMITED Domains, 2,500 POP/Imap Email Accounts, SSH (Secure Shell), SSL, FTP, Stats CGI, Ruby (RoR), Perl, PHP, MySQL 2000/2002 Front Page Extensions starting at 6,95$ per month

Zazzle is a marketplace where you can easily add you own graphics to products they provide. It’s a low cost, pretty effective way to make a few bucks with your works. However their ToS might not be for everyone.
I firmly believe in distributing my art and designs. Money is secondary, I am a concept artists, which means I worth ship the ideas more than the actual piece. I am a true believer that once you have an idea, write it down and publish it that idea belongs to you, everyone else is just a copycat or the guy who re-produces your artwork.
Nevertheless I have not earned a fortune with Zazzle, which is probably because I have neither actively promoted my shop, nor had any items in it until recently.
You can see the items I have created so far in my little shop.

The advantages of Zazzle

You don’t have to be a Jack of all Trades to be successful at Zazzle, their system is very easy and you can build your products with basic knowledge of a computer. It’s great for creatives who are starting out and don’t have great deals or produce everything themselves.
It’s extremely fast. In case you already have graphics you can use for print design you are ready to go.
You have your own ready to go shop with featured items that you can link to from your own site. People can find your stuff directly on Zazzle or you point them to your shop and earn even more in case they sign up and buy from Zazzle’s referral program.

The disadvantages

The shop looks a bit dull, even if you customize it, but most webshops do so it’s not really a biggy.
You might dislike the ToS of Zazzle concerning the use of your art.
To really get it going you have to market your shop and refer other people to join the site, or you have to create such a killer stuff that other people do the marketing for you. It’s great for people with a very low budget, but you have to get people to buy your stuff, most of the marketing has to be done by yourself.

Money Making Potential for Creatives?

Creative people can make some money using Zazzle, that’s for sure. It all depends on the contents you deliver. In case you create great stuff and are able to promote it well you can earn a few hundred, maybe thousand bucks per month. The key to selling is that you have to do more than create the items, you have to promote them somewhere.
My Zazzle Money Making rating is 8/10, as you can define your profit range on products. The problem is that the consumer decides if your items are too expensive or not, and that might happen if you up your profit margin by 50%.
I can only recommend testing it yourself in case you are producing digital artworks en masse. I am a fan of the digital lifestyle and the possibilities of passive income streams that can be created easily and are no hustle to maintain, Zazzle meets these both criteria, even though I did not earn a fortune with them, at least yet.

Most designer draw a lot of things, they started in kindergarten and went on through their life. Now do they need a tablet or is it enough to scan your drawings?
From my point of view a tablet is essential for every serious creator. Right now I am not having a tablet due to my old one not working with my new computer anymore, but within the next few weeks I will get a new one, and in case you don’t have one yet, here are a few reasons for you to go digital:

• You pay a pretty big chunk for one item, but you save on paper, color and pencils
• You can go digital and add textures with ease.
• You can create speed paintings with ease.
• It’s easy to create vector graphics that are flexible in size.
• You can reduce working steps and improve your work-flow / productivity.

Overall there are a lot of advantages to a graphic tablet. In case you are a designer or artist and still live in the analog world, consider going digital as an addition. The only thing you should actually do is to test the tablet you are going to buy. There is no substitution to the feeling of actually holding the pen and drawing / painting with it. There are plenty of pretty cheap tablets out there, but if you are serious about this, you should consider investing a bit more, as the pen is usually without a battery, has a better grip and the tablet has better reaction times.
I can’t wait to get my tablett and I will write a review about it once I hold it in my hands.

Some people still miss why they should make money like a creative. Sure there are always parts about every business where you have to take care of payments, list your hours, take care of clients and so on. Those things that make you feel like a bureaucrat and not like a creative.

Why shouldn’t you do the boring stuff?

Challenge yourself! Simple is good, boring is bad. Creatives, unlike many other people strive for better things. They want to express themselves and make a living with that. Or at least they want enough money to do what they want and pay their bills, and if their creative off springs can do the … all the better. The point is, be creative about the ways you make money. In case you are an affiliate marketer, do it like no one else does, create beautiful sales pages instead of those ugly, useless and not very trustworthy things that look like 1 big sales letter. Write about what you love, sell your art, create your own products, don’t be a follower, be a leader. Lead yourself out of the immaturity.

After all, don’t be one of those guys who give up a 9-5 job for something that is as boring. Some people play poker all day long, others write, other sell things. The great part about being a creative is that you can do more things than a lot of other people. Just do what you love and exploit it, or share that for free and charge other things. Find a sponsor, ask for donations, whatever, just don’t be one of those make money idiots. Those people look for recipes of others and try to do exactly what they did. That’s just because those people fear to fail, or they are boring. Or they want an easy life. There is money to be made outside, but in case you want a regular and boring paycheck, you can do that in a day job. Enjoy your life, mix things up and live an interesting life.

That’s my tip of the day.