I am someone who has always had that burning NEED to make art. For as long as I can remember. And then when I got older, it just felt natural that I should be able to make money off the energy I was putting into creating my art. I have never accepted the old starving artist concept because it just seems dumb as far I’m concerned lol.
SO in an effort to sell my work, I started doing street fairs and in-person craft shows. I absolutely LOVED the buzz of being part of a good art fair (shoutout to the Hoboken Arts and Music Fest, by far my favorite of them all!)! The interaction with customers, leaving with cash in my pocket, meeting new people, getting live feedback on my artwork… Amazing!
My booth at the Hoboken Arts & Music Fest back in the early 2000s
While it was so fun and exciting… it was also EXHAUSTING and would leave me just bone tired and wiped out. Schlepping everything out to the fair at the butt crack of dawn, setting everything up, often in unpredictable crazy weather, working the whole day on my feet and then breaking everything down, re-packing the car and getting home. Not to mention the stress of the unpredictables, namely crazy weather…hi there WIND, I’m lookin at you!
I’ll never forget one street fair I was a part of where it started as the gorgeous summer day that was predicted and then outta NOWHERE a wild storm rolled in and blew my walls right over, along with all my valuable original paintings hanging on them, despite all my best efforts to have made my setup indestructible. Chaos basically ensued… paintings strewn about in the rain, people frantically trying to pack up as fast as possible as I sprinted for my friend’s pickup truck I had borrowed to fit everything (that you had to park 8940201 blocks away of course) trying not to break an ankle in slidey (yes that’s a word now) rain-soaked flip flops. Good times.
All this to say, it felt unsustainable.
Then I tried selling art prints online on Etsy along with some of the POD sites. While I loved the IDEA of Etsy, I hated the unpredictability of sales. I’d go days with zero sales, and then suddenly on a random Tuesday I would get an order and then have to drop everything to create the prints that were purchased (often only to find my printer was out of ink), not to mention getting to the post office to ship it in the midst of my already crazy schedule. If you’re anything like me, the shipping aspect alone is enough to make this whole process feel awful. Not sure why, but this part was really a mental roadblock for me.
But it was also like between Etsy and Society 6 or whatever other POD sites I tried, I was hardly making any actual money despite having to expend real time and energy for those handful of sales I was actually getting.
THEN I discovered this thing called art licensing…
And more specifically, that you could license art as… greeting cards?! Say WHAT??! Is that how they got all the lovely artwork onto those cards that I remember always being dazzled by as a kiddo in the pharmacy? And sure I’d heard of licensing, say like, a Disney character for your brand or something. But artwork?? This sounded like THE perfect golden ticket that I had NO clue even existed!
Next week I’ll share how exactly I came upon art licensing in the first place and how exactly it changed my life… Stay tuned!