Making a living online as an Artist working from home

Ways to adapt your Art business whilst self isolating at home


Whilst the health and well being of our friends, family and neighbours is foremost in our minds at this time, there is no getting away from the financial implications that self isolating will have on your business. 

I would guess that most Artists are self employed and rely on income from teaching and selling their work at exhibitions and art fairs which are now mostly cancelled. Having recently paid fees for upcoming events and all the costs of framing and preparing work, this is arguably the worst time of year for Artists to be facing this challenge.

With that in mind, I thought it may be useful to you for me to tell you a few of the ways I make money from my Art online.

I will list these in order of revenue, highest to lowest :-


 Skillshare


This is an online learning platform. Students pay a monthly fee (around £10) to access as many courses as they like. Tutors upload courses broken down into short classes. My courses are all around 50-60 minutes long. Students interact with the tutor and other students and can upload their finished work for feedback. Tutors are paid into PayPal once a month on the 16th. Tutors are paid per the minutes viewed. The great thing is, once a course is published it continues to get students and create income months later. I talk about my experience on Skillshare in some of my YouTube videos, linked below.

YouTube


I have been slowly growing my YouTube channel over the last three years. You earn revenue from the adverts shown before, below and to the side of your videos. This revenue is paid once a month through Google and you do require a Google account to set up YouTube. You can also add Google adverts to your own websites.

Amazon Merch


Amazon Merch is a T shirt design site. You have to apply to the site with examples of your work and wait to be approved. You can then upload your designs to Merch. Your name is not attached to the designs, they are sold as Amazon own brand Amazon Prime T shirts. You set the price of each shirt yourself above the base price, deciding your own commission per shirt sold. This is a nice regular extra income stream. Once you have uploaded the work, there is no need to promote them as Amazon does that for you and they have an enormous reach. This took a while to build, but I now sell T shirts most days with an income of between £3 and £5 per shirt.

Artfinder


Artfinder is an online gallery for you to sell your work. Until recently, you could only sell original artworks. However, you can now sell limited edition prints as well. Artfinder is very easy to use.

Website shop


You can sell whatever you like through your own website store. Although I have original artworks listed, I mostly sell prints. 

Redbubble


Redbubble print your uploaded work onto all sorts of merchandise. What I really like is the quality of their products. I often upload images from my YouTube tutorials that would otherwise go to waste. This is an example :-



Amazon Associates


You can join a program called Amazon Associates. You then create links to specific products and have your own Amazon recommended page. You then link products in the description below your YouTube videos and receive commission for items sold. I will link my store below.

My Amazon Store



This is a list of the top things that work for me, there are many more besides. You need to find the best fit for yourself and your style of work. It is worth saying that these all take time to build and patience is required. None of the income streams is massive in itself, however it is more reliable having all the small incomes to grow together and not all your eggs in one basket.

The good thing is that I do very little paid advertising as the websites mostly do promotion for you. I would however recommend creating a Pinterest page and advertising on there, as it reaches people that are interested in learning creative subjects.

If you would like to ask more, or like me to create a YouTube video on this topic, please ask in the comments below.

My first Skillshare course







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