Art as a Side Hustle - or Something Like That
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Let me paint you a little moving-picture show … no seriously, requite me some money, and I will paint a picture of whatever you want. Information technology's hard to sell fine art every bit a side hustle, sometimes you have to beg for sales.
Selling Art equally a Side Hustle
If you're selling fine art to pay to larn how to create fine art in the get-go place, then that's basically your business plan and sales pitch rolled into one bloody concussion of a learning curve. I'chiliad going to exist painting anyhow, considering I'm in love with it. Simply painting has never been a "Side Hustle" to me. Thinking of art as a side hustle is like creating ginormous fidget spinners to hang on the wall. From that perspective, a painter is just a terrible interior decorator that can only do one rectangular space at a time.
I mean, you're not incorrect about the pace. I tin't count the number of times I've said, "Just pay me for the cost of the materials, because actually, all I desire is to practice another one." If you want to know how to sell a lot of paintings, there'southward your answer. I've sold hundreds of paintings since I started. But I've also painted 10 or 20 for every one that I sold. Every dollar of that and more than has gone into the tools and fourth dimension spent trying to get ameliorate, understand more than securely, see more conspicuously.
Juggling a Passion for Fine art with the Need for Money
I delved seriously into art over a decade ago, and at present, if I'k being honest, in that location's not a lot in this earth I wouldn't throw downwards a abysmal hole if it meant spending more time in front of the easel. Mostly, it tends to be money that goes in that hole, of course, just it's really a bully mode of finding out the many things you can do without. "Starving Artist" might be a platitude that gets thrown almost, but poverty teaches some amazing lessons to artists. Simply non budgeting. Information technology doesn't teach that.
On the other hand, poverty brings other surprises. I once agreed to exercise a serial for a woman before discovering I was to be decorating her married man'due south man-cavern with paintings of scantily-clad ladies. Keep in heed this is at a time when people would mitt me an old faded photo of their great-great whatever and ask me to pigment her like Van Gogh'south Starry Night (now who belongs in an asylum?). Or give me 8 selfies, so that I could use this confront, but the dress from this photo, with the background from this other photo, each with their own unique Instagram filter practical. Oh and also add the family pet. And I would attempt.
Just What Kind of Art Really Sells?
Hither's the thing. The art that sells, specially at the amateur level, is a multi-headed ever-morphing trend-beast. Owls, Peacocks, Ginkgo Biloba leaves. This month it may be goldfish, who knows? Goldfish bedsheets, goldfish pendants, two-dimensional, multi-sail, booze ink-poured, fish-shaped sponges filled with metal pigment, slinking beyond the Alaskan tundra. A calendar month after, once anybody sees a few truly stellar goldfish swim out of a real artist's studio space, anybody volition look at their gaudy sponge paintings, realize not i of them matches the beauty of the real deal, and they'll starting time trolling for a new spirit animal.
Hither'southward my stance. Go buy a goldfish, a articulate glass bowl, and prepare information technology on the windowsill beside your easel. If y'all need a side hustle, by all ways, cutting your old dish sponges into stereotypical fish shapes. But wouldn't it exist delightful if you learned to paint an actual goldfish? Only saying.
At present I'm thinking my title has become a bit misleading. What if I inverse it to:
Go a Successful Artist in 45 Seconds!
Would people be more or less likely to click? The study would no doubt uncover something curious about the human psyche.
Okay, in all honesty, the whole reason for this postal service is that I don't know the answer to the inherent question of How-to. How to turn your fine art into a side hustle.
I've ever had this fairytale hope that if my work is good enough, information technology will sell itself. It'due south kind of truthful. But will it sell itself for five thou a pop? This is the truth: I wouldn't sell a painting for that, not at my level.
Painting From Life
I've had this feel many times with paintings, simply the outset time happened in front of Relics of the Brave, a painting by Arthur Hacker. You can see the painting for yourself at the Telfair Academy in Savannah, GA. I managed to study it several times, and I swear, y'all tin see those four figures animate, every bit if four real people sat in a room just on the other side of the picture frame. The longer yous stand there, the more convinced you become that what y'all meet is not a painting, but an actual window to a moment frozen in time.
Okay, I got it. Allow's change the post championship again.
How to Brand Your Painted Figures Seem to Exhale
I call back I can answer the question though. Let'southward retrieve. How did Arthur Hacker practise it? I mean really, if you could time travel and be in the room as Hacker painted the piece, what would you run across? Firstly, a dude with a lot of practice. Hacker painted this scene from life, over a period of time, observing the figures as they shifted, fidgeted, breathed. Hacker defenseless that rhythmic movement of their animate forms merely by observing/painting them over fourth dimension. Then, what you lot encounter is not a snapshot moment in fourth dimension, merely several hours tucked into a unmarried image.
Painting from life gives you something that a photographic camera's image never can. Well, that's not to say that photography isn't its ain artform, as well as a versatile tool. No one need exist purist most creativity. However still, utilize captured images knowing them for their inherent flaw.
The camera is an attractive solution, especially when you lot believe y'all're unable to measure the dimensions of what you meet with your naked heart. And then, you might not know this simply, One time Upon A Time, in that location was no such thing as cameras. I know right? Un. Real. So, were those artist dudes that didn't accept cameras just like, super badasses or whatever?
Yes.
The photographic camera obscura effect has been known since Aristotle, sure, but skip past that and you realize there are not one but ii photographic camera obscuras wired directly into your encephalon. It takes a scrap of assertive in yourself, but eventually, with practice, you'll realize you lot're perfectly capable of measuring the shapes, colors, values, forms, and their visual relationships with a light source and each other, all of these things at once. And in that location's more! Merely kidding, that's it. That is the secret yous discover, afterward some experience drawing and painting from life, eventually you lot learn that you tin trust what yous see. And therefore know when you've successfully captured what it is you truly see earlier you. Ask yourself, is it that you tin't draw, or that you're not really looking at what y'all're trying to draw.
Well, now I've got to change the post title again.
Believe in Yourself for Better Art
Or something equally cheesy. I'm open to suggestions. What do we want to talk nigh adjacent? Exercise I have to choice? Is this still the blog post, or only meaningless text fading too far below the surface of this Google Md to be seen past anyone?
Source: https://partnersinfire.com/passion-fire-2/art/art-as-a-side-hustle/
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