7 Ways to Make Money as An Artist That's NOT Selling Art

Whether you are making, art, crafts, candles or watch bands, you can sell it and make money.  You can do very well selling physical art or art prints. However, did you know that there are a lot of other ways you can make money as an artist!  In fact, I personally have about 17 streams of income.  I won't go into all of them here, but I always suggest that it’s wise to consider diversifying your income.  There are quite a few different ways to do this, many of which I’ve tried personally or have good friends that do it to good success. There are many ways to think outside of the box. 

Today I'm going to share 7 different ways you can make money as an artist BESIDES selling your art.

By the way, the number one question I get is how to price art, so I wrote a guide! Get How to Price Your Art Made Easy for FREE right here.

Crowd Funding & Patrons

What if you could get your fans to pay you a modest amount of money a month in return for early access to your art posts, a exclusive blog or newsletter, discounts on your art, or something like a postcard of the month club?  Well, you can!  There's a growing culture of crowd funding for artists. One kind is to request financial support for a time sensitive project, and another kind is to offer a monthly subscription to your brand.

Patreon is the flagship app for monthly creative support.  They help you to build your page, they process the money and customer service, and they take a share of the revenue. Instagram and Facebook also offer a subscription service that is similar, from as low as $1 a month.  Most websites offer a subscription product which might be preferable if you don't want to risk the fees and changing terms of an off-site platform. 

This "patron" model is attractive to people who love your art but can't afford original work, but would be comfortable with a modest amount every month.  You will have to promote to get people to sign up, and you will have to think carefully about what you are going to offer.  You don't want it to be too much for you to manage.  Along these same lines, you can do a crowd-funding campaign, where people contribute on a one time basis towards a single cause, like completing a body of work.

Licensing

Another thing you can try is licensing! Licensing is when you provide an image of your art and a company puts it on something.  This could be greeting cards, jigsaw puzzles, or semi mass produced art you could find at West Elm or a high end furniture store. 

In licensing situations, you will agree on a percentage of the net sales which is usually between 7-11%.  The benefits are the manufacturer assumes the trouble of producing the item, finding sales channels, distributing it, and dealing with customer service.  You provide a digital image, and later you get a check! 

In my case, I have a line of puzzles that are made by a puzzle manufacturer, who also distributes the puzzles to Amazon, Walmart, and Target.  I do promote the puzzles, but pretty much it’s what everyone dreams of “passive income”!

Illustration

Often, businesses and brands need an artist to make custom art for their product labels, their promotional materials or other brand assets.  I know artists who have painted watercolor flowers for soap labels, designs for tissue boxes, patterns and elements for dish ware, and so much more.  Unlike licensing, when your name and brand will be associated with the design, illustration of this sort is usually “work for hire”, which means they buy the art outright and you will not get credited, and you no longer have a copyright in the work. You will charge them a flat fee for the work instead of percentage.

Social Media Influencer

There's a recent development that artists can leverage: you can become a social Media Influencer. Many artists can leverage social media audience to promote brands or products in exchange for a fee. An artist might promote an art supply brand or even unrelated products.  There are many companies with a large budget for promotion who are very happy to use micro influencers to promote their products. 

In the art supply world, I rarely hear of an art supply company being willing to pay for these services, but often they will offer trades.  When I was working with epoxy resin, a resin company sent me resin every week and I in turn mentioned their product and used their hashtag in my social posts.  That was a valuable partnership to me. On the other hand, I have been offered trades of much less valuable supplies and it is NOT worth it to me.  You will have to make those decisions based on your own calculations. 

Sometimes you will get an offer to have an affiliate link of which you will get a percentage of sales. That means when you promote a paint set and your followers use a special, you will get a kick back, usually around 10%. For my own business I have largely decided against promotions outside of my own brand.   My main reason is that I have enough of my own to sell, and I didn't want to spend my sales capital on someone else's brand.  The payoff just didn't make sense to me. 

There are many influencers who make a full time living and more promoting cars and mattresses and makeup.  I do not think of myself nor market myself as a lifestyle brand, so that wouldn't work for me and it probably wouldn’t work for a lot of artists I know, but it could for you!

Teaching

If you have skill and live in a populated area, you can offer workshops to teach your skill.  This can be a great way to make a decent wage and meet your fans.  You will need to have a space to host an art party, supplies, and a start-to-finish project that can be completed in the allotted time.

 Digital Products

If you are wired to be a teacher, you can extend your knowledge digitally. I could give an entire training on how artists can make money with digital products, like art tutorials and private memberships like my art revenue coaching.  The snapshot is this: if you have a skill and basic communication skills, someone somewhere is going to want to learn your magic. I am naturally wired as a teacher. I have taught many college classes and workshops.  It made a lot of sense to me to create courses to share my knowledge. 

In order to create courses, you need to be able to film your process and yourself, and have some basic tech skills to create the edited training and upload to a hosting site.  You can hire these two things out.  After you have created your course, you need to have an audience to sell you course to. Many artists and creatives have made many millions of dollars doing this. 

This has been a few of the alternative ways that you can make money as an artist.  I always recommend diversification for artists and as many income streams as you can manage.  We covered licensing, illustration, social media promo, teaching, digital training, artist subscriptions and artist crowdfunding. Hopefully there was something in there that peaked your interest.