As a modern artist, you have a lot more tools and resources at your disposal to make money compared to artists who lived 100 years ago. Most of these methods to make money as an artist may be unheard of for you but it’s so important that you know about it so you can use your skills to your advantage.
Read: how to make money with KDP self-publishing
Table of Contents
1. Draw comics to gain a following on Instagram
If you like drawing, you can make digital comic arts to post on Instagram. Once you gain enough following, you can sell print-on-demand merch and work with companies in affiliate deals or sponsorship deals.
If you don’t know what is POD aka print-on-demand. It’s a business model where you can upload a design and once someone ordered a merch, the design gets printed on the merch and then shipped to the customer.
Your design can be printed as a sticker, on a hoodie, or on accessories such as a phone case for instance.
You’ll have to upload the comics consistently, use the right hashtags, interact with other webcomic artists and your fans to be successful.
I would recommend you to catch on to whatever was trending at the time. For instance, if SquidGame was trending, make a comic in reference to it and add the hashtag #SquidGame in the description. This can help your brand gain more traction faster.
Read: How to start a slime shop and make money (Step-by-step)
2. Make custom drawings on Fiverr
You can offer your service to draw people and/or their pets in your own style. If people like your style, they’ll purchase from you. Particularly, if your style is unique and hard to copy.
Read: How to make money podcasting. How much can you make with podcasting
3. Make fonts to sell on CreativeMarket
If you are an artist, you may find making fonts to be fun and exciting. I have a full article on how you can make a font to sell, read here.
You can make your fonts easily for free using a pen, paper, and a scanner (or your phone to take a photo). You can also use your iPad to create the fonts instead of using pen and paper.
All you have to do is to download a free template, fill in the alphabets, upload the designs, and download as a .ttf file to sell on CreativeMarket!
Read: How to make money writing on Medium
4. Create clay art to sell on Etsy
You can make clay art like this to sell on Etsy. You’ll need the following:
Not all types of art would be fun for all artists so you really have to pick what suits you. I personally really like clay art, if you do, you should try selling on Etsy.
Read: How To Make Money On Etsy: 10 Easy Items To Make & Sell
5. Make merch designs to sell on RedBubble
Redbubble is a print-on-demand store that has its own marketplace where you can search for unique designs that suit your needs. Unlike most other POD sites, RedBubble is designed such that people can find your product through their marketplace without you having to bring the customers there yourself (Although that would help with the sales).
You can upload your designs and see them printed on a tote bag, notebook, wallet, t-shirt, hoodie, phone case, stickers, and magnets!
Read: How many articles do you need to blog full time?
6. Be an NFT artist
Now, this is a bit tricky. It works best if you already have a following as an artist because no one would just buy your NFT if you’re unknown.
If you got a sizable following on social media, you can go ahead and create an NFT project. It’s super important to have a good number of followers on Twitter (3k+) and a large member base on Discord (5k+). This will tell potential minters whether it’s a project worth pursuing.
Read: What are NFTs and all the basics
7. Make book covers for people on Fiverr
There are a lot of people who need someone artistic to create a book cover for them. If you know Photoshop, Illustrator, and In Design, this would be a perfect gig for you to try. You can sell this service on Fiverr.
You get to use your imagination to design the book covers. However, please note that your customers may not always like your design so have thick skin. They’ll ask you to redesign the covers sometimes. State clearly in your listing how many revisions you allow.
Make money on Fiverr with these 20 easy gigs, read here.
8. Teach an art course online
Teaching a course is one of the easiest ways to make a lot of money online. If you want to make a million dollars in a year and your course is priced at $200, you’ll need to make 5000 sales.
You can sell your course on Udemy where they have a marketplace people can use to search up courses. Or, you can use Teachable or Thinkific among many others. In those platforms, you may have to bring the students there yourself from your YouTube channel for instance.
It’s best to build up a brand on the subject you want to teach first so people trust you enough to buy your course. Otherwise, it’d be very hard for you to make any sales.
Go and create a YouTube channel or a TikTok account or an Instagram account where you share art tips and showcase your work. This will be the proof people need — you know what you’re doing. Having a community will help you make more sales.
Read: 50 Ways to make extra money
9. Create weird arts that gain mass attention
Look at the title of the following article.
This is her art made using her breasts. Each of those can sell up to $400. You can see how she doesn’t even need to sell that many paintings to make a living online.
It may not make her rich (although it could with good marketing) but this should give an idea of what’s weird art.
I wouldn’t be comfortable doing this kind of art but maybe you would and I’m really not suggesting anybody use their body parts to make art, what I’m saying is to look at the oddity of the art itself and realize the potential for abnormal arts.
Ideally, your art should be different enough to be a news headline. If you can have a few big news companies make a story about your art, you’ll be able to make quite a few pretty pennies when you turn that mass attention into sales.
Read: 16 Things to sell to make money as a teenager today
10. Illustrate children’s books
You can offer to draw children’s books in your specific art style on Fiverr. The price you set would vary depending on your experience. The more ratings you have the easier it would be for you to make a sale. Those ratings would have to be good too.
You can make between $20–300+ per page of illustration.
Read: How to improve emotional intelligence: 10 Unique ways
11. Create a YouTube channel in the art niche
There are a lot of YouTube channels out there in the art niche and the videos may cover the process of them making their art, showcasing their art, art challenges, and art tips.
Jazza makes a living with his YouTube channel in the art niche. He’s been doing this for a while now but you can certainly jump into it now and still be successful.
I would suggest you also try things out on TikTok but don’t just rely on TikTok as it may get banned again in the future.
The way that you would make money with YouTube is with ads, affiliate marketing, sponsorships, Patreons, live videos, and more.
Want to find out how much YouTubers make and how you can do it too? Click here.
Also, check out the most profitable YouTube niches here if you’re thinking about starting a YouTube channel. It doesn’t have to be in the art niche.
Read: How to make money as a content creator in one year
12. Make a custom storybook for couples
There are a lot of couples who want to do something special on their anniversary. If you can draw a custom storybook for couples you may be able to make some extra cash.
You’ll need to ask your clients for recent photos for reference.
Try to make your art style simple and easy to create as clients would pay you the same amount of money for an art style that takes 1 hour to produce vs. 10 hours to produce. If they like your art style, they’ll buy from you even if it takes you only 10 minutes to replace the faces and draw up their characters.
You can make a lot more money with simple character designs as it takes you less time to finish an order in the queue.
You can design a storybook for not just couples, you can design it for parents and children, for gag gifts, for people’s friends, etc.
Read: 12 Things to never buy as a college student
13. Design and sell vector arts on Creative Market
As an artist, you can design and sell vector arts.
To do this professionally, you’ll need to have knowledge of how to use photoshop and Illustrator.
Vector arts are pieces of illustrations that can be placed on websites, book designs, posters, etc, and can be scaled up and down without it losing quality like it would with a normal PNG or JPEG file.
For example, this is vector art.
So are these:
You can sell them in a bundle:
Once you have your designs ready, you can sell them on many different platforms including Sellfy, Creative Market, Adobe stock, etc.
Read: Secret guide to stop being a perfectionist
14. Design card game
Another thing you can do is to design a new card game to sell. Some artists are making good money designing and selling card games.
Use your imagination. What should your card game look like? What are the rules? How will it work?
Once you designed your card game, you can upload it to sites like makeplayingcard.com and then sell it directly on the site or on your own website. You can market it using social media.
Read: Are you an entrepreneur? You may be mentally ill
15. Make short animations on YouTube
This is Frame Order’s YouTube channel. Their videos are simple, short, and often garner millions of views per video. They currently have 5.55M subscribers on YouTube.
(They do have some dark humor in the video. Not everyone is a fan. You don’t have to copy their dark humor. I’m just taking them as an example because it’s the first thing I remember)
Develop your own style and humor in your cartoon brand. Make it unique and unforgettable.
Take a look at their website.
They’re selling merch. This is how you can monetize your cartoon animation brand too if you start one.
Read: 14 Important money lessons to teach your kids
16. 3D Design molds for people
You can use a free tool called TinkerCad to create 3D models or 3D molds to sell to people. These molds can be printed for people to use in their projects.
Here are the places you can sell your 3D models:
- TurboSquid
- CG Trader
- Renderosity
- Cubebrush
- Sketchfab
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17. Make hand-drawn logos for people
A lot of people like hand-drawn logos. If you’re an artist, you should try your hand in making hand-drawn logos.
It would be best to have an iPad to draw on so you don’t have to deal with scanning issues when making adjustments to your logos.
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18. Make custom animations
You can make < 30 seconds long custom animations for those who need it. Animations take a long time to create so even 30 seconds may take you a few hours. Be very clear about how many seconds of animations you offer in your service.
Your client may want to buy your custom animations for their YouTube intro, logo, explainer videos, etc.
Read: 8 Reasons why you should be your own boss
19. Make custom comic books
People may want to order custom comics books as a birthday gift for their friends, as a way to earn extra money, or just for fun. You can make custom comics for people in your style and sell your service on Fiverr.
Read: Want to be your own boss? 11 Reasons to start a blog
Artists who are making a living online
For those who don’t believe that you can make a living on the internet as an artist, you’re dead wrong. Here are some examples of artists making a living on the internet.
- Happy D. Artist
Happy D. Artist quit her software engineer job to work as a full-time artist with no prior training. She hated her software engineering job even though it paid really well. She wanted to do something else that makes her happy. She first started out exhibiting her arts in galleries but her real start was on YouTube. Her oldest videos were from 6 years ago but she started making a living 2 to 3 years into YouTubing I believe. People would custom order her art pieces or buy them as merch online.
- Dominics
Dominics went to Ryerson University for architecture but he never used his degree for anything. Instead, he started his YouTube channel animating his stories. People like his videos and he’s able to make a living online through merch sales and ad revenue. His parents thought he lost his mind when he said he wanted to be a YouTuber until he showed them his paycheque from YouTube.
- Bunch more people on TikTok
There are a lot of small business owners on TikTok making all sorts of things to sell. The good thing about TikTok is that it’s quite easy to get views compared to YouTube. Make your videos short and digestible so you can get your video seen in front of more people who may decide to follow you and eventually buy your products.
The things people are selling and making a living from on TikTok include jewelry, clay art, ceramic art, jewelry plate, slimes, clothes, hairpieces, custom water bottles, makeup, and more!
Do whatever kind of art you want. Film it and put it on TikTok. Once you have garnered enough audience, push your product in front of your viewers.
The best way to make a sale is always to build an audience first.
It doesn’t matter what you’re trying to sell and where you’re selling, having an audience to pitch your product/service is always going to make you more money than starting your store without an audience.
Read: How to become a content creator and make money this year
