Knowing your audience. When to sacrifice artistic "integrity" for a paycheck.

I have already mentioned my entrepreneurship in many of my blogs so I am going to talk about one aspect of that.

I used to be absolutely unwilling to do art that I didn't enjoy doing or take on commissions that bored me. I also didn't want to use my design skills to make adverts or kitschy designs. I wanted to only do fine art. And usually only used pencils for many years striving to do photo-realistic art. This is an example of one of my older works:

and another:

But now that I am on amazon merch and learned "slogan" tees sell well I have learned an important lesson. I now make shirts like this:

and jumping on trends like this:

However, I still find time to make designs I am passionate about. For example Red Bubble likes artistic, original, artsy designs. So, I do multiple designs a day on RB that I really enjoy creating. Because who wants to only make art they aren't incredibly passionate about for a paycheck? If I just wanted money I certainly wouldn't be in the art business.

This is the last design I did for Red Bubble.

And during all this I still try to take time to do traditional work. I have been painting and drawing with pencils a lot more and started doing figure drawing daily when I noticed I was getting a bit rusty. So, if you intend to make art a business it will be just that, a business. You will certainly have to take on tasks that are more work than fun. And you will have to develop business and marketing skills. You don't just decide one day "I am good at art and now I want to sell it" and poof. That takes a lot of research, studying, marketing, trying and failing before you start to get a grasp on it.

Oh, another word of advice for the aspiring artist.

Take on some fluff. You need side incomes. You need a lot of different sources of income. I am currently working on ebooks that are informative and can sell on kindle. I also do writing jobs sometimes, mturk, and am on usertesting along with my multiple print on demand sites, etsy, and offering commissions. The goal here is to get financially stable and then start doing the art that you really, really want to do. And heck, nothing else at that point. If you are comfortable enough. You can then just spend years finding your true artistic self without financial worries. But for now, roll up your sleeves, swallow your pride, and do something boring, eh?