I'm Robin (he/they), a third year enrolled as a User Experience Design student. I'm especially interested in eventually professionally creating artwork for entertainment such as animated films, books, and video games. I want to share my artwork with a wider audience using this blog, and I also want to open up a conversation about what goes into making illustrations and artwork both on the creative and business sides..
Happy holidays! I’ve been alternating between seeing my family, vacationing, and making art during break. Something I wanted to share with you guys before the end of the year is my 2023 art summary:
Template made by @Taxkha on Twitter/X
I tried to pick from a variety of art styles/subjects I drew this year to represent how I’ve progressed as an artist, as well as how my thoughts have continued over the course of the year across each month. It’s pretty obvious that I’ve been drawing a lot of mecha lately, so I’ll likely set aside some time to draw humans and furries next year more often.
Some notes: I had the hardest time picking out a single piece in July, August, October, and December to represent my art progress, as I had so many good pieces to pick from for those months. Meanwhile, February, March, September, and November were relatively easy to pick from as I hadn’t finished as many pieces. Not coincidentally, those were also mostly the months where I was starting new semesters of college and therefore had less spare time/energy to spend on my artwork. And in November’s case, I had two cons back to back that month and also had to deal with semester project deadlines creeping closer ahead of the end of the semester.
In terms of what I want to do next year art-wise, I do want to keep giving my follower/customer/client base what they want — which is largely fanart and acrylic charms — and make great sales online and at conventions, but I also want to do more original art and make my portfolio more solid to apply for well-paying art or design gigs. There’s only so much time I have in the day and year to make both of these aims happen, of course, but I am enrolled in a scientific illustration class next semester to make the second aim more achievable. I’ll likely be posting assignments from that class next semester as I try to strike a balance in this column between art business topics and talking about my art practice itself.
That’s all for this week, and I wish all of you a happy and restful holiday season!
Hello! It’s been a while since my last post — I ended up more busy with finals than I expected, and then I threw myself into making more artwork right after I finished my last final project. This entire semester I’ve been writing how-to guides and overviews of art business-related topics, but I think it’s about time I went back to talking about my own artwork for column #50!
Since I didn’t take any art classes this semester (unless you count Intro to UX), all my artwork from this semester is personal work or commissions rather than academic work. Most of this artwork was specifically for prints and small merchandise that I could sell at conventions, sometimes of original ideas (e.g. a fat squirrel wood pin) but mostly fanart of existing media properties. Because of how much of my time was taken up by programming/website design classes, I didn’t make as many fully rendered paintings as I would’ve liked and focused more on simplified artwork that I could finish in one or two sittings. I think it says a lot that my artwork output from November to today (mid-December) looks something like this:
Even then, I’m still overall proud of how much progress I made this semester both in terms of developing my art abilities and my business. I think my rendering has made significant and visible leaps above my artwork from last year, for one thing, and I’m getting better at making my artwork look more appealing from a design standpoint.
I’d like to highlight that the one original character piece I drew this semester (besides artwork for Flamechaser that I’m not posting publicly yet) was this piece I drew for Digipaint’s Fall 2023 zine “Dreams and Nightmares”, which will be printed next semester:
It features Wenet Tozawa (purple-haired girl) and Rashida Kuromiya (pink-haired girl) intertwining their fingers through a plane of water. This piece is supposed to represent the feeling of seeing a familiar face in a dream and reaching out toward them.
I personally really enjoy drawing my OCs and would like to make more artwork of them, but I also want to make a lot of new merchandise designs before the convention season hits again next year, and my energy and time are both very limited… I applied to a bunch of major conventions happening next spring/summer, so I’ll probably be discussing anime convention application results next semester!
I may or may not be making more posts over winter break — it really depends on whether or not I have anything to talk about. If I don’t, I’ll still be posting next semester anyway, so see you guys soon!
Did I say “next week” in my last column? Oops. I kinda forgot that Thanksgiving break was coming up, and then I ended up too busy with personal life stuff to actually make this post. Anyway, now I’m making this quick-ish overview of paper terms and types for making prints!
When making prints on paper of your artwork, something important to keep in mind is paper weight (which is almost always equivalent to thickness). Thicker paper is sturdier and harder to damage or bend, which both keeps your stock safer and also feels better for your customers compared to receiving a super thin paper print. Usually the way to evaluate printing company paper weight is through points, which is a whole number version of how many fractions of an inch thick the paper is. For example, 12pt cardstock is .012 inches thick. There’s also other ways of evaluating weight such as pounds or gsm (grams per square meter) that sometimes show up, but I’m less familiar with how those work.
A sampling of papers with different gsm. Source: samedayrushprinting.com
There’s also a myriad of different paper types available for printing, but the ones used most often for poster prints are text and cardstock. Text paper is thinner paper similar to office printing paper or the pages of a book, while cardstock (also known as cover stock) is closer to the paper used for a greeting card or the cover of a softcover book. There’s also giclee, which is an archival-quality paper used for more expensive fine art prints that are meant to last, but I don’t use it since the per-unit cost is much higher than cardstock and my customer base prefers relatively affordable posters.
If you want personal recommendations, the paper I use from Catprint is specifically their Light Cardstock – Satin, which I feel has a good balance of sturdiness, light-weightness, and a finish that subtly enhances the artwork (I’m not sponsored, but I definitely wouldn’t turn down a sponsorship if I got an email about it). I’ve also tried 12pt gloss cardstock from Greko Printing (a Michigan-local printing shop) and found it similar in thickness and quality to Catprint’s Light Cardstock Satin, so that’s a valid alternative if you want to support local.
The print I made with Greko is on the left, while the print I made with Catprint is on the right. Greko’s feels slightly thicker, but otherwise the two prints are quite comparable.
If you print at home or (as a Stamps student) in the Digital Printing Lab using an Epson printer — which is a valid option if you prefer total control over your prints and can tolerate wrangling the printer yourself — Epson typically makes several types of papers that are good for art prints. I personally liked their matte premium presentation paper the most — their non-premium paper is way too thin and light for my liking, and I didn’t really like how the gloss finish on their gloss papers made my artwork look overly shiny. They’re typically available in packs of 25 or 50 online in various sizes (usually 8.5×11″ or 11×17″), and they even have some extra premium options like a canvas finish or extra thick paper that I’ve never tried but might elevate your prints.
Don’t make my mistake — make sure that the paper you’re getting has the “Premium” at the top!
Honestly, the best advice I can give in the end is to order a sample pack (usually either free or at a small cost) from the printing company you’re interested in to actually see and feel for yourself which paper type would work best with your own artwork. Enjoy having your artwork physically sit in your hands as a custom print!
In terms of next week’s topic, maybe I’ll go back to showing and talking about my own artwork, since it’s been a few weeks of just talking about art business-related topics. Of course, I’d like to hear if you guys want me to cover anything specific in the future!
Welcome back to another week of Industrious Illustrating! Last weekend I was selling at Motor City Comic Con Fall 2023 in the Artist Alley, which ended up being a lot slower sales-wise and traffic-wise than Youmacon was the previous weekend but still an okay profit. I think that my stuff just isn’t as popular with the comic con crowd, which makes sense since almost everything I draw fanart of is a Japanese or East Asian media property (even including Armored Core). Weirdly enough my Pacific Rim print sold way better at Youmacon than at Motor City, but I think that can also be attributed to Motor City Comic Con’s fall show having lower attendance and buying interest overall than either Youmacon the weekend before. I still hope that I can try spring MC3 in May next year since I’ve heard it’s much better attended than the fall show, but I don’t plan on doing the fall show again since it didn’t really feel worth my time or the table cost.
Something I’ve definitely noticed is that selling big-ticket items (large prints, specialty prints, deskmats) has helped increase my revenue and profits at conventions. My profits at MC3 were salvaged by several people making large purchases of multiple prints or items, and a significant chunk of my far better than expected profits at Youmacon was also people making large purchases of deskmats or multiple items at once. There’s only so many days in a convention weekend, which means that making more money means making more sales or making larger sales. Because my products are mostly for a specific niche (mecha art) rather than a broadly appealing mass market, I can’t count on making more sales at every event. However, I can count on making my art and offerings good enough to encourage larger purchases per interested customer that are worth as much as or more than several smaller purchases. That’s just my personal business strategy, though — other artists may find greater success selling lots of small cheap items that add up into good profits.
In terms of future conventions, I received acceptances for two early 2024 cons within the last few days — Anime Milwaukee and Katsucon (Washington D.C. area) — which means I will finally be branching out from Michigan/Ohio cons and traveling further away to get my work in front of more people who haven’t seen it before. This also means that a bunch of the money I just earned at Youmacon and MC3 is immediately getting reinvested back into the business since I have to book hotel rooms and transportation to get to these cons, which goes to show the importance of making a profit rather than merely breaking even. Without making a profit off of these past few cons and my online sales, I wouldn’t have enough money to both pay off personal expenses and grow my business at the same time.
Anyway, I won’t have any more cons until January, so I probably won’t be talking much more about conventions until then and I’ll focus on other art and art business-related topics. Next week I’ll discuss different ways to make prints (at-home printing, outsourcing, etc.) including a few on-campus or local options for UMich students!
Last weekend I actually got off of the Youmacon Artist Alley waitlist extremely last-minute (like, getting off on Friday of the Friday to Sunday convention weekend last-minute), so I tabled for all three days with the stock I had prepared for Motor City Comic Con and actually surpassed all of my previous sales records and expectations for convention selling! If you’ve been following me for a while, you’ll know that I split a table at last year’s Youmacon with a friend as one of my first convention selling experiences. This year I had a whole table to myself, and I think my art and display have seen massive improvements since then, as you can see in my table display pictured below:
My convention table setup this year, though I did rearrange some of the prints on my photostand later that weekend
Considering how much better my bank account looks now, I actually want to talk about a few different types of income streams that working artists rely upon to make a living, pay bills, keep their art business going, or sometimes just to have “fun money”. Typically artists will rely on multiple income streams/sources to minimize volatility from surges and recessions in the demand for certain types of art services.
Commissions
Getting other people to pay for you to draw them custom artwork is a pretty common way to make money as an artist. If your skills are valuable enough and you get your name out there one way or another, clients will be willing to pay a pretty penny for your services. Typical personal commissions cost anywhere from sub-100 dollars to hundreds of dollars, with some clients potentially being willing to pay over a thousand or more for your artwork if you’re in the top echelon of commission artists.
Commercial commissions (e.g. working as a contractor) pay much better than personal commissions and typically pay several thousand dollars per piece, but they’re also much harder to secure with higher skill and networking requirements to get your foot in the door.
Online Store
A lot of artists run an online store, whether they’re selling digital products, their mass-manufactured products, or even original artworks. If a lot of people from around the country or world want to purchase your products, this can be a decently regular and significant income source. However, there’s a lot of necessary know-how to actually market and run and online store, and actually fulfilling orders can become very time-consuming (I literally just spent 2 hours the other day packing orders). While I don’t focus as much on my online store as I do on other income sources, my online store has taken off enough to the point that it now constitutes a decent part of my income in between commissions and conventions.
Conventions (mass-produced products)
I’ve definitely already discussed conventions a few times before on this column, but they’re worth mentioning again if the type of art you create is geared toward pop-culture fans or simply can be sold in a cheaper mass-manufactured form. Just like with most types of online stores, the money you make per sale isn’t that much, but getting a lot of purchases in a single weekend can add up pretty fast and lead to significant take-home income relative to the amount of hours you spent selling. However, the cost and time investment involved in paying for table space/travel/merchandise is also pretty significant, and most people only break even or barely make a profit after expenses.
Fine Art events (originals)
I don’t know as much about this type of income since I’ve never tried to make money through this income stream, but I’ve attended a bunch and have a few acquaintances who are working to break into this sphere. Just as online stores and convention selling involve combining business acumen with an attractive display and good art to make people believe in the worth of your work, fine art events involve showing off your impressive one-of-a-kind creations and selling them for large sums of money similar to or larger than the amount of money you’d charge for custom commissions (in the hundreds or thousands of dollars). They also have a high initial start-up cost and most people don’t actually make a living off of doing this (which is true for pretty much all of the income streams here). Really, the main difference is the type of audience you have to woo and what kinds of signifiers (e.g. connections, presentation, the quality of your artwork) they recognize as determining the value of paying for your work. As for what those are, you’re better off asking someone else besides me, sorry.
Patreon/Subscriptions
I also don’t know as much about this type of income source, but it’s the closest thing that many independent artists have to a reliable income source. Usually this takes the form of digital goodies (work-in-progress pics, high-quality final pics, a monthly poll to choose an art idea to draw, etc.), but some artists run monthly enamel pin/sticker/charm/etc. subscription services where they mail out a merch package to their subscribers on a regular basis. The per-patron revenue oftentimes isn’t very high because of the expectation that subscription services that provide the same services to everyone who use them shouldn’t be too expensive, but the artists who secure a large and devoted paying following can make a respectable income off of monthly subscription money.
Full-time work
The dream for many artists is to find stable, full-time work with a company so that they can get typical employment benefits (including retirement and health insurance) and not have to juggle several different hustles at the same time to get by. However, full-time employees are expensive for companies to pay for, so in the age of increasing cost-cutting, outsourcing, and automation there’s fewer and fewer full-time jobs available — and the ones that do still exist are oftentimes higher level jobs which require years of experience at other full-time art jobs. Basically, more and more artists in the future will have to rely on some of the other income sources described above.
Of course, these are all very broad descriptions, and there’s many much more specific ways to profit off of these types of income streams, but I hope these descriptions are helpful enough as a way to help you get thinking about how you want to get money in exchange for the value of your artistic labor!
Also, I’ll be tabling in the Artist Alley at Motor City Comic Con this weekend starting from the time that this post goes live, so I’ll make a mention of how I did at my first comic con tabling experience in next week’s column!
Hello, and welcome back to another week of Industrious Illustrating! In previous weeks I’ve gone over profit margins and event types that artists can sell at. This week, I’m discussing a few different types of merchandise that I personally offer and their most common prices at pop culture convention Artist Alleys and online sales. Since this is another long post, I put my list underneath a Read More:
I used to sell stickers, but I stopped because the thin profit margin wasn’t worth how much trouble it was to market and display them in exchange for enough money to maybe buy myself a single boba per sticker. Other artists see great success with selling large volumes of them or in addition to higher priced items though. It all depends on your business strategy! Keep in mind that some event venues will outright ban stickers and other sticky-backed items (phone grips, window decals, etc.) because of potential vandalism.
Buttons/Pins ($3-$15+)
While buttons and pins are sometimes used interchangeably as terms, they describe different types of merchandise. Buttons are typically laminated paper pressed into a metal backing with a safety pin attached on the back to secure it to clothing or other soft materials. Pins are typically wood, acrylic, metal, or enamel with an attached pin post (shaped like a metal nail) and “clutch” (typically rubber or metal) to attach it to soft materials. Pins are also typically more expensive than buttons because of the higher production cost that comes from outsourcing them to a manufacturer rather than being able to mass-produce them at home using a button press. However, these two types of merch are oftentimes displayed together on table displays using corkboard, canvas banners, vinyl cubes, etc. Prices on buttons and pins vary a lot and are generally dependent on the production cost, size, materials, etc.
I currently sell some specialty buttons shaped like coffins or made of soft plush material and a few pins either made out of metal in the shape of a bottle cap or made of responsibly sourced wood. They’re not my bestsellers, but I’ll see how they’ll do over time as I accumulate more online sales and attend more events to sell my art.
Most of my coffin-shaped button designs
A wood pin I’ve made with a fat squirrel design.
Acrylic Charms ($8-$20+)
Acrylic charms are printed 2D artwork sealed within a (typically) laser-cut piece of acrylic cut to the artwork’s outline. The most common size of charm that I see is 2.5 inches with a clear border around the design and a hole in the top with a metal keychain clasp for hanging the charm on something else.
These typically sell for about $12-15, which may seem like a lot for such a small and simple item until you remember that acrylic charms are almost all produced in China (so, higher shipping costs than sourcing domestically like you can for prints) and are relatively sturdy and long-lasting compared to stickers or prints.
Larger charms and charms with special finishes/gimmicks such as holographic finish, foil accents, attached hanging acrylic pieces, special clasp designs, an internal compartment with shakable acrylic pieces, etc. can sell for a higher price, typically somewhere between $20-$30. Charms smaller than 2.5 inches can go for lower, typically somewhere between $8-$10. There’s also charms made of other materials such as metal, wood, PVC, and enamel, but they’re a lot less common than acrylic charms either for durability or cost reasons.
Charms sell best for me through online sales compared to other merchandise types. I assume this is because charms take up less space and that the charms I offer are in a niche that doesn’t have many other artists making small merchandise (mecha/robots) even when compared to the broader internet.
Two recent acrylic charm designs I made that far surpassed my sales expectations when I listed them online
Prints ($10-$25+)
Prints without specialty finishes like holographic (rainbow crystal) laminate or metallic spot foil accents are fairly cheap to produce, totaling about 1 dollar per print for 11×17 inch prints and even lower for smaller prints like 8.5×11″ or 4×6″ prints. Their high price point compared to their production cost comes from the length of time a typical print artwork takes compared to smaller merchandise with simpler designs, and also their relative large size compared to other forms of cheap-to-produce merch such as stickers and buttons. This still means that their profit margins are much better compared to other merchandise types, which also means that competition in the print-selling market is extremely competitive, especially in Artist Alley.
The most common prices I see for common print sizes at pop culture conventions is $10 for 4×6/5×7 prints, $15 for 8×10/8.5×11″ prints, $20-$25 for 11×17/12×18″ prints, and much higher for anything larger. Specialty finishes up the prices per print size by at least $5, though in my experience customers are willing to pay an additional $10 or more for a special shiny-looking print. However, these prices are actually relatively low compared to how much fine artists charge for prints at fine art events, as the typical attendee there is expecting higher prices compared to the average anime or comic con attendee.
My best-seller at cons is by far prints, though prints also account for a majority of the merchandise that I offer in the first place.
Examples of holographic finish prints that I sell online and at my Artist Alley table
Apparel ($20+)
I don’t personally sell apparel because of the high cost per unit (at least $10 per printed shirt) and the amount of stock I’d have to order for sizes S through XL without knowing if it’d actually sell, but there’s some artists who sell shirts or sweaters either printed on by a third-party manufacturer or that they screenprint on themselves. There’s a decent amount of potential money to be made by selling apparel since it’s not a common Artist Alley item and a lot of customers see appeal in functional items, but it also takes up a lot of storage space (a problem especially for weight restrictions on flights for faraway events) and you end up having to compete on price with fast-fashion corporations who can afford razor-thin profit margins far more than an independent artist can.
Other merchandise?
Keep in mind that this list is far from exhaustive and that there’s lots of other things that you can either create yourself or get your art printed on! This is just meant as a quick introduction/overview of commonly sold merchandise types in the specific type of small art business that I currently work in.
Remember that the advantages of selling mass-produced merchandise based on an original drawing instead of focusing on selling one-of-a-kind original art pieces are that you can reuse your designs infinitely and across various types of merchandise to potentially make lots of sales across a long period of time from a few hours of labor. Your budget and time are the true limiting factors when it comes to what kind of merchandise you can create and offer as an independent artist!
Anyway, Motor City Comic Con is next weekend (November 10-12), so I’m waiting on several merchandise orders to ship in ahead of that con. I’ll be debuting new merchandise like rubber deskmats and double foil prints to experiment with what my customer base likes best, and I’ll be sure to write a column after that convention talking about how my first comic con tabling experience went!
