Making your first dollar as a freelance artist is a huge milestone, especially these days when it can be really difficult to make clients or even get noticed. There are a bunch of ways to make a living as a freelance artist, so it can be really daunting at first. You might think you’re not good enough at art, or you might be concerned about establishing an audience.
So in this post, we’re going to teach you the steps you need to take in order to make your first dollar.
If you have a niche, take full advantage of it
A great place to start when making money with digital art is to find a niche for yourself. Look at the type of artwork that people commission and look for growing sectors where artists are needed.
One example of this is with content creators, in particular streamers. Streamers need overlays for their broadcasts, they need marketing materials for things like social media, and they also need custom emotes that their viewers can use. This is a great opportunity for digital artists who have experience or knowledge of streamers on platforms such as YouTube and Twitch.
Identifying a niche like this usually starts by looking at your own skills and determining if you’re a good fit for a specific category of art. Someone who has trained in digital art and likes cartoon-style drawings would be a great fit for designing emotes. It’s also become incredibly popular to use tools such as Live2D to create virtual avatars for content creators, which is a great niche to get into if you enjoy doing character designs.
In short, identifying a niche is a great way to make your first dollar in freelance art It can take a bit of research and you need to have a good feel for the community, but it’s always a good place to start small.
Selling your own artwork in different forms
So you’ve just got your first digital drawing tablet and you’re cranking out fun designs and graphics. You might think that it’s all for practice and that there’s no way to make money off your doodles–but you’d be wrong!
You can very easily sell your art prints or even turn them into items such as clothing, keychains, stickers, and more. It’s really easy to do so thanks to services such as Shopify because they can automatically connect to services that print those items. All you need is a design that is uploaded to a website.
However, it’s worth mentioning that the hard part here is getting noticed. Just like before, try to identify a niche or fandom if possible so that you can appeal to their tastes. Not all of your artwork will be desirable as a product, but if you market yourself well enough, people will come flocking to your store and start buying your products!
Selling your artwork is another fairly simple and reliable way to make money as a freelance artist. There’s also the plus side that it can be fully automated, effectively making it passive income!
