Making a living being creative -- I started an art store!
It’s true. Even though I have successfully cleaned up a total of ONE piece of art, it is soooo exciting seeing my favorite creation slapped on all sorts of products! Society6 is a Print-on-demand site (for people like my family who have not used it) where you can get my art plastered on stuff. They ALWAYS have % off deals, so don’t feel pressure to pay full price. I’ve never actually sold anything so it could be that if someone purchases a product during a sitewide sale, the profit that I get diminishes. I don’t really care though, it’s awesome! I put up a jigsaw puzzle. Half the piece are white! Oh I giggle every time I think about it. I hope someone buys it as a prank for someone.
You can find my one single art slapped on a bunch of stuff Here!
And also on my “Art” page which might be up and running by tonight but also might not. But the excitement is real!!!
As for anyone curious about my progress. I’m nowhere near the level of “set up” that I wanted to be a month in. Turns out this whole time has been steep learning curves and making accounts. Took me a full free trial’s worth of time to learn Affinity, but I like it! That has been hours upon hours though. Not just learning the software, but buyingand learning how to use the scanner, making high-res scans that aren’t stupid 400mb, had to get an external hard drive so that I can clean off processing space on my real computer… That’s all been probably 30 hours alone. Not to mention setting up accounts and doing internet money stuff, etc.
Setting up this blog has been the relief that I needed. This is the crux of my future and what all “success” will hinge on. The reason being, journaling helps me break through my blockages and heal. It’s truly for me. I’m glad I finally did it, and I’m sure all my 4am long-form, deep-thought text recipients will, too.
On the music front, I signed up for the Soundcloud distribution program. No royalties yet but I wasn’t expecting any of that for….a long, long, long time. What I really want them on there for is so that eventually they’d be available on Instagram and Youtube, etc for people to use as shorts (see below- all I have to start doing is make a video and get them into circulation). I also decided that some of my pieces are so short that it’s okay that they’re not perfectly mixed and mastered. They’re like 2 layers apiece. So I went ahead and just released them for purchase on the internet.
On the video side, my original plan was to record myself drawing pieces, write a piece of music to attach to it, upload those pieces to Soundcloud, edit those videos to be speed-ups of the drawing process that fit the length of the music, and release them as reels. The problems I’m running into are, I’m so focused on the tiny details that it takes like eight hours to finish a piece… I usually start and stop from different places, the lighting changes, and when I speed up that much time I can’t even get it within five or six minutes.
So, I might pivot. In addition to making little shorties when I learn to not take forever (like when I specifically say okay, next three hours I should just go nuts for a reel), I’d like to just make a normal sized however-long video, and either attach it to a song, or attach it to a full album. For background something. When people type an album in youtube, they can listen to the official upload, or they can listen to the version that has pretty art being colored attached to it. The point of this is, Youtube has a royalty program where, if I post a song that is copyrighted, it’ll reach out to the band and say, “Hey, this creator used your music. You guys wanna throw on some ads and split the profits?” Some people will say yes, some people will say no. Doesn’t really matter if lots of people say no- I just really like the idea of letting people see into my writing process.
Some time next week, I want to do my first Twitch stream. I’ll probably ask for people to jump on and help me set it all up. Hopefully I’ll get a response from MLB’s legal team in response to the question, “If I want to watch the Mets game off camera while I stream, am I allowed to stream only the audio? And if not, is there a way I can get permission?” If anyone happens to know the answer to that, I’d appreciate a talk.
Anyway this is the update. No profit yet. Only ironing out the foundations. Ultimately it’s been fun and I get sucked into tasks easy! So it’s all good. The end goal will ultimately be to make captioning my spending money job, and only caption baseball games and other sporting events that I love (which means giving up all my news because after 7ish years my heart can’t take it, any more).
Once again here’s the new art store. Ennnjjjoooyyy!
