In 2019 I got my first illustration client: some guy on Upwork who was looking for an “illustrated” logo of a truffle. He gave me my second job, which was the same truffle, but vectorized, with a Swiss cap on it. Don’t ask. I was still in uni back then, and I was happy to monetize my art considering I had low self-esteem and a bleak future struggling to make ends meet by drawing.
A few months went by, and I acquired a couple of illustration odd jobs, among which was a maritime-themed poker deck and some non-sense products made for dropshipping on Amazon. Then the pandemic hit. 2020 went by, and in the beginning of 2021 I re-opened for business and managed (somehow) to land a few more interesting gigs: packaging, album art, book covers. A full-time booking for a period of 4 months made me think I could do this, I could give up on having a design job and make money following “my passion”.
I had one gig in two years. Well, one gig and a half if we count a bullshit job on Upwork. I was getting by mentally with a UI designer job at an agency, and almost had the opportunity to land a 5.000 EUR commission doing prestigious artwork for some politically affiliated client. Almost. I lost the prospect to a guy who had 1,000x more followers on Instagram.
Then, crickets. Nothingland since then. I burnt out in the summer of 2023, working after my day job to complete illustrations to refresh my portfolio, and when I got some serious product design opportunities, I had to call it quits. I just couldn’t do it anymore. I had a choice between trying to make illustration work, or cutting my losses and pursuing a more meaningful career opportunity.
There are a few ways of “making it” as an illustrator. You have a look at this (probably incomplete) list, and you tell me how well you fit in any of the categories:
Sure, you can apply this to plenty of other industries, and it’s strange to call illustration “an industry” because it’s not something that keeps itself running. Like most other entertainment businesses, illustration runs on fumes because it’s commission based.
What the illustration “industry” does to artists is it gaslights them into believing they should grind themselves into a massive black hole of uninspired content to boost an algorithm or to finish an ever-shifting 5-dimensional “portfolio”. It’s easy to fall into this trap with drawing because completing an illustration takes significantly less time than completing a UX project, or writing a novel, or developing a video game, or exporting a well-edited video.
Art directors with good intentions encourage budding illustrators to adhere to the “grind → get an opportunity” ethos. While I don’t have time to doubt the intentions, I doubt the thinking. An art director has only so much time to study someone’s work, and only so many projects available, and a lot of stakeholders to manage. It’s easier to pass off the project to someone who’s vetted, and knows the stakeholders already, and is trusted by the marketing team, than to introduce someone new into the business or keep an eye out for the perfect project for one stranger. So the whole ethos becomes a trap, because you’re encouraged to do cold outreach to art directors, who are themselves trapped in a 9-to-5 job where most of their work revolves around managing other people’s expectations.
The other big-big trap is print-on-demand. I don’t know who started the POD craze back in the late 2010’s, but fuck them. Actually, I do know tho started it. Lowball illustrators made YouTube videos with cringey tote bags with ugly cat drawings and claimed they sold them for six figures and plenty of people sniffed it and drove insane traffic to sites like Redbubble and Society6.
POD shops have narrow margins for artists and unreliable support for customers and the whole thing is just a big web traffic scheme. The shops purchase low-quality physical products at a wholesale price, print art on them, then ship it overseas. I think most POD shops tried to be Temu before Temu, but if you read a bit of Seth Godin’s disastrous work, you’ll learn the uncomfortable truth that Temu existed long before the official release. Godin called it the “mechanical turk” and reffered to someone who could copy Mona Lisa pixel by pixel and re-sell it at a low price but with cool profit margins for whoever owned the “mechanical turk factory.” Sounds… familiar, doesn’t it? It’s like we’ve been running in circles for the past fifteen years.
The last trap is the more insidious one, because everyone on the Internet gaslights others into believing it works, and it’s the “diversification of income streams.” As in, you can’t make one income stream work for you, so you’ll go ahead and try a few others. At the same time. With very low profit margins, but every penny counts, right?
Well, no. Business infrastructure doesn’t survive on “passive income”
Passive income was a popular meme in the mid-to-late 2010’s. Popularized by weird tech-bros like Tim Ferris, the passive income subculture permeates every little fucking art thing of the last decade. Everything from print on demand, to ad revenue from YouTube, to NFTs and now AI-generated slop is somehow molded by the concept of “making money while you sleep”, because when you’re awake, you’re making no dime.
It’s not a problem that people desire passive income or “diverse income streams”. The problem is that the same people will go online, talk about this, flood the Internet with low effort content, then complain about dropping engagement, about not making enough money on YouTube, about how difficult it is to jumpstart a career in illustration, without realizing they’re part of the problem.
And while I appreciate that some of these people have fulfilling careers, the content they produce for the masses doesn’t sustain their business infrastructure. It would be very simple if all you had to say was “make 1,000 YouTube videos about illustration”, but life is not that simple. And these people- the gurus and nepobabies you look up to- are not your friends; they are caught up in the same “passive income” trap as most art students posting nonsense on Society6, hoping it’ll sell. It will not sell. But it will give you the impression of forward momentum, which will push you further towards self-destruction.
All you have to do is to not try to make a business out of your hobby. I wrote a novel at the beginning of the year, and plan to post it for free on the Internet. I don’t need the… how much is it now? 10% on royalties? Less until you earn out your advance? It’s astonishing how many still pursue traditional publishing when they know full well it’s not the great gig in the sky, it’s just a scheme to make a publishing company money. Especially if you’re not a big-name person who lives in New York or Los Angeles.
The myth of “the great gig in the sky” plagues every artist’s waking life. The hit. The art piece that gets 10,000 likes on Instagram. The book that will outearn the advance. The breakthrough.
You know who had a breakthrough? Guy Ritchie. Guy Ritchie hard-launched his career with two of the best British films in the history of cinema, then spent the rest of his working years chasing after that prestige and never reaching it again.
The problem with the “breakthrough mentality” is that it doesn’t take into account the day to day realities of your working life. If all you do is plant breadcrumbs hoping that one will grow into a bread, you’re ignoring how unsuccessful you are in the present. This clouds your judgment, makes you prone to wishful thinking.
Passion is a great thing, but like passive income, it will not sustain the infrastructure of your business. Plenty of artists get into toxic working environments out of passion, and the reason I dedicated the first part of this article to memory lane was to highlight the toxicity I had to put up with when working on my own. The delusions, the disappointment, the grinding for the sake of grinding, and the wishful thinking of hoping for a breakthrough instead of taking a more strategic approach. Business acumen develops over time, I guess, but it’s one thing to drive yourself to the brink of financial extinction to keep afloat a business that shouldn’t have started, and another thing to just… work on a hobby.
Passion is an inflammatory thing. It’s the Romeo to the Juliet of day to day boredom. Alluring, yet forbidden, but addicting, and self-defeating. People who are mediocre at something will claim they are “passionate” rather than “good at”, and passion can sustain decades-long delusions about talents that were never developed properly.
Assuming you have talent (which is rarer than you think), you’ll have to dedicate time to educate yourself on best practices. And I don’t mean technique, but conduit. Here are a few examples to illustrate what I mean:
These examples bring me to the climax of this section. Passion is nice, but doesn’t give you the strategic overview over an industry. You might be passionate about 2D animation, but that’s not going to help you get a job at Disney. Learning what it takes to get a job at Disney, then copy-and-pasting that recipe, is better than passionately leaning into your love affair with Max Fleischer films.
The “sellout” trope refers to someone who gives up their need of artistic expression to over-indulge in mass-appealing, consumerist bullshit. Which is funny, considering how many fans Sabrina Carpenter has. It can’t possibly be that all of Sabrina Carpenter’s fans are performative, no, the woman has genuine fans regardless of how “commercial” her meaningless music is.
Up-and-comers view commercialism and passion as antagonists. It’s a weird conflict of interests that never gets resolved because artists are taught that grinding meaningless skills (like still life drawing) is the way forward. Under the hood, we feel how useless most of the things we’re told are, but we push forward with them because we’re afraid of risks and losing the “special” label. I think this is one of the reasons why new writers dream of trad publishing regardless of low royalties; it’s prestige they’re hot for, not the money. Because money is bad, because only commercial artists make money.
I’m not a fan of G.R.R. Martin. I think A Song of Ice and Fire is a mess, yet the man carved his spot in contemporary history writing in a genre that’s famous mostly because of a trilogy written by a man who fought in World War 1. I mean, was Tolkien commercial? Which one is it? Is it bad to be commercial because of fame, or is fame bad because it leads to commercialism? I don’t think there’s anything wrong with fame, but that fame is a by-product of industry planting or being first, and that you can’t reverse engineer fame in your studio apartment half-drunk on cheap wine.
What you can do is understand that commercialism doesn’t always lead to money, and neither does passion. Since money is the topic of this conversation, I think money should be the primary indicator of success if you plan to make a business out of art, which I don’t think you should do because you run the risk of severe burnout, losing your spark as you age, and setting yourself up for failure by working in toxic environments.
So did I. Look, the reason this conversation exists is the weird anti-capitalist undercurrent that’s at the foundation of most art-related discussions. This is a primary reason I don’t associate with people who call themselves artists. They don’t seem to get it, and if they do, they performatively spout anti-capitalist rhetoric.
It’s not capitalism that’s preventing you from monetizing your art, it’s your desire to monetize your art without doing everything you can to… make the money. To bring the dough. To clink the jingles. If you want to make money, stop saying you want to make art. If you want to make art, get a job, or involve yourself in a well-paying practice, then make art on the side. If you want to make money, create a stable business infrastructure.
Artists fail at setting up their infrastructure because they never had the money to create it in the first place. Platforms like Patreon and YouTube and print-on-demand shops thrive by selling us the idea that we can make a business out of nothing, which is appealing to working people. Just create an account, buy a domain, and you’re all set to accept donations, which is funny considering that accepting donations involves creating what the donators require you to create, on their timeline. Isn’t that a bit… commercial?
I get it. Too many creators thrive (or seem to thrive) by posting low-effort content that appeals to the masses and they get on the bandwagon because of the… bandwagon effect. And I know how it feels to be jilted on jobs I was capable of doing because someone who was at my level had more followers of Instagram. Or more citations in politically affiliated award shows. Or old money.
But jealousy solves nothing. What am I accomplishing? I know I live in a world where Drake exists. I know some muppet who takes an hour to cook a chicken breast will post a 20-minute chopped video for a chicken bryiani recipe in his schmancy “vintage” kitchen and 200.000 bots will clap and give him ad revenue in spades. It’s a reality I’m used to, but I don’t want to change reality. I just want to make my art, man. And money.
I think the concept of a “hero’s journey” is so ingrained in popular consciousness that we can’t escape it. Almost nobody has a “hero’s journey”, yet artists are encouraged to study that shit like it’s some kind of business bible because “people resonate”. They don’t. Deep down, people feel terrible and inadequate and try to numb themselves with drugs and other activities. Making art is often one of those activities; they give people who feel terrible something to do when they lack the energy to build a better life.
And that’s fine. Our art is not going to change the world, but in trying to change the world, we’ll change our art to suit what the “donators” want. And that’s where I draw the line. I want control, and control and profit margins don’t jive because people with money give it to feel in control themselves.