Where Was I?

I have not had a sale for the first few months since I set up shop, but this time I can take some responsibility for that, because I was initially not very clear about what I could provide to the audience besides my art and my update posts. It's also been a while since I spoke on this matter as well. You also may have also noticed that I don't post much art outside of the Untilted comic strip. All that is explained on my personal blog.

Regarding art business, I've done a lot of introspection and research on what specifically I want to do these past few months, because of the lack of subscriptions and interactions and mostly due to my thinking that I would be mostly passive while customers come to me. It seems that no matter where I set up shop, whether it's Mercari, Fiverr or some other marketplace even if run independently by me, I don't get much traction anywhere. There was a whole moment where, despite consistently putting up stuff on Mercari for weeks, I went a whole year without a single sale, which led to my frustration and led to me eventually deactivating my Mercari account. All this despite putting up stuff most people want to see. And I'm being regularly blamed for not being proactive enough when I just want to not have to think about how to woo people in my business, which apparently I must actively do or else I'll be treated with suspicion. But guess what? It was like this under actual employment as well. When I signed up for a temporary summer painting job at my community college, I was also being seen by my manager as “not doing my job and constantly disappearing” despite the fact that I actually was consistently painting on the areas I was assigned to the entire time, and despite me showing him. Which led to me quitting a day before the official employment term ended.

It turns out that I'm not very traditionally well-suited for any type of business or profession due to my nature and attitude towards it. And I think the main reason for this is because, going by how people promote their own products and all, from Mastodon to Pinterest, everyone HAS to be proactive and initiative at ALL times and everything HAS to be attractive and acceptable to the general public (or at least a well-defined popular demographic/audience) or else I'll be viewed with suspicion/contempt and eventually ignored in favor of more popular and marketable influencers. And I don't really like that notion. At all.

It also turns out that there are some things in the art business that I am not exactly comfortable with doing, that I've seen everywhere I go in a lot of art circles:

  1. Art prints. I feel like only photography is best suited to be printable, but I don't exactly have the budget for a high-end camera (although I do have Photoshop and Lightroom, but I rarely use it) so I will probably never be able to successfully pull it off.
  2. Art merchandise (like stickers, bookmarks, shirts, etc.). I do actually do my own stickers and bookmarks using my own materials and whatever else I got but I just do not like the idea of turning my art into marketable merchandise that dilutes almost all meaning my art has. It feels like I am using my art in a way that indicates that it does not deserve respect beyond being marketable and trendy.
  3. Stock photos and stock illustrations. At one point I did attempt to sell stock photos with Adobe Stock, and they rejected my photograph for being low-quality and, most irritating at all, “not representing the broader human experience” as if a stock photo has to mean something beyond being used by businesses to showcase their products without actually showing the actual product. So I stopped. I'm not even sure if someone can sell stock photos beyond a marketplace, because most people are bound by marketplaces that either prohibit content with resale rights or have heavy restrictions on them anyway, and stock images are technically such content. So I will not be doing stock images.
  4. Sending physical and handmade art/jewelry. I currently do not have the means or support to do so due to preservation concerns as I live in an apartment building that's not very suitable enough to preserve high-quality artwork beyond the ones that take low maintenance to preserve.
  5. Anything that can be sold on Fine Art America, Etsy, Pixels, etc. due to my experience with marketplaces I just explained at the beginning.
  6. Anything photography related due to the high expectations associated with it.
  7. Any type of art commission that feels informal (like character base templates). Now, I have no hostility or hatred towards people who do art commissions. But a lot of the scene and their ideas feel, how do I put this in a nice way, too simplistic and informal. I do not mean to say that they are unprofessional at all, or anything overly negative like that. I am not one of those people who judge other people's career choices based on perceived professionalism and I am actually very accommodating about this stuff. However, I have a preference towards commissions that convey a higher level of seriousness and that give me something simple yet also challenging to do, while not burning me out, but also helping me learn something new at the same time. And I don't feel that certain types of art commissions meet that standard for me.
  8. Any type of art commission that feels too easy to do to the extent that it can be exploited by someone who wants to rip it off and pretend they did the work themselves when they stole it from me (like profile picture commissions done in the same kind of style, “adoptables”, etc). See 7.
  9. Any type of art commission that has loopholes that may violate my boundaries and could get me in trouble (e.g. non-explicit fetish art that isn't obvious to the average viewer that it's meant to be fetish art). I've had this boundary way before the whole UK Online Safety Act thing (which I technically may be bound to due to me being on a UK-based marketplace website, although my website contains no objectionable content) but I would just like to reiterate that I do not do any kind of content that may be considered harmful to vulnerable audiences, legally or not, no matter how implicit or hidden it is. Although all my art is created for a general audience and is not primarily directed at either children or adults, I do not do any kind of adult content whatsoever. This is not to judge those that do, just to set things straight.
  10. Anything that requires software I may not be familiar with.
  11. Texture/brush packs (because I am not familiar with them)
  12. Online teaching (for obvious reasons)
  13. Anything involving cryptocurrency, non-fungible tokens, and artificial intelligence due to ethical risks
  14. Anything beyond my current skill level and budget.
  15. Anything outside my personal taste unless I'm sure I'm comfortable with it. I do not discriminate against anyone for having an art style different from my own either.

I do like the idea of putting up membership content for people to subscribe to me and see all my content there, even if it's just for a month, which is why Untilted was initially a subscription-based thing before I realized that no one knows me well enough to want to subscribe to me. But I haven't even figured that out well yet, as I see some people put some behind the scenes art in public, and other art behind a membership paywall. As a result I am stumped as to what I want to put on my membership tiers, and I am open to ideas. I was thinking maybe I could do alternative versions of certain Untilted comics, or maybe some GIF animations.

I would really like everyone's help and input with this.

For any inquiries or feedback, please contact me at this email right here. (When commenting on a blog post, kindly include “Re: [insert blog post name here]” in the subject line.)