Everyone loves a good artist. What if your child had an affinity for drawing and creating art— would you push him to pursue this career path? Most likely, we would guide him to a career that would pay him well, not to become a creative.
The reason is we don’t see successful career artists too often. However, that doesn’t mean we can’t turn their passion into a fulfilling and high-paying career as an artist.
Welcome back to the Passive Income from Creativity series (101, 102), where we pursue income by following our passion. Today we are going to create analog and digital art.
Automation Can’t Replace Creativity
Passive income from drawing. Yes, you can make a living from drawing and painting. I recently found out that my nephew in Turkey is a great young artist. My first response was for his mom to start a Facebook group.
The most important part of being an artist is building a collection to showcase your work. Consider it a resume of sorts. By starting a Facebook group and collecting all past and future works, you give everyone a chance to learn your style.
The magic of passive income is to build a library of assets over time. Eventually, as people discover you, they’ll want to visit your back catalog. How can people use your past artwork?
People can find your past work and use them for tattoos, logos, T-shirt prints, articles, book covers, advertisements, etc. You can also upload them to stock photo websites, as I wrote in the last article in this series.
People may also ask you to commission original art for them as well. Since you are exchanging time for money, ensure you charge them appropriately.
Digital art. Creating digital art and design projects is every bit as original and exciting as drawing and painting. In fact, I recommend you learn both. Even drawing on an iPad will give you a leg up in the new world.
Mailbox Money: The Power of Royalties, Rents, and Dividends
You can transfer digital art faster and work on a higher fidelity canvas for big-time clients. Digital art can also play into our next topic, Non-Fungible Tokens or NFTs.
I would build an audience via a blog and Facebook group for digital artists. Everything we need in life requires an audience. If you want to make millions, you’ll need to affect millions.
Non-Fungible Tokens. NFTs are the hot new rage in art. The feature that makes NFTs great is that they are original, and each one is written onto the blockchain individually. This means that a digital product can be one of a kind.
Cryptocurrencies, in particular Bitcoin, were created to send assets via email. The problem with sending a pdf via email is that you’ll need 2-3 copies—the original pdf on your desktop, the email copy, and then the copy the receiver downloads. If we tried to send money over email, we would have to duplicate it multiple times.
6 Types of Income Streams
Bitcoin, and subsequent cryptocurrencies, write the ownership information to the blockchain. Your “key” is proof of ownership. When you transfer Bitcoin to someone else, you remove your ownership on the blockchain and transfer it to them.
The blockchain records all actions and ownership. This custody chain is also essential for NFTs and digital art.
When you create an NFT, you are the original owner. You can set the number of royalties you receive for each subsequent sale. Say you put your royalty rate at 5%. Now, every time someone sells you art for the rest of the time, you will receive that 5%.
All analog and digital artists should strive to build these royalties because they are actual passive income from artwork. There has never been a way to create such “clean” royalties from art.
Building an audience. The thing about NFTs is that the market prices them according to your value as an artist, not theirs. A massive NBA star can create a crappy NFT that sells for a considerable sum of cash. Yours may be much better, but no one knows, or cares, about you.
Basics of Design 101
Therefore, you need to build an audience. And once you have a small audience, you need to keep building it until the end of time.
Let’s run this scenario to the ground. Let’s say you have a Facebook group of 10,000 members. You release an NFT of a pastel bird painting for $1,000. Now, ten years later, your Facebook group is 500,000 people strong. How much do you think your original bird painting would sell for at an auction?
That’s right; it would probably be trading for close to $1 million by then. You would receive a 5% royalty of that million dollars, which is $50,000. Imagine you had 500 or 1,000 NFTs floating around—this could become very lucrative indeed.
Again, the main draw would be your stardom and consistent work. The more you stay true to your artist lifestyle, the more your prior world will be worth. Take a long-term mindset to build wealth slowly to let time and compounding do their job.
The Magic of an Automated Business
Art in the Metaverse. NFTs will be a huge, huge part of the digital world of the metaverse. Again, even if you are an analog artist, learn to scan or copy your works into the digital space.
The money in art will come through NFTs, so you need to get on board. I believe the money in analog art will be from commissioning individual original tattoos. Heck, there may even be NFTs that become tattoos.
People will own land and build digital homes and businesses in the metaverse. Everyone will want original art or expensive NFTs from celebrities. As you get started, your creativity will be your selling point.
As you become more popular, your popularity will sell your NFTs. Funny how life works. If you are an artist, learn everything you can about NFTs, cryptocurrencies, and the metaverse. That will be your meal ticket over the next 20 years.
Living Overseas Passively 106: Royalty Income
Back to reality. Back in the physical world, you can still make a ton of passive income by selling courses, consulting, teaching, etc. You can even create magazines of your artwork and release them on the Amazon platform.
You could get paid just for people scrolling through your digital artwork via the Kindle Unlimited platform—how amazing is the digital age?
Conclusion. The most crucial part of any creative platform is building an audience and showcasing your back catalog. Your art will do the rest of the work for you. It’s okay if your first creations suck—they should suck. Life is about the journey of growth.
People will eventually love your first work because it is the raw, less talented version of you. Don’t hide your initial passions; showcase them. They will bring in a lot of money in the long run.
For any artist, my quick recommendation is to build a repository of all your work (for example, in a Facebook Group) and learn everything you can about NFTs and the metaverse. If you can pivot to this digital world, you will earn digital gold.
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