Most artists, photographers, and visual creatives know.. once your work is complete, showing and selling your masterpiece is the next step in the creative process. What happens when one payday isn’t enough to satisfy us? That additional outlet is called passive income. Passive income allows artists to start bringing in extra money once the creative work is done without having to constantly re-create originals ultimately costing us more time and more money. 

Gone Are the Days of Only Being Compensated Once!

If You’re a Photographer: 

As a photographer, you may have a particular style or a significant effect that you’ve created when you publish your photos. If you’ve been using this across your work and this is recognizable by your social channels, creative partners and customers, you can create bundle packages for presets and sell those to your network. Bundle packages of presets and push the products on your website or via your social channels. Doing this will allow you more income and will double as a way to connect to your audience. How rewarding would it be to see those who admire your style of work create their own interpretation of it?

If You’re a Visual Artist, Designer or Illustrator:

Merchandising is a productive strategy allowing artists with a visual component to recreate their work without the mess of sorting through wholesale vendors and dealing with the retail side of things. Using certain platforms that allow artists to upload work to be printed on a variety of items such as Red Bubble or Society 6  allows you to create product lines such as mugs, t-shirts, aprons, etc. with very little hassle.

Using these websites or building partnerships with similar companies is a great way to generate more passive income and they generally come with agreements. Before you upload work or sign any contracts, it’s important to make these simple checks to ensure you retain ownership of your artwork:

• Double-check usage info, you always want to be certain that you are the sole owner of your artwork and to be knowledgable of how or when it will be used.
• Thoroughly read through legal agreements. As the artist, always ensure that you’re aware of any legalities that you are agreeing to in exchange for using these websites.

Licensing Your Artwork:

Licensing your work is slightly similar to merchandising, but it differs by connecting your artwork to a brand, store or company wanting who essentially wants to use your work for a particular period of time and for a particular use. Usage fees are a part of this process. Let’s say you are a digital artist and for the Christmas Season a brand would like to license your work for Christmas cards through the next year. You will get paid a percentage of each sale or a licensing fee allowing the brand to use your work for the amount of time specified in your contract. 

Be sure to check what your artwork will be used on and where the product will be distributed. If you agree to have your work used on cards, make sure it doesn’t show up on aprons. A great pro to having a licensing agreement is that you don’t have to do any marketing, the brand will do it for you!

If You Have Extra Supplies:

Look around you! Do you have a lot of equipment in your home or studio? A lot of artists have quality equipment like microphones, cameras, tripods, etc. that are not being used all of the time. Make money by lending the items that are not of use to you at the moment to your creative peers. Platforms like Fat Llama allows you to lend to peers and make money renting your equipment that usually would go untouched for long periods of time.

Creativity Leads to Options and Options Lead to Income

The accessibility to create passive income streams eliminates the days of selling your work only to compensated one time! The ease of access to these outlets is a great comfort to artists. For a lot of artists, it is a great relief knowing that your work can make money without extra time!

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Banner Photo by Matthieu Comoy on Unsplash