Building an art career online

How can computers help us make a living at art?

No matter how traditional we want our art to be, we have to use computers to market our artwork. How do we make a living at it? And what’s the best way to allocate our time and resources to be as effective as possible?

In this essay I want to present two pathways to success: one involves going wide, and the other is about going narrow.

Changes in social media

Let’s start by looking at the state of things. The last two decades have witnessed the invention and evolution of social media. They have taken a lot of criticism, but they’re still the most popular way to spend time online. Over the years, they have changed. The original idea was to share your life and thoughts with a known friend network, and now it’s much more about building follower counts via entertaining content. 

Along with that change of network orientation there has been an evolution in content. Today there’s less emphasis on words and pictures alone, and more focus on short-form video. These changes were already happening at Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter/X before TikTok came along, but the dramatic success of TikTok led all the others to emphasize attention-getting video content. YouTube created Shorts, and they’ve been successful with it. But it’s not just a story of attention spans getting shorter. Long-form podcasts and real-time videos get a lot of views, too. So you can do well going short or long. 

Wing’s Noodles, gouache, 5 x 4.” While teaching at a concept art symposium, I stopped to paint this old neon sign in Montréal's Chinatown, which helped me keep my blog followers up to date with my adventures.

Feeding the algorithm

The recommendation algorithms used by these platforms determine which videos and which posts get seen. The algorithms are optimized for maximum engagement, hooking the viewer’s attention and holding it. This has led to to an over-saturation of emotionally charged content, and unfortunately that means prioritizing outrage and negativity over nuance and constructive discourse. 

Most of us need to promote ourselves online if we want to make a living at art. Many creators try to second-guess the algorithm in hopes of maximizing subscribers, comments, and likes. That’s fine as long as you don’t get too emotionally attached to the numbers or the negative comments. It helps to think of platforms as “push media,” meaning places to publish, rather than consume, information.

To make the most of your time spent in content creation, it helps to streamline your workflow so that you can post similar content on multiple platforms. You can develop a considerable amount of synergy by cross-linking content, or publishing both in print and digital. 

How do you monetize subscribers?

If you’re popular as an artist on social media, how do you convert that into lunch money? First, you can think of this exposure as a promotional tool. Any place you share your artwork, such as Pinterest, Behance, ArtStation, or LinkedIn, plus the social media mentioned earlier, raises awareness for you and your work, and you can occasionally use your feed to announce a new print on Etsy, an original for sale, or a gallery exhibit. 

If what you want is to be hired by a studio or commissioned by an art director or collector, then you can think of your feed as a place to put your portfolio. But you can’t always be passing the hat. You have to give a lot of stuff away if you want to sell other stuff.

In addition to directly promoting what you have to offer, you can market your influence through advertising and product promotion. YouTube is the social medium best able to yield a passive advertising income for its creators. Currently the platform shares 55% of its advertising revenue to the creator, and that can start to add up once your subscriber count passes into the six-figure range.

Snow Pile, gouache, 5 x 8.” I posted this painting on multiple platforms. I used my blog to go into more detail about my inspiration and methods. 

Promoting other brands

Another way to make a living on social media is the placement of affiliate links to Amazon or other online retailers. These links are coded in such a way that you can earn  a small kickback for each sale you generate without costing the customer anything. Some manufacturers offer a full-fledged affiliate partnership program, where you act as a brand ambassador for their products. When your following is large enough, companies are willing to pay you to personally promote their products or services with sponsored posts or brand integrations. 

It’s essential to be completely open with your followers about these product promotions to avoid giving the appearance that your judgments are not independent, especially if you use those products in your public posts.

But building a big following on social media isn’t the only pathway to earning a living online. Instead of generating content with the broadest popular appeal, you can develop high quality relationships with a smaller group of loyal fans.

Next up, we’ll look at this narrowcasting model, which you can pursue instead of, or in combination with, the wide-net approach we’ve looked at so far. We’ll define what is a “true fan,” and we’ll look at 15 different ways you can develop these relationships. Then we’ll talk a little about time management, and we’ll end with the all-important question of the work itself: How do you know what kind of art you should spend your time on?