Becoming an Artist Part III: Time Management and Burnout

Hello, my Devils.

This is part three of this ongoing series about the ups and downs of becoming an artist for fun and profit. Time management is probably the most important skill that takes a lot of time to learn and figure out. Nothing in this part is the primary rule or even the best way to do it, but this will help give you a starting point to figure it out on your own.

Finding Time

Tempest Fugit., and thus, its management is probably the most important thing you will have to learn when becoming an artist. First, however, you got to find the time to do it. There is only so many hours in a day that you can do things, and you spend a third of that unconscious so it will feel daunting at times; especially when the real world likes to well *gestures at everything* but I'm here to tell you, its not as bad as you think and there is a light at the end of the tunnel.

Sit down, take a breath, and think about what you do throughout the day and week. Write down your responsibilities. Responsibilities are things that you must do, they are expected of you and others may depend on you completing these tasks, like, going to work, caring for your children (both the human and non-human varieties), and managing the household in some way. After writing that down, figure out how long it really takes you to accomplish these, and how often every week you do it. I assume you don’t sweep and mop the house or give your puppers a bath every single day and I assume doing dishes doesn’t take you four hours to complete.

Once you have an idea about your responsibilities, you can easily see a regular block of time where you can squeeze in your craft. Easily you can find maybe three hours out of the day between responsibilities to squeeze in some painting here, some molding there. Maybe even a full day with nothing that generally goes on and you can just make a day of doing it, but once you have it figured out; YOU MUST ADD IT TO YOUR SCHEDULE. IT becomes planned and other activities that you normally plan around your responsibilities must also be planned around your craft.

Keeping a Schedule

A key to this is to maintain the schedule. By keeping it regular, you can easily adjust and plan around it. Eventually everything else will fall into place as you develop a routine, allowing for you to enter you flow faster and even anticipate issues that you may have down the line and adapt.

Burnout Prevention

As you spend more and more time working on your craft, you will start to edge closer and closer to burnout. The best way to deal with it is to prevent it as best we can with regular breaks in your work schedule. Having a weekend where you do not work on your craft for consecutive days and do other things you enjoy will go a long way in this. Regularly scheduled hiatuses to have small vacations from these tasks give you something to look forward to.

Occasionally taking time for yourself to expand your skill sets and the like, essentially changing things up a little bit, will also help.

Burnout is caused by too much repetition of tasks that requires a level of focus and interaction, think a retail worker is in near constant state of burnout if they don’t have any paid time off to do whatever they like, or how some college students that show a lot of promise early in academia will suddenly just crash after years of intense study.

Soothing a Burnout

Even with the best laid plans, burnout will happen so what should you do?

The best solution to a burnout is to close your commissions, struggle and complete the obligations you already have, and just take a break. Most of your fanbase will see it for what it is, especially if you are very communicative and so on, and will still follow and support you through your hiatus.

After your last commission is complete, take some time to yourself. Do what you want to do. Look into projects that you wanted to try or do some experiments to increase your skills. Or just play some videogames for a week, but in any case, during that time slot that you normally dedicate to doing your craft, you instead work on yourself and do some selfcare, even if it’s just a nap.

A week into your hiatus, sit down and evaluate your time usage and see what possibly cased the burnout to begin with, sometimes it’s just something you can’t avoid, other times it can be something as simple as you happen to take on too many projects at once. In any case, come up with a plan about going back to work and slowly start transitioning in when you start to feel better.

I know this part isn’t nearly as long as some of the others, but time management in the end can only really be figured out by you. But next time will be something with a bit more meat to talk about, cultivating a fanbase.

Becoming an Artist Part II: Money

Hello, my Devils.

Welcome to part two of Becoming an artist. This blog focuses on one thing that I know many new artists always question and struggle to find answers. I’m trying to be regular on these posts, and I think this is an easier format to read, but we will see.

How do I price my work?

It took me years to figure that out, and it’s kind of annoying when you get down to it, but if you want to get paid, this is one of those details that needs to be figured out and is one of the more boring sides of trying to be more professional. There are many ways you can price your work, but the best that has worked for me, and I hope you will consider, is the wage method. It is really simple with some very basic math so it shouldn’t be too daunting.

In the wage method you actually work backwards instead of just trying to fix a blind number to your work.

First, figure out how much you want to make in a month. I like to start with a reasonable number such as $100 (yes, I’m American).

Next figure out how much time you honestly can dedicate a week to working on art. Let’s say, it’s a purely side gig for now, so very part time, maybe 15 hours (that’s about 3 hours a weekday leaving weekends free to prevent burnout).

So, you plug that into the following equation:

What you want to make a month / (Hours per week × 4) = The price of your time
100 / (15 × 4) = $1.67 per hour

Now that you know the price of your time, or your wage, the rest becomes easy. Now don’t despair if the number looks low (like the not even minimum wage example above, we will talk about that later in this blog).

When setting up your prices, think about how much time it takes to do it and the cost of materials (also known as overhead). If you are working in a physical medium such as sculpting or painting, it is literally, how much the materials cost time how much of it you used; when dealing with nonphysical mediums or no general overhead, you can kinda ignore this part, but if you wanna go into the cost of power and non-consumable equipment, power to you.

Let’s say that a commission piece you offer takes you three hours to make and you have no overhead. According to the math above, that piece would only cost a just outside $5. I can hear you on my screen right now; “Dude, what the heck, five bucks for three hours of work, that’s outrageous! I’m clicking away from your blog right now!”

Well first off, remember, I was going to address this and second, this isn’t an airport, you don’t need to announce your departure.

This equation gets you started. It helps you figure out how you feel about your value. Many new artists suffer from a disconnect between their labor and the value of their end product because remember:

Anything you sell is your product.

Any effort you put into making your product is your labor.

Now you can see how much you value your labor; we can tweak the equation to give you a better idea.

Maybe, instead of thinking that you are wanting to only make $100 a month (and this is assuming you have enough commissions for three hours a day at five days a week) you should consider making $500 a month instead meaning your labor will be worth $8.34 an hour, which is a dollar higher than minimum wage in the US for the last twelve years as the writing of this blog. That same piece would now be worth $25.02. Much better.

As your work improves and demand for it increases, you will either start adding more hours you can work under this wage. From fifteen hour, to twenty, to maybe thirty and this becomes a parttime gig. And at your current wage set of $8.34 and consistent enough work to fill in thirty hours a week, your income becomes, $1,000 a month, just from your current pricing.

However, if your art is so popular that you are working more hours than you are wanting to, then the next option would be to increase the price of your work. If you want to make that delicious grand every month, but don’t want to work more than 20 hours a week consistently (that’s four hours a workday), then your labor is valued at $12.50 per hour. Then that same piece that used to cost $25 now costs $37.50.

Record Your Income

Now you are making an income, you should really; and I mean this with every bone in my body and a few bones in my dog, keep track of it. There are plenty of tools, like if you use PayPal, it keeps track for you (I really recommend their invoice system to keep track, but you do you) but anything will help.

Recording your income from this endeavor will help you see trends. What sold and for how much and so on, will allow you to adapt your plans and strategies down the line.

It will also help encourage you when you can see your progress.

Regularly Reevaluate Your Prices

On a regular basis, you should look at your trends on what sells and doesn’t, and how much work you are putting into things. If a service doesn’t sell too well, but you like doing it, feel free to drop the price of the service a little bit to increase the availability of the service. If something sells a lot and you find it far more time consuming to complete, increase your price a bit to slow down the demand.

As said before, the formula is a place to start but the market wants what the market wants. Personally, I reevaluate my pricing every six months or so, unless there is a major event in the world that potentially affects a larger portion of my client base, then I may run sales and specials that drops the price for a little while.

Sales and Specials

Sales and special events are good, but just like sugar or drugs, only in moderation. Having a sale that rolls around on a regular schedule helps drum up interest and many of the fans that you have been cultivating may wait until your sales period to commission you. If you have a subscriber base, such as Patreon, Subscribestar, Gumroad, Ko-fi or whatever, having a recruitment period every year will help drive interest and encourage lower-level subscribers to check out higher tiers.

How you want to do your sales and how often is up to you, but some good guidelines I like following is fairly simple.

·         Mass Sale! Everything discounted should be once a year, pick the period where you are in a sales slump. These regular slumps can be due to the holidays or major vacation periods where a lot of people are low on disposable funds. By putting a mass sale for a few days regularly during these periods, it will allow people to still commission you, even if they have more limited funds. If you keep this in a regular rhythm, some of your lower-level clients may save and wait until this period to get some of your more expensive options.

·         Monthly Sale! You rotate a specific service or cater to a specific crowed every month. This allows for groups that you get commissioned by that may be more marginal or unusual that kinda get no love by a lot of other artists to have a chance to get something from you at the very least.

·         Weekly Sales! I do not recommend unless its part of something else like, if you stream some of your work, you might sell a limited number of slots at a discounted price as their work will be broadcasted and used to gain more attention. Beyond that, all you are going to do is create a lot of extra work for little profit.

How you price your work is up to you, but depending on how regular the sale is, you shouldn’t cut the price too deep. A yearly mass sale can be easily cut 75% of your labor cost since this happens only once a year, but a monthly sale shouldn’t be much more than 50% of your labor cost.

DO NOT LOWER THE PRICE LOWER THAN COST OF MATERIALS!

While capitalism is kinda a terrible thing, you must at least cover your costs, and if you lower your price below the cost of production, then for everything you sell as part of the sale will COST you money, which is kinda the opposite direction of your goal.

Now that you understand the basics of how to price your products and services, you need to learn something very important that I still struggle with, and its time management.

Until next time!

Becoming an Artist Part 1

Hello my Devils, this is the first of several little blog posts that I hope will help other artists and possible clients.

With everything going on, there is a massive new generation of artists and creators that need some advice and just a little bit of guidance in order to make this their new side hustle or even a possible career path.

First I want to say that I am no expert in this, but I am willing to share the things I have learned over the years so at least you, my dear reader, can at least form the correct answers and not struggle for as long as some of us had to get to where we are now.

This post is going to cover some of the primary topics, in no particular order, that I always get asked and well, that I wished someone else was able to tell me when I asked; and hopefully in a way that is not patronizing and encouraging. I am going to assume that those reading this have already some artistic talent or, at least, aspirations, otherwise you wouldn’t be asking these questions.

The format we are going to approach this is as a question and answer, like a more informal FAQ.

>I like being an artist, but I don’t like making art, should I do this for money?

The short answer to this one is kind of obvious. No.

The long answer is a little more grey than most of us want to admit. Not all of us who do this kind of work do it for the simple thrill of being an artist and the love of the craft we are doing. Some of us are in it for the paycheck. Like with any other profession, this is work. It will consume significant amounts of time and personal energy to commit to. It’s the personal cost that is hard to equate and define in the end, but we will talk about that later. If you need quick cash or you are doing this as a side hustle between other things, then okay; go ahead and bite the bullet and deal with it for however short term this is planned to be; but when it comes to longer terms; no.

The personal costs will always outweigh the value of the task.

>Should I do this as a profession or should I just keep this a side hustle?

That is really up to you. If you like what you do, then there isn’t any reason you couldn’t, but it depends on how much time and effort you are willing to put into your craft. Its not as cut and dry as it may seem. Being an artist or creator takes a lot of time and effort (the personal cost we talked about last question) and because of that it may not be feasible to do it as a full time professional. That said, it isn’t unreasonable to start off with it a supplemental income and slowly transition it to a more full time gig. That is actually how many of your favorite artists got into the positions they are in. So it really just depends on if you are able to dedicate more time and energy into it and if it can reasonably sustain your lifestyle to do so.

>Do I need a degree?

It honestly depends on what you want to do, who you know in those industries, and the basic entry requirements. Generally, an art degree of some sort is good to pad a resume. It’s a piece of paper certifying that you are knowledgeable in your craft. Without it, in more professional settings such as the art department for a larger, more structured company, it may be needed as they have to handle many different applicants and many different people need to be sure that you are qualified to perform your job without having to constantly evaluate portfolios and the like.

If you are striking out on your own, no. It may take longer, and you would have to be a one-person-band as it were, but like many of your favorite independent artists, professional certification is not a requirement for entry. You will have to work at maintaining and cultivating your client and fan bases.

>Okay, I’m in. Where do I start?

The big thing to focus on is your goals. You hear that a lot when it comes to planning, but it is extremely important in the long run and will help prevent burnout (a topic we will cover later).

Goals come in three general flavors; your short-term goals which can be accomplished within a few weeks or a few months, medium term goals which can be accomplished within a few months but mostly within a year, and long-term goals that may take years to fully accomplish.

The approach I like using when setting these goals is to see what the big picture is and then figure out the steps to get there. If you main goal is to become a professional creator whose primary income is their craft, that is the long term goal from there, you will break down the best path for you.

But for now, lets start with a simple example: Starting a webcomic.

Your primary goal is to be the creator of a webcomic series (it might not be but pretend). You need some basic things in order to accomplish that goal. You need a story, characters, the comic itself, and a host in order to share it and whatnot.

A short-term goal with that is the creation of a premise. The seed of an idea like a comic about post-pubescent martial artist mutant reptiles that live in the sewers of Chicago. The medium-term goals would be coming up with the characters and the world they live in. The long-term would be actually putting in the physical work of pulling the comic together.