On being a full-time freelance artist (Patreon)

A few aspiring artists have asked for my advice on how to make a living doing art. I always tried to keep my answers short and hopefully still provide them with something of substance, but I think it’s time I should go a little more in-depth into this topic.

This is gonna be less of an ‘advice on making money from art’ blog and more of just me sharing my experience and the experience of other freelance artists I know. If this is of interest to you, I hope you can find at least one helpful thing out of this. If not, I’ll try to make the read entertaining at least :)))

I’ve never worked for any company or studio. Besides my Patreon, all of my income comes from commissions. The biggest question for any beginning freelancer of my kind is: How to get commission clients in the first place?

Currently, since I’ve managed to build a decent following there, almost 90% of my clients are from Twitter. But before that, I used to get all of my jobs from Reddit. Reddit was my bread and butter, and in my opinion, still the best place for short-term freelancing. You don’t need to have followers to get eyeballs on your art there, you can just post on all the different subs and drastically increase the chance of someone liking your stuff enough to hire you. A lot of my artist friends rely heavily on it as well even now.

I’m not saying Reddit is a goldmine, it’s not a magical solution. If you want stability, you definitely need a following. And the best place for this, in my opinion, is Twitter. Twitter is in bad shape right now, and maybe tomorrow, it’ll become unusable. But right now, it’s still unmatched. I never got any luck with Facebook or Pixiv, Deviant is pretty much dead, and Insta’s conversion rate from followers to clients/supporters is incredibly low. Remember, the goal here is to get paying jobs.  Having a lot of followers doesn't always mean you're gonna get much financial support. 

Obviously, the easiest way to build a following is doing fanart and trends. I won’t talk about it, but I’d like to discuss its potential consequence. When you’re chasing followers, it can get frustrating because your artistic needs are not fulfilled. Maybe it’s not the case for every artist, but it definitely is for me. It’s important to maintain a healthy balance between drawing what’s popular for growth and drawing what you want.