Friday Thoughts Ep. 38 (Patreon)

Hello Patrons, happy Friday! Welcome to another episode of.... Friday Thoughts with Ragonia! Where you can read all about the weekly inner workings of a slowly and painfully developing art business!

Okay, I say painfully, but it was a pretty good week, and a good month. I can't complain. But my neck does hurt a little bit right now...

Anyway! I hope you had a nice end to your January, I hope your resolutions stayed resolute and you inched (or jumped!) a little closer to your goals!

This last week (and month, to be honest!) was largely devoted to finishing the bulk of my Valentine's Day portrait commission orders and mailing them out to my lovely customers.

Currently custom portrait orders are my true money maker, my bread and vegan butter. 

I like to do them in batches like this because it speeds up the overall process. While one portrait is drying I start working on another. When I boot up the computer to print labels I can do it once for 6 orders all together. 

And it's useful to take one trip to the post office box instead of six!

And I have to clean up the packing mess once. Consolidate the work!

Once I've gotten the ball rolling on portrait orders I'm having a surprising number of people emailing me asking when they can get portraits. It's exciting, and a little overwhelming. It's nice to think I may have found a fairly reliable way of making enough money to live while building up the other side of my art career goals; merchandise. You know, prints, stickers,  shirts, mugs, earrings, etc. 

I think at this point in time I'm not clear enough with my merchandise branding or quality, and not creating enough items with enough frequency to make a livable income. With portraits I can sell 15 portraits in a month and have enough to live on. Now I just need to find a way to balance the two.

I'm grateful for the awesome number of commission orders this month so far, but I can see how easy it is to give my undivided attention to only portrait orders. I've put almost no time in to product development, personal work, etc.

I'm wondering, should I go with the flow of portrait orders and put all of my time and attention on them in the months that they come in? And expect that there will be slow months for me to devote my time to merch, Patreon, everything else I need and want to do with my business?

I suppose we'll see! I'm still learning the ebbs and flows of freelancing.

This makes me think... I should write a long article on what I've learned in my year of painting portraits! 

I have had a tiny bit of time this month for sketching. Right now I find myself keeping it very loose, quick, sketchy, funny, and random. I like to let whatever comes out of my mind and hand happen.

The above sketch was from the first week of work, before I really started to get in to the swing of things.

I hope you all like seeing the bits and bobs that aren't clean or complete enough to share on other platforms! I feel like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter are often people's "highlight reel". I think it would be interesting to see the nuts and bolts here on Patreon. Do you like seeing these sketches?

A few more thoughts from this week:

1. I hosted an "Ask Me Anything" on my Instagram stories yesterday, and got a lot of really good questions that were hard to answer quickly. Their questions gave me some great ideas on longer articles/tutorials that I could write for your benefit here. Perhaps monthly? And one of the first articles will be based on something on of my lovely Patrons (Kaila!) asked!

2. I think I've said this a lot before, but it's been on my mind almost daily: I want to re-do this Patreon soon. I've been a little hesitant to share my Patreon because I don't feel like my reward tiers are reasonable or achievable, and I'm nervous about people signing up for something that I want to change soon. I'm thinking of adding a lower price tier, and adding some new benefits for the current $5 tier. Perhaps eliminating some of the higher tiers, while still providing benefits to those who want them.

I'm not sure if my patrons would prefer free things, like stickers or prints, which I could push myself more to keep up with, or if tutorials, videos, and articles are more desirable/helpful. Maybe I'll create a questionnaire soon for you all, so I can determine what you find interesting, useful, or valuable about this Patreon! So hang tight, and if you have a second maybe let me know in the comments why this page is important enough to you to pledge $5+ a month, so I'll know what features to lean in to. Thank you!

3. I just invested in a DYMO 4XL label printer from Amazon, for $200+. Currently I buy labels from the Fed Ex down the street and print them with my expensive ink and toner on my expensive-ish printer. The DYMO apparently is thermal, so it doesn't use ink, just interacts with the special label paper to quickly create a shipping label. This label printer will DEFINITELY save me money and time in the long run.

And that will be all for this week, my friends! If you have time, I'd love to hear in the comments what you find valuable about this page, how I could make it better for you. 

You're the best!

xoxo

Ragon