Earning a living from selling my artwork is nothing short of amazing!
Since taking photography more seriously in 2012, I’ve spent all of that time making work for my own personal projects with no thought of making money from those photographs. Not because I didn’t want to, I just wasn’t ready and I tried, so many times and failed quickly. I taught myself that the only way I can sell my photographs as art, would be through selling prints and I did sell two prints once to the college that taught me and again to De Montfort University, who taught me my degree.
So I’m not sure if they really count?
Sileby Marina
What changed?
An incredible amount of variables led to me selling my artwork. I think the main thing was I’d collected a following on social media and with an audience, I wanted to entertain them with my artwork. I was building something that I had no clue about, I was collecting photographs that had a commercial value and I hadn’t realised it. All of it was unintentional and it steered itself with whatever exploits I got myself in to and I didn’t even know what I was doing as I took baby steps towards doing this with no agenda.
In 2019 I contacted another photographer that I know called Justin Minns, who was making really nice calendars and I felt it could be a way for me to sell my artwork.
That was one of the single most important steps I’d taken in my life because it has led to working for myself.
How it happened for me?
I began selecting photographs and designed my very first calendar and incidentally, it was the very first calendar my home town Hinckley has ever had. It went so well and it gave me a new lease of life for my photography. I was struggling with employment and wasn’t earning enough to support my family from self employment back then.
River Soar Weir
In the January of 2020 I did manage to secure myself several commissions for the year that gave me a great start and something to build on. While all this was happening, I’d got my eyes and ears on China with news of the Coronavirus coming from a bat in a wet market!!! I didn’t immediately fall for that and was suspicious from the beginning. A friend of mine was and is still living in China, teaching at a school and I stayed in contact with him during the outbreak to learn as much as I could.
Then I witnessed Covid 19 arriving in Britain and initially because of the incredible levels of fear based propaganda, I fell for it and was having panic attacks at the thought of bringing my daughter up in to this kind of world.
Lockdown was announced and many businesses closed their doors, leaving me with noone to work for. I had nothing to do, so I began working on a photography project to document what we were going through, which spilled out in to bringing community involvement in to it. I published a book with the project work in called ‘Locked Down’.
Then an opportunity to make my photographs in to 1,000 piece jigsaw puzzles came along and I thought I’d give it a go but wasn’t overly sure about it at first. I made 6 designs and they all sold out online before they arrived.
So I made some more and they kept on selling out really fast.
Hinckley DIsneyland
What I did to help it along.
It felt amazing because I’d simply fallen into this and it was never a concerted effort to make a business but I’d made a business using my artwork and people were buying my work.
It just happened!
I’ve never been one to miss out on an opportunity like this one, so I began making new photographs with purpose and with a puzzling design in my mind. It became an obsessive hobby / business and still to this day I find it really challenging to find a jigsaw puzzle worthy photograph.
I learned how to do ecommerce and installed it on my website, did everything that was needed to run a smooth operation and it all seems to work.
Now I’m approaching two years since I started with that first calendar and I’ve now got a range of products to share with everyone.
While it’s amazing to be mixing my artwork with a business, it’s a challenge to find the money to pay the rent on my office and meet the demands of running a business. It changes things and even puts more pressure on making good photographs, while shortening the time I can spend making new photographs.
It’s a balancing act and one that I’ve not gotten right in many circumstances but so far I’m afloat.
There’s something to celebrate there!
Visit my shop to see what I’m offering now.
