The artistically inclined sometimes struggle to feel like their creative talents are being properly taken advantage of. It’s the feeling that you aren’t appreciated or overlooked, and the constant wonder if you can make money doing what you love. Being creative and having an eye for design, an ear for music, or the skill and craftsmanship to illustrate can sometimes feel like an uphill battle to get the recognition and compensation you feel your talents are worth.
The wonderful thing about possessing these talents isn’t about learning to play an instrument or learning to paint. It’s about finding the right career to help you utilize your skills to earn money. This is easier said than done as finding the right marriage of passion, creativity, and career potential is something people go their whole lives trying to figure out. You might need a little push in the right direction on the types of careers or opportunities to look for, which is why these eight great ways are listed for your consideration.
1. Starting a clothing business
Being talented isn’t enough sometimes, and there’s a truly select handful of people who will be able to capitalize on their natural artistic skills. For the rest of us, we have to get creative and be smart about how we use it. Being a skilled designer or artist can mean starting a clothing business. While it’s not the usual way to implement your abilities, it’s profitable and a more practical way to go about it.
The keys to starting your own business will include knowing your way around shipping and ordering, starting a website, and what services to help you sell your designs. Having a clothing business can be as simple as operating out of your living room from a laptop using dropshipping and other e-commerce techniques. The services listed at https://thrivescreenprinting.com/wholesale-screen-printing/ show how you can save money, improve how much work you can get done, and grow your business. Being your own boss is a way many people are able to use their creative talent to earn a living, and you can, too.
2. Become a tutor or teach courses.
If you’re skilled enough in a particular area like painting, drawing, acting, and most notably, music, you can find yourself valuable to those who want to learn how to become a better artist. Tutoring is one of the best ways to take your artistic skill and apply it in the educational sense to help boost someone else’s abilities, and even learn some new skills yourself.
Tutoring or teaching courses allows you to make a flexible schedule to fit in with your existing work schedule, or focus on teaching these skills full-time. Combining the importance of education and skills is why tutoring is important, along with building confidence and other functions of a successful artist and person. You can offer video lessons or create web courses to sell and help inspire budding artists, or help those that just need some refreshers.
3. Networking as a way to find opportunities
Networking is almost always known as a way people in the business world can climb the corporate ladder or get their foot in the door. Many people don’t realize that networking applies to just about all areas of careers and fields of interest. Networking is just our way of socializing and using it for some benefit, and this applies to creative types as well. It might seem confusing on how to network as an artist, but it’s rather easy now.
Thanks to social media and the Internet as a whole, networking doesn’t have to be an in-person affair like it used to. Networking is traditionally done through your job, social gatherings, having friends who know someone, and meeting people in college. For a lot of us, these are things of the past. Social media has allowed creatives and artists to find like-minded people online that can help share their network of connections and vice versa. Meeting people through online workshops and communities is a great way to open up your horizons to finding that dream job, or get you on the right track.
4. Blogging and vlogging your way to success
If you couldn’t already tell, technology is helping artists a lot. Blogging and vlogging (video blogging) is another potential choice you have to turn your artistic talents into a money-making opportunity. If you don’t feel like teaching a class, making a digital course, or are intimidated by the prospect of face-to-face teaching, maybe you can use your talent elsewhere. Blogging and vlogging is a good way to share your breadth of knowledge and your work without the difficulty of making lessons.
Starting your own site and monetizing it through selling ad space, affiliate marketing for music or art products, and commission-based incentives allow you to write about stuff you love and earn money. Starting a vlog on YouTube can give you the opportunity to do the same thing as vlogging is one of the most popular forms of video channels that creatives make. You can start a channel on photography and give tips or give reviews on products. You never know who might be watching, and you never know how popular it might become unless you try.
5. Take an internship.
Internships might not always be paid, but they can lead to a job or recommendation down the line that could further your artistic career. Internships give you a similar experience to networking in that you’re meeting peers in your area of interest and people in positions of power in the art world. From a fellow photographer or musician to a creative director for a brand or art gallery, you can meet some interesting people in an internship.
These types of opportunities are hard to come by and often very competitive, which means you have to wow them with a solid portfolio, resume, and interview, but they act as a gateway to new opportunities, and as stated earlier, are a great way to network for future career possibilities. Just because you’re not getting paid right away doesn’t mean you won’t in the future. An internship is an example of playing the long game.
6. Writing a book
Taking your blogging or teaching skills to the next level could mean writing a book. Being an author is a much easier thing to do now than ever before because writing an e-book and having it published could be something you get done in your spare time. Of course, writing a book isn’t as easy as it sounds. You need to plan out your chapters and paragraphs, make sure you edit it correctly for spelling or grammar mistakes, and hopefully find someone who wants to publish it. But then, it’s doable.
The other big question is whether or not you have enough knowledge on the subject to write a book. It’s one thing to be naturally gifted in a creative capacity, but it’s another to be able to explain it well enough that if someone picked up a book for the first time and was learning about the art of watercolor painting, they would know what you’re saying. The point is that writing a book is easier to do, and self-publishing is an available option, but be mindful of how much effort goes into making the content of the book good. Still, there’s money to be made if you write about what you know, and others want to read it.
7. Freelancing your talent
Selling your labor as a way to make money is how the whole world works, but that doesn’t mean you need to be part of a big agency, firm, or company to use your creative talent for financial gain. Freelancing your talent through Fiverr or other sites can give you the ability to make some quick cash doing what you love.
Writing, graphic design, photography, videography, etc. are all things that people pay good money to have done, and you could be able to cash in on that need. It’s all about supply and demand, and if you have the talent, freelancing might be the way to provide that supply.
8. Sell your work yourself.
Lastly and briefly, why not just sell your work yourself? Instead of offering services like workshops, tutoring, or trying to find opportunities, you could always do it the old-fashioned way and sell prints to friends and family, publish music, license your designs, and all sorts of firsthand ways to make money off of your work directly. Never forget that sometimes, it can be that simple to make money off of your work.
Being a creative type with an eye (or ear) for artistic talent can sometimes feel difficult when you’re not making money doing what you love. This is an all too common complaint from the artistically inclined, but it doesn’t always have to be that way. These are just eight of the possible ways you can use your creative gift to earn money, or find opportunities that lead to success.