The Importance Of Multiple Revenue Streams For Illustrators

If you, like me, are just starting out on the road to becoming a professional illustrator it isn’t likely that those high-paying commissions will be flying through your door immediately.

Even for established illustrators it seems that it can often be a feast or famine situation, so how do you set things up to ride out the early days or slow periods of your career when those bills still need to be paid?

The answer is with multiple revenue streams!

Don’t just take my word for it, listen to what illustration superstar Bobby Chiu has to say about it in this video (you can listen while you watch him do an awesome digital painting of Princess Mononoke).

One thing I’ve learned while running my Graphic Design business is that you should never put all your eggs in one basket. It’s business suicide to work solely for one client (unless you have a watertight contract with them) or rely on one main source of income - what happens if that client goes bust? Or a recession hits and an entire industry starts to struggle?

It’s far safer to earn you income from multiple clients and multiple sources so that if one area starts to struggle, you’re able to take the hit and still survive.

For illustrators these days, there are many multiple income streams to explore. The following are some of the avenues that I will be exploring while launching my career as a Wildlife Illustrator:

Prints

There are numerous online services like Thumbtack Press, Cafe Press and Red Bubble that enable you to easily sell prints of your work via their website. Although these services all take a cut of the revenue from your prints, they handle all of the printing, admin and postage/packing allowing you to generate truly passive income from your existing and new artwork.

NOTE: If you are selling prints of artwork that you have been commissioned to produce, make sure you have retained the rights to sell prints of the work.

T-shirts

You aren’t just limited to selling your artwork on paper either, there are also lots of online t-shirt printing sites that operate in the same way too, like Printfection, Spreadshirt and Skreened.

Art/Illustration Tutorials

I was lucky enough to be contacted recently by Collis T’aeed the founder of Photoshop Tutorial site PSDtuts to create a digital painting video tutorial for the site - this wasn’t totally out of the blue as my wife and I had met up with Collis and his wife Cyan for lunch when we were all traveling through Hong Kong last year.

[As a side note, this has really highlighted to me the importance of networking and building relationships, something that doesn't come naturally for me but something that is so important in any freelance business - you just never know what opportunities will come your way via the people you meet throughout your career].

This was perfect timing as it has been great exposure to launch this blog plus PSDtuts pay contributors to create exclusive content for them. This introduced me to a new revenue stream that I hadn’t considered before.

Illustration Stock Libraries

This is a bit of a controversial one since a lot of illustrators will tell you that it will lead to the demise of illustration careers and harm the industry as a whole.

As someone trying to forge a long term career in illustration, the use of these low cost stock library illustrations is a little worrying but when you are starting out and money is tight, creating illustrations for sale via illustration stock libraries such as VectorStock and iStock can’t be overlooked as a passive income revenue stream.

This is a great post from Freelance Switch by Collis T’aeed on how he has been able to supplement his income through the illustrations he sells via iStock.

If you can use any one of the above options (or better still a combination of all of them) to generate additional streams of income from your illustration work, it will give you a safety net and greater peace of mind that if your career is slow to get started or your illustrations commissions hit a slow period, you can still make the rent.

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