How to make money by drawing. Portraits: starting a business, stages of development

Creativity can be a profitable activity. This is especially true for creating custom portraits. Any artist can open a portrait painting business from scratch. You just need to organize your business correctly, thinking through all the technical and financial issues.

How to create a portrait painting business

Fine art is constantly evolving and becoming more diverse and modern. Therefore, artists who want to make money from their talent and skills can apply their skills in a practical way, including painting portraits to order.

Demand for interesting and unusual gifts is constantly increasing, so custom portraits do not lose their popularity. Contemporary artists can offer both the creation of one type of portraits and different kinds services.

The following are traditionally in greatest demand:

portraits in oil, pastel, watercolor or pencil from life;
any type of portrait from photograph;
pop art portrait;
gift options made in a certain style.

Since today there are many professional artists offering their services, including painting portraits, it is necessary to immediately think about what the “trick” of the offer of a new market participant will be. One of these moments could be the design of portraits in a special style or the creation of urgent portraits and some other interesting ideas.

The main difficulty of a business in the field of creating portraits lies in the need for careful organization of activities: step-by-step planning and serious financial calculations are required.

The business plan should include the following main points:

analysis of the chosen area of activity: the level of demand for such services and the occupancy of this niche. Here you need to monitor existing offers and pay attention to the variety of services offered and the pricing policy of the main market participants;
creating a strategy for the future business: you should decide what services will be offered to clients and set a price scale. At this point in the plan, conclusions are drawn regarding the target audience and the most effective methods searching for clients;
financial calculations: determine the nature and size of future investments, the total budget required to open a business and its further promotion and, taking into account the expected profit, calculate the profitability of the new business.

Since you can open a business from scratch for creating portraits of various types on your own, without hiring additional employees or equipping a separate room, working from home, the start-up investment will be insignificant.

The most significant costs will be for the purchase of working tools, equipment and consumables; costs for advertising campaign. If we calculate the approximate costs of organizing activities for creating portraits, then the purchase of canvases, easels, paints, pencils, brushes, containers for liquids, consumables and other small volume work on initial stage will cost between 100 – 200 thousand rubles . In the future, with the development of activities and expansion client base, which means an increase in the number of orders, it will be necessary to purchase more material and technical equipment. About 50 thousand at the initial stage should be spent on advertising the services of a portrait artist, the same amount on additional costs, including installation software, if the artist also offers portraits in modern processing or souvenir options.

As for possible earnings, you can achieve very high results in the first months of work. Thus, by setting at the initial stage a price of about 400 rubles for a drawing made to order in pencil and from 1,000 for a portrait on canvas, as well as a higher price for various souvenir options, you can achieve fairly high earnings, provided you have a high level of professionalism and active advertising campaign.

Portraits: starting a business, stages of development

When creating portraits of various kinds to order, you can avoid renting a studio, saving a significant amount and working at home. All you need to start such an activity is to choose a suitable organizational form and register a business entity, purchase everything necessary equipment, materials and tools and start advertising your services.

Once the type of activity has been selected and the range of services that the artist will offer to potential clients has been determined, it is necessary to purchase equipment for the work, tools and consumables.

So, to paint classic portraits on canvas or paper you will need:

easel - table or floor, as well as wooden or metal;
sketchbook;
canvases and paper;
palettes;
brushes made of several types of materials - acrylic, synthetics, bristles, foam rubber and others;
pencils for various purposes;
paints;
pencil cases;
all kinds of accessories.

Artists who have not previously engaged in professional painting may experience difficulties at the stage of purchasing consumables and tools for work. Since there are quite a lot of stationary and online stores designed for artists, you should choose the one that has the optimal balance of quality and affordable cost. To avoid mistakes and choose high-quality tools and materials, you can use the advice of experienced artists.

If the creation of portraits will involve computer processing, you must acquire high-quality computer and related equipment and install the appropriate software.

Starting a portrait painting business on your own, over time, as the number of orders increases, you can take on an assistant or an assistant, or work in tandem with another artist. In this case, it is better to rent a shared studio, although you can continue to work from home online.

Competent advertising is the key to the success of a future business. When starting a business, you should first think about what the target audience will be and what potential clients you should target. As practice shows, in most cases, portraits are ordered as a gift - often such ideas arise from young or middle-aged people. And since the cost of painting a portrait is generally considerable, most customers should have an average or high level income.

According to the experience of many artists, the best way to promote your services would be your own website, which should contain all the information about the services offered, information about deadlines and other details of order fulfillment. The most effective will be a detailed portfolio of works already completed by the artist, as well as customer reviews. It is better to entrust the work with the site to professionals: its design, development, optimization and further maintenance require the participation of qualified webmasters.

Additionally, placing contextual advertising, using the capabilities of forums and social networks and other functional resources. Ads in magazines and outdoor advertising can be useful, but these will mainly be auxiliary methods.

An artist who has never previously own business, can choose a simpler way to promote his own business: without being distracted from creative process– entrust this task to specialists from the advertising agency. But in this case, there will be additional costs that should be taken into account when developing a business plan.

How to open a business: official registration of an enterprise

Many freelancers who work alone and do not open a permanent studio do not consider it necessary to register their activities with tax office. It is important to remember that when engaging in commercial activities and having fixed income, not reporting it to official structures without paying taxes is illegal. Therefore, from the very beginning of the activity of painting and selling self-made portraits, it is important to act in accordance with the law. First of all, the law provides for the design of one of the possible organizational forms. As a rule, for private entrepreneurial activity choose the IP form.

The requirements for a future individual entrepreneur are minimal: it is enough to have a passport, identification number, and also meet the requirements set by the tax service - age over 18 years and citizenship of the country.

The process of registering an individual entrepreneur for an artist privately engaged in painting custom portraits will be quite simple. First of all, you need to choose a suitable branch of activity, for which you turn to the OKVED classifier. In accordance with the current classifier, the code “Activities in the field of artistic creativity” is suitable for this type of activity.

To register an individual entrepreneur, you must pay a state fee at a bank branch, prepare a package of documents (copies of your passport, tax identification number and receipt of payment of the fee) and, after filling out an application, submit it to the territorial body of the Federal Tax Service. Deadline for consideration of application and issuance of certificate individual entrepreneur is up to 5 working days.

Since the level of earnings at first will be low, you can, in parallel with the status of an individual entrepreneur, switch to a simplified taxation system, which will allow you to pay the minimum tax and submit a reduced package of documents.

Sep 28, 2017 Sergey

If you love to draw and want to make money from your hobby, this article is for you.

To make money with your drawings on the Internet, you don’t have to be professional artist. Expensive graphics tablets neither have special meaning. In most cases, it is sufficient to have great desire, paper and colored pencils.

I will talk about one method of sales, which I have personally tested and proven its worth.

Profitable topics and platform for selling works

It must be said that the main factors determining the financial success of an artist’s illustrations are the themes of the works, as well as the competent choice of the site on which these works will be placed.

It is clear that demand is formed by the public’s interest in a particular event, object, or character. But what is interesting to society? What information has the highest view rates?

That's right, this is news. Eccentric headlines, emotional intensity, forecasts of the likelihood of wars, economic collapse, natural disasters. Scandals, gossip and rumors that have their own heroes.

The heroes of these news will be the main characters in your drawings. These are people famous all over the world: leaders of states, politicians, artists, athletes...

To images similar people there is enormous demand! And this demand increases to incredible proportions when hype rises around them in the media space.

Choosing a platform through which you will sell your work is also extremely important. And the main selection criteria should be the presence of high traffic of potential customers and specialization.

As for traffic, the picture is as follows: in terms of traffic, photo stocks are completely superior to other Internet sites. The leader in popularity, quantity of content and its sales here is the photo bank Shutterstock (Shutterstock.com).

To start making money by selling your work on Shutterstock, you need to register on the website. The site is multilingual, however, there is no Russian language.

During the registration process, you will need to enter your first and last name, as in your international passport or driver’s license, your address, and also upload a scan of your international passport (page with a photo). The service will also ask you to confirm the relevance of your email.

After successfully registering on the site, you must pass an exam to determine the quality of your content. To do this, you will need to upload 10 images and wait until they are verified by the site administration.

Images must be at least 4 megapixels in size. Quality is maximum. If at least one picture is approved by the administration, the exam will be considered passed successfully.

After this, you can safely put the images up for sale.

The idea of earning money. Efficiency confirmed experimentally

To confirm my guesses about the exceptional popularity of the above-mentioned subject of images, I decided to conduct a small experiment: at approximately the same time I posted 4 of my works on various topics on the Shutterstock photo bank:

– scanned illustrations of US President Donald Trump, previously drawn on a sheet of paper with pencils,

– computer drawings of butterflies generated from own photos,

- photos ordinary people from different angles,

– photos of attractions from the cities I visit (statues and monuments),

– photographs of the nature and architecture of Egypt and Thailand, “taken” by me on vacation.

I must say that every hand-drawn illustration you send to a stock photo site needs to be confirmed with a special release.

By doing this you prove that you are the owner of the image you are sending. You can download the release for Shutterstock by clicking the “Model & Property Releases” link at the bottom of the page and then clicking on the “Download” button here:

The experiment lasted approximately three months. His results are as follows (amounts earned were rounded):

Butterfly drawings – 2 downloads, $0.5 earned,

– photos of nature and architecture – 8 downloads, earned 3 dollars,

– images of people – 8 downloads, $4 earned,

– photos of attractions – 9 downloads, earned 7 dollars,

– Donald Trump drawings – 74 downloads, $91 earned.

The result, as they say, is obvious. Moreover, for the first few weeks, only works with Trump were sold; the rest began to interest customers only by the end of the first month of the experiment.

The money was successfully withdrawn in ruble equivalent through the Skrill service on bank card. Shutterstock makes monthly payments automatically.

I can only add that I conducted a similar experiment in several other large photo banks. There, the sales results were orders of magnitude more modest, so I won’t even mention them.

Every person sooner or later thinks about earning extra money. The first thing that comes to mind is to make a business out of your favorite hobby. And this is quite real.

If you are a good drawer and, by the will of fate, you sit at home or want to earn extra income, you may have already wondered how to make money by drawing. Indeed, this hobby can be used not only for moral satisfaction, but also for complete real earnings.

Nowadays, selling your creativity has become much easier than before, and you often don’t even need to leave your home. All that remains is to understand the details, weigh the risks and move from plans to actions, and the magazine Reconomica will be happy to help you with this.

My name is Stepantsova Olga Aleksandrovna, I am 22 years old, I live in the city of Blagoveshchensk.

Many of us loved to be creative as children: someone was good at playing musical instrument, some did crafts, while others liked to draw. Talent exists within every person, and it goes without saying how important it is to discover and realize it.

It is known that drawing has a positive effect on nervous system, which means the whole body will benefit.

By being creative, you can not only have fun, but also make money, while spending a couple of hours a day on it!

First publications

I always loved to draw and did it often. I just sat with a piece of paper and a pencil wherever and whenever I wanted, because I liked it and got better every time.

And for a person engaged in creativity, it is necessary for his work to be seen and appreciated as much as possible. more people, so I decided to publish mine best works in social networks.

Now this is one of the the best ways show what you are capable of, and look at others, learn new things. By the way, I used A4 paper and simple pencils. The cost of this did not ruin me, especially since the pencils lasted a long time.

My drawing.

Earning money idea

One day I was trying to figure out what to give my friend for her birthday, and an idea popped into my head - why don’t I draw her? A handmade gift from the heart is greatly appreciated.

I put all my skills into my work, received a lot of praise and was inspired. At the same time, this was my advertising, and the idea of making such gifts to order was thoroughly ingrained in my head. I had to improve my skills using the Internet (studying facial anatomy, drawing techniques).

After browsing the Internet, I realized that you can and should make money from this, and most importantly, drawing a portrait did not take much time and was a pleasure!

First profit

After the donated drawing, several people appeared who wanted to buy a portrait for money, or even not quite a portrait, but something more unusual. For example, one guy asked me to draw a robot for him.

By the way, drawing a portrait from a photo is very convenient, because the photo is constant, the person does not change pose, as can be the case when drawing from life, in addition, you can work when it is convenient, and focus only on the customer’s deadlines.

Of course, the first orders were among friends, but it gave good experience and small profits. When the first wave of orders passed, I realized that it was necessary to do more advertising and focus on people I didn’t know (after all, I redrawn everyone I knew). To do this, I promised to quickly complete the work (all this on the social network page) and sat down to draw as soon as someone contacted me.

What did this lead me to?

Starting once with simple, unsightly drawings, I came to good skills and a constant income.

Having experience in drawing, you can find many options for different part-time jobs:

In addition to portraits, there are sketches for tattoos, and people are also interested in them.
A good imagination will serve as a tool for creating funny cartoons.
And if you film the process of creating a work, you can make money by watching it on the Internet, because such videos are often popular.

And this is also my drawing.

Many have seen artists painting portraits on the street, and why not? All paths are open!

Let's calculate the income

Based final result, I can say that the main cost is time for training and improvement, and I do not take into account the purchase of paper and pencils, erasers, and sharpeners.

At the initial stage, the portrait cost 250 rubles (for a beginning artist), after a while the final price was established - 500 rubles.

If we take into account that, on average, by the second month I painted one portrait a day, we get an amount equal to 15,000 rubles (and this is far from the limit), despite the fact that the work was done in my free time and took 2-3 hours a day .

The cost can be increased, but left adequate in relation to your abilities. Sometimes there were two orders a day, and sometimes none.

Not everything is as simple as it seems

When buying a finished product, the client has no idea how much effort was spent on making him find you and want to cooperate with you.

Drawing is not as difficult as it seems, but making your work in demand is a more serious task.

One way or another, you have to communicate with people, and it would be nice to be able to do it correctly (be polite, tactful, win over, create a positive conversation).

If you like to draw and want to try to earn some money, then I want to give some tips and recommendations that helped me:

One of my favorite expressions, which I often used as a guide: for every artist there is an art connoisseur.

This is true. There will always be a person who will like the character of your work, your drawing style and the author's zest (and everyone has it).

The customer likes to see all the information at once.

For example, when visiting your page, he should find answers to all the questions he is interested in: price, deadlines, format, drawing technique, examples of your work. This will increase the likelihood that he will want to order from you.

There is no need to be afraid of anything.

Creating a portfolio.

You don’t need to write a lot about yourself; your works will say the best about you. Design your drawings beautifully, and people will definitely like them. There is no need to post all the works; choose the brightest, most special and catchy ones in your opinion.

Pay attention to your competitors.

Draw conclusions for yourself (regarding cost, quality of work).

Successful people overcome their laziness and fear. Don't be lazy and everything will work out!

Artists can always count on an extra piece of bread. If you know how to draw, then think hard about how to make money from this hobby at home.

If you are a good drawer and by the will of fate you sit at home or want to earn extra income, you may have already wondered how to make money by drawing. Indeed, this hobby can be used not only for moral satisfaction, but also for very real income. Nowadays, selling your creativity has become much easier than before, and you often don’t even need to leave your home.

What can you sell and where to start?

You can sell both original works and digital files, such as prints for clothing. There are various websites that offer their services. You can sell digital pictures that customers buy for sometimes mysterious purposes. But the author feels satisfaction from his work when he sees that his pictures have found their application in real world.

First, decide whether you want to draw illustrations, prints or sell your paintings and graphics. Some artists combine several options at once. You can choose a direction such as selling your images on stock sites. Best Selling vector images. In this case, you will have to learn a couple of programs in order to create them.

The “old” method of selling works was quite simple - artists went to galleries or publishing houses and offered them their work. With the advent of the Internet, making money by drawing has become much easier. You can successfully promote yourself, not only in your country, but throughout the world. Of course, we shouldn’t forget about back side medals - competition among artists is now very high.

If you decide to make money as an illustration, you definitely need to create a portfolio. It will need to select your best works. There are more than enough quality resources to post your work. Don't neglect foreign sites. Their audience reach is much larger than their Russian counterparts.

To sell paintings, you must register on websites that sell handicrafts. There is always a film section, and the audience is very large. There are several sites that only sell paintings. Basically, professionals post their work on these sites.

Where to sell your creations

There are different platforms for making money on the Internet:

sites offering to sell originals of your works;
Stocks or microstocks. Here you can offer digital files for sale in different formats. Initially, the image costs very little.
stores that offer ready-made templates. You upload your prepared images, and the site automatically applies them to its templates. For example, T-shirts, bags, mugs and much more. The disadvantages of such stores are that they often charge most earning money for yourself. The advantages are that you do not need to spend any money. An example of such a store is All T-shirts;
do not hesitate to offer your services to sites, perhaps portals need unique illustrations for articles.

Don’t neglect the opportunity to sell your work at various fairs. You can organize exhibitions, displaying drawings made with paints and pencils. Invite your friends and acquaintances using social networks.

Practical implementation of the idea

Practical steps:

Take high-quality photographs of your work. If you don’t know how, you can ask a professional friend or read how to correctly photograph art. This required condition to sell your paintings or graphics. The buyer likes high-quality images. In this case, there is little risk that in reality the picture will be very different from the photograph.
Determine your pricing policy. The price should not be too low, but not too high, otherwise you won’t be able to make money from drawing. It is very difficult to understand how much money to take from a client. So find popular artists who work in a similar style. How much do they charge for their work? This way you can roughly determine how much to ask for your creative work.
Register on specialized sites. You can post your work on many resources - this will increase your chances of sales. Chat with colleagues, take part in competitions. This can help attract potential clients.
Start a blog. It is recommended to start blogs on popular free platforms. Don't forget about the possibilities of social networks. Not only post your work more often, but also write about yourself, your thoughts about life. Show photos of the process. People are always interested to see how a master creates his masterpieces, even if they are created from digital “materials,” as well as his ordinary life. Be sure to respond to user comments. People like to feel feedback. Sometimes they buy simply because they liked the conversation with the master.
Learn new things, keep track popular destinations . The world is rapidly updating, people’s tastes are changing: today cats are popular in the interior, and tomorrow there will be thoughtful whales. Undoubtedly, works that are interesting to the mass consumer sell better. If you're good at drawing on paper, it makes sense to learn how to transfer your creations to the digital environment. Steep graphic drawing in a notebook can easily become a selling print that will bring you a lot of money and fame.