An Experiment in Selling Art

Trying Something New

I haven’t written a Substack post in a while as summer kind of took over and with travel and back to school, things got busy! The latest thing occupying my brain is trying to figure out how to sell some of the art I make. This was prompted by the interest people showed in t-shirts I made for my kids with a drawing of the Star Island Dragon Playground.

Choosing a Service Provider

The shirts I made for my kids weren’t the greatest quality, so I set about trying to figure out an option that would provide good-quality products with my art on them. I was seeking a business that takes care of the logistic parts of product production (provides an online store, and printing and shipping of products) and looked at a few different options including Zazzle and Teespring. While Zazzle was pretty good and where I printed my initial shirts and also had a recent success in selling 200 copies of a little SF card I made, I wanted a more focused site (Zazzle also markets other items on product pages). The Teespring sample order I placed to test the service never actually arrived so that was firmly taken off the list.

I landed on Printify as my choice, it allows you to build your own dedicated pop-up shop, provides templates to design shirts, cards, mugs etc. and serves as the connection to printing vendors who then ship out your product. They take a cut, you take a cut, people get cute things, everyone wins (I think, hopefully).

It has been a lot of work just to get here and I’m still learning - like this morning I woke up realizing I needed to streamline my shipping options to keep shipping costs down for people, but at least I’ve gotten started. I also struggle with doing the ‘boring’ business-y things, I just want to do the fun creative things, but I’ll have to get over that!

Art to Start

I’ve realized that the art that is easiest to get onto products online is the art I draw on my iPad, so that’s where I chose to start. I use Procreate (Aside, I just discovered that they use the same “Art is for Everyone” phrase on their website that my Substack is called!) and an Apple Pencil to draw things and it’s very easy to make the background transparent so the design can be easily applied to many products in different colors. At some point I’ll see if I can transfer my physical paintings and drawings if this turns out to be successful.

The Beginning

So this is where I am starting: digital drawings on products on Printify. The first products I made available were my original Dragon Playground shirts, but I’ve also made some SF Bay Area inspired ones and a new face-on Dragon Playground shirt, and I have many more ideas to come!

Next Steps - Advice?

The next thing on my list to do is to figure out how to advertise my products. If readers have experience doing this, I would be very grateful for any advice. I would also be interested in hearing about other design ideas people would be interested in buying so please leave a comment on this post if you have an idea!