Inspired will be a bit different this month. As many of you are also subscribed to my shop newsletter, and since I did promise to tell you about my decision concerning said shop, I’ll be talking both business and inspiration.
The bad news first
At the start of 2023 I decided that I would spend more time and energy on my print business, in the hope of it bringing 50% of my annual income. I was feeling confident I could do it!
So, I applied to as many markets, pop-ups, and shops as possible. I was accepted into some and rejected by more. The places where I got in didn’t bring in the money I was hoping for. One pop-up brought in £2.81 (after commission) in three months. Another pop-up did very well compared to the others, but it cost me a juicy £200/month to be stocked there. Two markets brought ZERO money in. One of those was over a weekend. That’s two days of standing there and having no-one interested in what I was selling… fun times.
It wasn’t great for my confidence, as you can imagine. What made it worse was seeing posts from people selling in the same places as me going “doing a restock!” because they sold out.
When I realised at the end of the summer that markets and pop-ups weren’t doing great for me, I thought “right, I’ll put more energy into PR.” I subscribed to a PR platform where I could upload my product images for journalists to download and, small mercy, that had some success! Encouraged by this win, I paid (a VERY steep price to) another PR platform to have access to a list of journalists to pitch for the Christmas Gift Guides. I pitched to 40 publications, I got into… none.
I also moved my online shop to Shopify, a £25/month cost, because it offered more features like discount codes and overall looked more professional. There’s been 6 orders placed on it since then. My Etsy, which I make no effort to promote because I want people to come to my website, has had 7 orders.
And so here’s a summary of my revenue versus the related costs through my product business in 2023:
Let me do the math for you: that’s £249 in profit for the year, before deducting taxes and all the other expenses. Yeeeah… I knew it hadn’t been a good year, but sitting down to do the above exercise at the beginning of this month was depressing, to say the least.
Even though my decision (we’re getting to it!) had been taken in late November, I felt sad again. But not as sad as when I realised that not enough people were interested in my products for me to live—even partly—from my art. So, I decided (there it is) to stop actively selling. I’m not doing any more markets, I’m not going to mention products on Instagram, I’m not going to reach out to magazines. My online shop will stay open for a while because I still have some stock at home. Thankfully, I don’t print the full run of my limited art prints in one go for lack of space and cashflow reasons, so I don’t have that much.
There’s been some grief attached to the decision. Going from “this will make up 50% of my revenue” to “I’m closing shop” in less than 12 months will do that to you.
And now for the good news (and inspiration)
Following an initial feeling of grief, there’s been one of liberation. I can now create for myself! Not that what I was creating before was to please the masses, clearly 😂, but the pressure of thinking about selling was counter-intuitive to my creative flow. It was always there at the back of my mind, telling me I should be doing more marketing, adding new products on my website, writing more shop newsletters, approaching more stores, attending more markets, trying to get into trade shows. And every time I didn’t sell as much as I was hoping for, it knocked my confidence. Not only wasn’t I bringing in enough money, but it was hard not to feel it was because people didn’t like my art. Now that “you must be selling more” voice has disappeared, I’m left free to create as I please.
Coincidentally, I also happened to visit two amazing exhibitions the same month I took my decision, both about the drawing practice of famous artists: David Hockney and Pablo Picasso. Listen, I’m not fan of Picasso as a person, but you have to admire his body of work. There were 400 drawings in that exhibition!
As for David Hockney, visiting his drawing retrospective made me want to read the book Spring Cannot be Cancelled. Written by Martin Gayford, it’s a collection of his conversations with Hockney around the time the latter started to live in Normandy, right before and during the pandemic. It was very inspiring to read about how an artist thinks, how he looks at things, what he finds inspiring. I remember that the lockdowns made me look closer at nature. Hockney seems to always have done just that: look closely. And it makes sense. To be a good artist, really observing is the key.
This book, the exhibitions, and my newfound creative freedom inspired me to start a new daily drawing practice. The roughly one hour in the morning I would use before to chip at a bigger piece, I now use for one quick drawing. The aim is to practise my art and explore without having to be productive for my shop or polished for social media. I also realised that I really needed the satisfaction of finishing something quickly. My illustrations and paintings take so long to create, I longed for shorter projects.
I began with ink, because you can’t erase it so I couldn’t waste time starting over and over again until it was ‘perfect.’ I’ve now introduced pencil, colouring pencils and gouache. Sometimes I spend two mornings on one drawing, and that’s alright too.
I like some of the drawings, others not so much. The early drawings were done with my cheap fountain pen which leaked many times, creating random blobs that I had to accept. Also, the ink had a shimmer that meant it never quite settled, and as a lefty I kept smudging it. But the idea was to have fun with it and not be precious about the outcome. After a while, what I’ve observed before about looking back at old work and reappraising it became true again: I’ve come to enjoy a lot of what I first considered as flaws. In fact, those flaws are what make the drawings more interesting. But even if I didn’t think so, I had fun creating and that’s the important part for me at the moment.
One of my goals for the year is to have more art in my life. Visit more museums and galleries. Read more about art. Paint more. Draw more. Just generally create more. Let’s see if I can make it happen!
Judith xx
You can follow my illustration and graphic design work here.