ASLU 039: What We Learned From Our Art Businesses in 2020
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In Episode 39 of the podcast, Melissa and Heather sit down to do deep year end dives into their art businesses to talk about what worked, what didn’t work and what they learned.
In this episode we don’t talk about our services businesses or this podcast. Just our art businesses.
Heather is the owner of Heather Lynne Travis art where she sells her large scale paintings, accepts mural commissions and produces smaller original pieces. She also makes her paintings available on products through Print on Demand sites like Red Bubble and Society6.
Melissa is the owner of Fine Lime Designs Illustrations and focuses on traditional marker and ink illustration work, usually by commission She sells handmade prints, note cards and stickers from her original designs. Heather recently encouraged her to start selling her designs on additional products via Red Bubble.
We both freely admit that while we’re both very experienced small business owners, we are novices when it comes to seriously selling our artwork. This is what we learned in 2020!
If you’re just looking for the links to all the resources mentioned in the episode, just scroll on down a little bit more and you’ll find them all listed.
Listen To the Episode
Here’s a direct link to Episode 39 - or you can listen via the players below:
2020 was the year that both of us got really serous about selling our artwork. Moving to a new home with a studio space that needed renovating was a big motivator for Heather to take her art business to the next level right from the beginning of the year. Melissa went all in the last 6 months of the year after realizing that yes, people did want to buy her art.
A pandemic required a lot of pivoting and rethinking but we both made it through, better than we expected but still with lots of room to learn and grow in 2021.
One of the biggest struggles for both of us was mental - dealing with the general malaise and mood changes that come when you’re dealing with a global crisis. As Heather aptly put it, the feeling of having cobwebs on your heart. This really affected our creative output this year.
This was also the year we learned a lot about fees (banking, listing, commission, payment processor, etc - there’s a lot of them), the administrative side of an art business, creating multiple revenue streams, trying additional platforms, having different price points and products so your work is accessible to a wider range of people and putting ourselves out there.
And, it’s no big surprise to either of us, given how much we talk about community, relationships and networking together on this podcast, but we both recognized just how important it is in the creative space for people to resonate with both the art and the person creating the art. Growing our networks and increasing our visibility was a big thing for both of us in 2020 and will continue to be in 2021.
Have a listen to the episode for all our insights into what worked, what didn’t and what we learned and who we learned it from. And tune in next Friday to find out what our goals are for our art businesses in 2021!
