Starting My Art Business: How to Know It’s Time
Leap to Start an Art Business:
I have recently decided to get serious about emerging from the safety of my cocoon as a hobbyist artist and jump head first into starting a scalable art business! Now that the tot is two (and is willing to play by himself a little bit more), I am no longer nemui (nap time) art mom, I can become nemui plus an episode of Ms. Rachel time art mom (yay)! Talk about freedom.
First Steps:
Terrifying mixed with procrastination adrenaline. I decided to pick a deadline and force myself to meet it. Like everything I do, I was ALREADY late for applying, so I didn’t realize the convention I wanted to apply for began applications in 2 weeks! For future purposes, beginning round of applications start as early as June, so I probably should have been working on all of this stuff a couple months even before that! Stress. Here’s everything I had to do.
1) Pick a hard application date (for personal motivation purposes)
2) Create a logo, color scheme & avatar. In addition, I had to settle on a direction to take my brand. As a mom, I am always browsing conventions or artist markets for original and aesthetic children’s apparel, children’s toys, or cute prints/ gifts. I can’t help myself. Compulsive. I figured, why not make what I want to buy? Maybe other people are into it to, and if not, at least I’ve made something I would dress my own kid in or put on my own walls LOL.
3) Set up a website. I chose Squarespace because I had watched a Youtube tutorial about it years ago I think. IDK, I didn’t think too hard about this one because that is not my strength AHAHAHHAHAAH technical details. Blah blah, no.
4) Set up an LLC so I could get an EIN. I wanted to use my baby as a model and pay him, so this might not be necessary for others.
5) Apply for a seller’s permit (for that state). If you are trying to do conventions in other states, this may be necessary for you. It was a quick process. Took me 1 day to fill it out and submit it, and then the next day I got the result back. It costs $0.00!!!!!!! I almost got scammed at first! I had googled CA Seller’s Permit, and it took me to an official looking page, had me fill out all the same info basically, and wanted to charge me $299 like WUUUTTT?
6) Create art & design product. This should have probably been my first step T_T but I wasn’t happy with a lot of what I had/ I wanted more art to appeal to children since that was the direction I wanted my brand to go. This step is, obviously, ongoing.
7) Design & Create my Booth. More details on that later!
Thoughts:
We are in the middle of this process, so I will touch more on this later. However, I will say, have courage!!!!!!! For the longest time, I worried about whether or not my art was good enough! I would see artists on Instagram with tens of thousands of followers or more, and I would compare my work to theirs. These people are outliers. They are amazing. They are exceptional. I strive to be one of them.
HOWEVER, even if you are not there one day, you are still good enough. GO TO CONVENTIONS. When I was at home on IG I would think my art was not good enough, but when I actually attended conventions, I would always come back inspired because my art was just as good as most of the vendors there. The difference? They had COURAGE to get their art out there and apply! So HAVE COURAGE! You are good enough! The time to start is ANY TIME!
Also, start small, dream big! If you’re like me, you tend to get ahead of yourself. I jump straight to what I want my business to one day be before working out the details first. You have time. Each convention is a learning process that will get better and better. You don’t have to buy the expensive embroidery machine. Outsource outsource outsource until you get big enough (or so my husband says).
What’s Next for Tangiverse:
My ultimate goal is to create graphic novels. The idea of creating a story and world (universe) that can be enjoyed by thousands of readers, keeps me up at night. I have a lot of growing to do in order to get to that point, but hey, I like to get ahead of myself!
Catch you on the next one,
Tangi