How to turn one piece of art into multiple income streams

As someone in the creative community you’ve no doubt heard all about how using your art across multiple markets can generate new income streams for you. Instead of telling you this is something you can do, today I want to show you how I did it through licensing:

Happy Times
Here’s how a random personal piece that I created because I wanted to add more typography work to my portfolio resulted in my best licensing deal to date:

• I created the design to exhibit at Printsource in 2013 with my agent
• The design received no interest & sat in my archive for two years. I still promoted it as part of my portfolio because I personally liked it & wanted to show my skills in typography
• In 2015 I was approached by a giftware company who wanted to put it on one of their ‘art hearts’
• To my surprise they decided to expand the range to tea towels, mugs, magnets & more!
• To date this is still one of my most successful licenses!

Havana Flowers
A lot of the time licensing deals don’t just happen for you & you have to hustle to manifest them. This is what happened with my Havana Flowers print:

• I created the design in 2018 after being inspired by a long saved for trip to Havana, Cuba after I’d been experiencing a massive dip in my creativity
• Again, the design had some interest but didn’t officially get picked up so I decided to take action & make things happen myself
• I created a mock up of the design on a building to use for promotion of the design
• I printed the design onto a shirt & had it professionally photographed in the very place it was inspired by. (This is obviously an extreme choice but I had many friends out there from my trip who helped to keep costs down.)
• I printed sample of the design on shoes & masks through a print on demand site to get the design even more out there
• After all the hard work, the design was finally noticed & picked up for licensing on sketchbooks & fabric!

So when we say it’s possible to create multiple income streams from one piece of art, it is! But that doesn’t mean it will happen over night. It took over two years for my Happy Times design & even more for my Havana Flowers piece. But the fact that I’ve been there, done the groundwork, & made the mistakes so that you don’t have to means I can help advise you on making multiple income streams happen for you.

Don’t know what rates to charge or how royalties work? Struggle to understand wordy & complicated contracts? Do you focus on print on demand or getting licensing deals? Let me help you with an individualised, 1:1, online coaching session.

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