Vectorizing takes hours, but I’m good at it. I could vectorize for living; I get bombed by spam from third world countries offering “VECTORIZE ARTWORK FOR $12”. I imagine a building full of kids click, click, clicking away in Illustrator… when I’ve tried them out by sending artwork they reply with ‘Oh, that’ll be $80”. A couple times I’ve bit the bullet and had them do it, but they botched it up. Not artists, them, just click click clickers. I could offer “Artistic vectorization!” and click click click away myself for $$$, it’d be easy.
There’s always some way to make a living around art that is not creating art.
Screenshot in Adobe Illustrator of me vectorizing the Cormurant artwork
I survived for years by color separating other peoples artwork for screenprinting, which is not creating art. I had a website called screenprintprepress.com and at the high point had several dozen screenprinters as clients that send art regularly. I quit that when I was able to build my own screenprinting shop.
Most of the t-shirts I print are not particularly artistic, they’re just branding. I create fancy design when I can… but mostly clients don’t ask for it.
People are more comfortable wearing branding then they are wearing art, it’s true!
Another not- art profession that there is constant pressure to become is an art teacher. If I were an art teacher my classes would entirely consist of me yelling at children “DON’T BECOME AN ARTIST IT’S REALLY HARD!”
I enjoy framing artwork; Framing shops are successful, Michaels and Hobby Lobby have framing departments, The overhead is tiny! It’s still not doing art.
Going to multi-media college in the 90’s, photoshop and illustrator were used to make web graphics, which led to webpage design, which led to wepage development… and suddenly you were coding, not drawing, and what happened? Why am I in this cubical?
For a while I worked in an Art Gallery in San Francisco as an art consultant, which is the used car salesman of the art world. I should write a blog about how extraordinarily cheesy working as an art salesperson is, I shudder at the thought to this day.
Now I’m realizing that all my skillsets are from industries I drifted into while trying to be an artist. I built a networking group called the Contoocook River Business Club and ran it for a couple years, just to sell t-shirts. It worked, and now I can run a networking meeting like a pro.
Alright, enough wool-gathering and navel-gazing. Back to click click clicking