All posts tagged: illustration

Holiday season countdown part one: planning

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This post starts a series of post about getting our business 200% ready for holiday season (I’ll call it HS). This gonna be a big challenge for both of us, but I have a really strong feeling that all hard work will pay off . If your business is somewhat similar, maybe you can hop on and give yourself a little kick to get out as much as you can from HS. What kind of business I’m talking about? My hubby Tytus (<3) and I are running few stores on print on demand platforms – here I wrote about this topic. It’s going ok but not awesome and we’re about to change this this year. This series will be mostly about Zazzle, partly about Redbubble, Spreadshirt and Cafepress and while some of our moves will apply only to POD stores there will be some marketing-y stuff, which you can use if you selling your art in any form, directly to the customers (in opposite to selling to companies or taking commissions) As most of retail …

“50 images is still on the low side”

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Week – March 30 – April 5 aka story of failure and success. I mentioned once or twice that I’ve never been any good at math (maybe more, but as I just said…;)) so that shouldn’t be a big surprise that I did so many miscalculations this week. Seriously though, I got slightly too optimistic and ended this week frustrated over the outcome. Not that I did little – oh no! quite the opposite in fact. What I had done this week. Commissioned work wise I finished everything I could for project B (awaiting some direction for one remaining part) and I’ve just sent color preview to client A – yes, at Easter Sunday evening – that’s Monday morning for them, as it’s Seoul based company, I’m not sure if they care for this holiday (Internet says that not really). I do not, so I didn’t mind working today. That was a lot of work itself. *update – while I was writing this post, feedback for project A came -wow I love them so so …

Print on demand (POD) aka passive income (PI) for artists

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O,h passive income – one of the most misleading terms I can think of. Passive might suggest that money come to you without any your action from your side and tell you what, this is quite opposite. I’d say that’s just a name to call some model of making money. Basically it involves working your ass of for X amount of time, very likely without any instant profit. So you can say: like opening most of businesses. Weeeell kind of, key however (this word and other similar like: although, but etc. will be overused in this note, so brace yourself – I’ll really need it to make a point) is to set your business in this way to automate most of processes and in a long run being able to earn money continuously while doing something completely different. There are many, many types of PI and all this is fascinating (zero sarcasm – it really is) – if you’re intrigued I strongly recommend you to listen to one of PI guru Pat Flynn on  http://www.smartpassiveincome.com/. …

Where I’m starting from and where I wanna go*

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*The answer to question “where I wanna go” is usually “everywhere, except for maybe Afghanistan or Space”, but that’s not about that. This time it’s all about my illustration career (I turned 30 last year, so I think that word: career, as serious as it sounds, should be in my vocabulary). I have two major love affairs in my life : first, uncomplicated with my husband Tytus and second, with my job, which is not that sweet and easy sometimes and makes me understand all those sad songs about broken heart etc. Yup, this really matters to me – that was my dream job and I put lots of afford in getting where I’m now (partly, because I didn’t know what I was doing at first and partly, because it’s very competitive industry). So, where am I now? If I finally make new business cards (I should), they will say “Monika Suska children’s illustrator” and that exactly what I do – I illustrate picture books for kids and educational materials. It’s safe to say, that …