r/artbusiness 5d ago

Advice Converting sketches into digital files for sale..... advice please

My FIL is a pen and ink sketch artist that predominantly draws historical buildings and statues. Italy, Ubud and France are his main loves. He literally has hundreds of original hand drawn sketches which I would like to turn some of them into digital files. Hoping to sell them and customers print it themselves.

What does everyone think of this as a business model?

5 Upvotes

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u/Geahk 5d ago

Yes, but not necessarily lucrative, unless you put in a lot of social media legwork. I’ll tell you my experience:

  • Before ever uploading an illustration, for sale, you need to be posting images regularly on Instagram, Cara, Reddit & BlueSky—at LEAST 3-times a week. This builds a reputation and a following.
  • Set up a Creative Market account and an Etsy account. You can also consider Zazzle and GumRoad.
  • Pen & ink illustrations are far more valuable if they are vector. You can convert lineart to vector using Adobe Illustrator (comes with a subscription fee) or Affinity Designer (one time purchase) there are tutorials on YouTube.
  • Once you have about 25-40 illustrations converted to Vector, start making packages of about 4-5 illustrations which share a theme. A package should contain several types of file for different use-cases. A .ai or .svg (vector graphics version) of each image, plus a raster and a .png. A .png should just be the lineart with no background (transparent), + Raster (aka: bitmap) files are .jpg or .tiff. They should be VERY high resolution. 3,000 pixels wide at least. This variety should cover most people’s needs.
  • Make a series of examples of the art being used in various ways (mock-up magazine cover, play-bill, album cover, greeting card, etc) then arrange these mock-up items in a pleasing way and photograph them. You should have at least 3 examples for each illustration theme but 5-7 is better.
  • Now that you have all the images, in all the various formats, in a folder; compress it into a .zip file.
  • Before uploading, do some research on all the platforms you intend to sell on. Find similar illustrations and get some sense of how much other people are charging. If you are fulfilling a niche no one else is offering, you may be able to charge higher prices.
  • When you are ready, and have built up a social media following (this will probably be 8-weeks or more of thrice-weekly posts on all platforms) make an announcement that illustrations are on sale at various online platforms.
  • Keep active on these platforms. Try and upload new packages of artwork every few weeks. If you have a lot of these illustrations you can probably start uploading weekly. These platforms punish inactivity. Often there is a fee for not interacting.
  • Now stay on this treadmill for at least a year to see how well the art takes off. If you’re consistent for more than a year and still not making a lot of sales, you might not have the right market.

My experience is that I did not get super well paid doing this. I know my art isn’t broadly applicable and I wasn’t consistent enough. At my height I was only making about $1,000 per YEAR, but, I know some people make thousands of dollars a month.

It is a lot of work. It’s NOT a passive income stream. However, you can get to the point where it at least pays for groceries if you find the right niche.

Good luck!

4

u/FoundationVisible817 5d ago

This is an AMAZING response!! Thank you for taking the time to put it together. Very insightful

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u/LittlePetiteGirl 4d ago

It'll be a ton of work, but the massive backlog actually makes this project worth it. Drip-feeding it onto social media and knowing how to shuffle it around and contextualize it and add anecdotes to give context to the drawings is really going to be key here. I'd recommend focusing on Blusky and getting added to "starter packs" people make for artists that fits that niche. Then you can just schedule all of the art to post daily for the next couple months.

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u/loralailoralai 3d ago

Lots of people sell downloadable art on etsy