No. Not this guy. He’s way too cute to fight.

But, seriously. There’s still two days to enter the weekend to enter the Fight the Monsters contest! I’m extending the deadline.

Draw, paint, or sculpt your fear. Give it a name and then…watch its power over you disappear.

Two artists, chosen mostly by me, will get prizes!

What Do I Get if I Enter?

First of all, you get the opportunity to define your fears and make them manageable. This is hugely important.

But wouldn’t it be more fun if we did something else too? I’m going to give away a couple of really fun prizes to the best monsters (as totally and completely and arbitrarily defined by me).

• A copy of Havi’s Monster Coloring book. One artist will win a Monster Coloring Book for submitting his/her drawing, gratis. Thanks Havi, for the inspiration!
• 3 Month Membership in ArtEmpowers.Me. The best resource on the Internet for selling art online, Art Empowers is chock full of course materials on selling art online and getting past the starving artist mindset. Plus there’s a super awesome forum for artists to ask questions – and that’s where the extra goodness lies.
• A Special Surprise that I’m not going to tell you about just yet.

So…get crackin! Go introduce us to your monster by posting the image and leaving a comment with a link to your image!

Best Entries so Far

From: The Rogue Toad, the Time Suck Monster

From: Daniel Olivier Argyle, Canvas Clingons

Where’s yours?

In this week’s video, we talk about:

• Selling to Your Target Audience
• The Fight the Monsters contest
• What I’ve learned from setting up other artists’ websites

The Personal Patron Connection

Selling to your target audience is one of those phrases that makes many artists cringe. So let’s think about it another way. All you’re doing is finding the people that like your work and forming a relationship with them over time. You can do that over the web via your site, blog, email, or social media. You can do it face to face. You can do it in other ways too.

The point is to get yourself out there and make connections with people so that they know and like your story.

Fight the Monsters

There’s still time to draw or paint your own monster for the Fight the Monsters contest. Entries are due January 27!

What I’ve Learned From Setting Up Other Artists’ Websites

Unfortunately it seems that setting up a website for effective marketing is a Monster for many artists. If that’s the case, you can defeat the monster by getting someone else to do it for you, hiring someone to help you do it, or taking a class to do it.

In this week’s video post, I mentioned that I wanted to change the way that we use words here at The Abundant Artist.

If the words that we used were monsters, what would they look like?

Starving Artist

The world at large continues to talk about Starving Artists. Even close family members of mine ask my wife and I, “How’s the life of the starving artist?” Ahem. We haven’t been starving for years, Aunt Edna. Sorry. You’ll figure it out eventually. This little guy (from MadeByMoxie) is what I think of when you ask me that.

Silly, right? Who would be afraid of this little furry beast? The trick is to substitute words and images for the automatic reactions that we usually have when we hear something.What do YOU think of when you hear the word starving?

The Psychology of Substitution

When I was in acting school, I learned about the concept of Substitution. The basic idea is when you are playing a character who does something that you aren’t familiar with (murder someone, win a Nobel prize, or complete an otherwise extreme action), you can substitute your own profound experiences as a stand in for that emotion, and thus move you to a more convincing performance.

If you are like most of us, the idea of putting your art on display for the world to see can sometimes send you into a terrifying tizzy. You won’t be able to breathe and the though of asking someone to pay for something that you’re unsure of anyway seems like an insurmountable barrier.

If you want to be successful as an artist, then substitute success at something else when you think about your art. Perhaps you won a spelling bee as a child. Perhaps your mother put all of your projects on the fridge at home, no matter what you did. This substitution will pull you out of the paralysis that you’re currently in and allow you to take small steps forward.

Money

It used to be that when I looked at my bank account, I would get a gnawing feeling in the pit of my stomach. I grew up poor enough that we had ‘adventures’ like living in the car for weeks at a time. I get the scared panicky feeling. The truth is that my experiences growing up created unconscious scripts that I would act from when certain things would happen. It’s easy to make bad decisions when acting from pre-existing scripts that make you more afraid.

The thing about money is that it’s totally neutral. It’s a prop that will do whatever you tell it to do. It took me years to really understand this concept, and I’m still learning how to become more skilled with this prop. Once you understand this concept, you’ll recognize that your financial state is up to you – and that means you can change it and make it work for you, instead of having an adversarial relationship with money.

In other words, money is not this big green monster trying to hurt you or take away your artistic integrity. It’s just a physical (or digital) manifestation of an exchange of value.

Flipping the Script on Money

There are many ways to change your pre-programmed responses. I know because I’ve tried a whole bunch. One of my favorites is Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT). My wife and I were introduced to EFT by Carol Tuttle, who you can see in this video.

I practice EFT when I find myself freaking out about money. I also practice before I go on stage to get rid of tension and fear, as well as if I’m having an emotional argument with someone.

Galleries

Quite often I talk to artists who ask me if I can help them get into a gallery. I don’t do that. I help artists build their own businesses and learn how to leverage the power of the Internet. The funny thing is that most of the artists I know who are doing well don’t even have gallery representation. Even if they do, it’s not a significant portion of their income. That’s probably skewed because of the work that I do, but it amuses me nonetheless.

You don’t need a gallery to succeed. Galleries, and gallery owners, are not magical soothsayers with the ability to conjure collectors.

Gallerists = Artistic Partners

When you do place a piece of art in a gallery, you are entering a business relationship with the gallery owner. They become a sales agent on your behalf, and you need to do whatever you can to enable them to make the sale. Deliver on time. Show up for interviews. Offer to do some in-gallery demos, exhibitions, or other public appearances. Write up the story of the work, of your inspiration. Follow up and ask about feedback from gallery visitors. Communicate regularly.

By the same token, be sure to partner with the right people. Do you get along with your gallerist? Does their gallery excite you? Does your art fit there? Do they have good references from other artists? Did you get a contract that stipulates how long they have exclusivity? How will you handle people who visit your website? Will you sell the same pieces in the gallery and on the web? How will the gallery promote you?

What Do Your Monsters Look Like?

You probably have a different take on what the Starving Artist, Money, and Gallery monsters look like. You might have other monsters that you deal with. I take inspiration from Havi and her Monster Coloring book.

I’d love to see your monsters. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be taking entries for The Abundant Artist Monster Contest.

What is it?

The Abundant Artist Monster Contest is a way of encouraging artists to define their monsters (fears), why they fear them, and what is really behind these monsters. Draw, paint, sculpt, photograph, or otherwise manifest your monster in a visible way and share it with us here. At the close of the contest, I’ll pick a few monsters to permanently display on the site as a way of letting other artists know about monsters, and why they don’t need to be afraid.

How Do I Enter?

Leave a comment below with a link to your monster. You can post it on your own blog, Flickr page, Facebook, or whatever, but I need a list of links in one place so that I can see them all. Don’t wanna miss any, after all. Oh, and it would be extra awesome if you decided to mention this contest on your bloggy thingy. Let’s also do a Twitter hashtag – #ArtMonsters

The Deadline for Submissions is January 27, 2011.

What Do I Get if I Enter?

First of all, you get the opportunity to define your fears and make them manageable. This is hugely important.

But wouldn’t it be more fun if we did something else too? I’m going to give away a couple of really fun prizes to the best monsters (as totally and completely and arbitrarily defined by me).

• A copy of Havi’s Monster Coloring book. One artist will win a Monster Coloring Book for submitting his/her drawing, gratis. Thanks Havi, for the inspiration!
• 3 Month Membership in ArtEmpowers.Me. The best resource on the Internet for selling art online, Art Empowers is chock full of course materials on selling art online and getting past the starving artist mindset. Plus there’s a super awesome forum for artists to ask questions – and that’s where the extra goodness lies.
• A Special Surprise that I’m not going to tell you about just yet.

So…get crackin! Go introduce us to your monster!

New thing on The Abundant Artist!

One of the surprising pieces of information from doing a yearly review is that video content is REALLY POPULAR. The few videos that I’ve done on TAA have been found super-helpful. It’s pretty easy to say yes when so many people like the videos so much.

For at least the first few months of 2012, I’m going to add weekly video updates, including visual how-tos, informational expositions, and other helpful stuff. They’ll be short, so it should be easily digestible info.

I NEED YOUR HELP WITH TWO THINGS!

1. What are your least favorite words? One of the most important things that I’ve done in my business life is recognizing the automatic reactions and scripts that run when I hear certain words. For example, it used to be that whenever I heard the phrase ‘personal finances,’ I would panic a little bit and avoid looking at them. These were automatic reactions that were programmed in while I was growing up. I’ve replaced that script by automating most of my savings and bill-paying.

What are your least favorite words? I list a few in today’s video.

2. What should we name these weekly video updates? I have some ideas, but I’d like to hear your creative suggestions. Give me a title you’d love to tell your friends about!

[Note from Cory] Today is a guest post from Dan Johnson. I talk to a LOT of artists who are over 40, 50, or even 60 years old who are just beginning the transition to making a full-time living as an artist. Some of them came to art late in life. Most of them, however, put an art career on hold for years because of family, health, or (mostly) being afraid of giving up the day job.

Dan Johnson is a painter and graphic designer from Sheffield, UK. I found his site, RightBrainRockstar, on Twitter. I joined his mailing list and when I got his email where he talked about jumping out and making the transition from graphic designer to full time artist, I thought about how many artists I know who are in similar situations. Even though Dan is not very old, I think his situation will be familiar to many of you.

As we approach the end of 2011, I think it’s good to think about where you want to be in 2012. Dan, take it away…[/Note]

Have you always wanted to be an artist, but you’re waiting for the right time? Maybe you intend to become an artist when you feel you are good enough, or when you’re in a better financial position, or when your kids have grown up and left home. When will that be? 5 years? 10 years? 20?

Let me tell you, if you’re waiting for the perfect conditions before you can become an artist, you will be waiting a long time. The right time never comes, and there will always be some condition that is not quite right, and you’ll have to wait a bit longer, then a bit longer, and a bit longer still. Before you know it you’ll be retired. Maybe then you can be an artist.

If you don’t feel like waiting that long, then you need to take action now. That doesn’t mean you should necessarily quit your job today, but you definitely need to start taking steps towards your creative career, or it will never happen. Nobody is going to come to you one day and say “Ok, conditions are perfect now, you may be an artist.” What you need to do is accept that there will be obstacles, and then do the best you can to overcome them.

So How Do I Do It?

The fact is I can’t give you a step-by-step guide to making the transition to a creative career, because everyone’s situation is different, so everyone will have different obstacles to overcome.

What I can do is tell you about my own creative journey, and give you some guidelines to point you in the right direction.

Disclaimer: My journey towards the Abundant Artist Lifestyle has only recently begun, so some of you may be way ahead of me here. But I know there will be people reading this who are in the same place I was in a few months ago, so if I can help those people to take the first steps on their creative career path, then that’s good enough for me.

So here are the factors I considered when deciding to become an artist.

Recognizing The Need For Change

The first thing that happened for me, was that the dissatisfaction with my current situation began to outweigh the benefits of having a regular job.

I had been employed as a web designer for around four years, but I had never really been passionate about it. Eventually my dissatisfaction grew to a point where a regular monthly income was not enough for me, and I started to think seriously about making a change.

There will always be voices in the back of your mind telling you you’d be crazy to give up a paying job for the uncertainty of an art career. Those voices never really go away (and some of them are actually the voices of real people.)

But when these doubts start to overwhelm me, I can always rely on 3 simple words to get me focused again: “Life’s too short!”

Life is too short to put off doing what you really know you should be doing. It’s a clichÈ, but it’s true. Steve Jobs used to get up every morning, look in the mirror and ask himself “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer had been “No” for too many days in a row, he knew he needed to change something.

So ask yourself the same question. Maybe it’s time for a change.

Assessing Your Financial Needs

Obviously, we all need enough income to buy food to eat and pay the mortgage, rent, bills etc. so you need to think about how you will make money as an artist.

Personally, I was fortunate enough to have saved up some money to ease me through the transitional period, but not everyone will have this luxury, so you may need to do things differently.

Maybe you already have people lined up waiting for you to put your artwork on sale, or to start taking commissions. If so, that’s great, you can start earning money from your art straight away.

But it’s more likely that you’ll have to build up sales gradually, do some self-promotion, and work hard at finding your target audience and getting your work in front of them. So you may need an additional source of income to begin with, until you are more established.

You could potentially keep your current job, but go part-time, or find another part-time job that is in a more creative field. There are plenty of ways to earn money from your artwork too, so with a bit of hard work you should be able to find a way to support yourself.

When I first left my job, I didn’t fully commit to working as an artist at first. I decided I would work as a freelance web designer, but specializing in building websites for artists. That way I figured I could continue to earn a decent income, while starting to work in the artistic community.

I only did this for a few weeks before I decided now was as good a time as any to put all my efforts into my artwork. So I hung up my web designer hat, and officially declared myself an artist.

Now I’m primarily earning money from art commissions, which I get through my art portfolio site. I have had that site online for several years now, so I already have a decent sized audience who I can sell to.

If you don’t already have one, the best thing you can do to start earning money from your art is to get started creating your own art website.

Assessing Your Ability

Another thing you need in order to succeed as an artist is some level of artistic ability.

That’s not to say that you need to be a master painter with a fine art degree. In fact you don’t really need any formal qualifications to make a living as an artist. But you do need enough skill to produce consistently high quality work, and to have the confidence in your own work to be able to sell it.

If you don’t feel like you’re at that level yet, then you may need to get some more training.

This is why I am currently taking an online course in classical drawing and painting. I have a fair amount of experience in both drawing and painting, but I felt like my lack of any proper instruction was holding me back. I didn’t have the confidence I needed to sell my work, particularly with painting, so I decided to improve my skills.

One important thing to note, is that just because you are still learning, that doesn’t mean that you can’t be earning at the same time. An artists never stops learning. You will never reach a point where you have nothing left to learn, so you don’t need to wait until you are an ‘expert’ before you can make money from your art.

I have sold art in the past that wasn’t as good as the art I sell today, and the art I sell today won’t be as good as the art I sell in 5 years time. We are constantly growing as artists, and that growth will be reflected in your work. But as long as there is someone out there who values your current artwork enough to pay for it, then you can start earning money straight away.

The Right Time Is Now

So that was about the extent of the process I went through to get where I am today. To recap:

• Acknowledge the need to make a change in your current situation.
• Figure out how you will make enough money as an artist.
• Determine whether you need any additional training to increase your confidence.
• Take action!

Sounds pretty simple when you break it down like that, doesn’t it? As I mentioned, everyone’s situation will be different, and there may be other obstacles you will encounter, but this is a good starting point for you to consider today.

There’s an ancient Chinese proverb that says “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.”

So stop waiting for that mythical ‘right time’, and do something today to get your art career started.

It’s a question that artists of all stripes wonder. There are thousands of artists around the world who sell hundreds of thousands of pieces online. How can you get anyone’s attention?

I’m bringing a focus on the basics back to The Abundant Artist. For the next couple of weeks, we’re going to publish a series of articles on the basics of selling art online. Nothing crazy or flashy – just 10 posts on how to build a solid foundation for long term online success. This is the first post.

Making Art Stand Out Is A Process

I’ll break it down for you here in a succinct way.

Define your target audience or collector. No matter how great you are, your art will never be loved by everyone. Who really likes your stuff? Who do you know that has said, “wow, I really love your necklace/painting/song?” Of all the people who’ve said this to you, what do they have in common? How old are they, what are their interests, approximate income?

Define what makes you unique. Even if you consider yourself just another jewelry maker, chances are that your work is unique in some way. Perhaps you make jewelry out of recycled glass? Maybe you really like to make customized pieces? Combine that with the unique things about your target market. Of course, you’ll also need to get your own website so that you can present your own unique style.

Sell to your audience. Don’t worry about standing out for everyone who sees you. Once you know who you’re trying to reach and what makes you unique, just put yourself in the places where those people hang out. Display your work on Etsy, Amazon, and the other places to sell art online that are out there, but then start visiting niche blogs that your target audience is reading. Find a way to get your art featured there.

Build a List. This is crucially important, and too many artists miss this. Once you start getting attention you need a way to keep their attention. Sign up for an email list management service like Mailchimp.com, and then put up a signup form on your website. Put on your website that you offer special offers to your mailing list and let people sign up for it. Most of your sales will come from your mailing list.

From here, you can try lots of interesting things like Facebook advertising for art, Google Adwords, video and other targeted forms of marketing – but first you need to identify what makes you different.

A couple of years ago, I wrote a blog post making a reference to the phrase, “Art is War.” In the blog post I mentioned that I was giving a presentation at a local event talking about how artists have to flip the script on how selling art works, and I called the event Art is War. It was all about how innovative artists were making a living with their work while fighting against a gallery system that tries to push them into doing something that doesn’t work for them.

The phrase “Art is War” didn’t come from me. I first read it when I saw Hazel Dooney’s blog, Self vs. Self. The tagline is “Remember: Art is War.” That phrase has stuck with me ever since I read it.

It still gives me chills.

Steven Pressfield wrote a seminal book called The War of Art. It’s a short little book that deals mostly with the topic of Resistance. At the essence of Hazel Dooney’s idea of the Self vs. the Self is the notion that artists are our own worst enemy when it comes to the creation of art. We can come up with a dozen reasons to not practice, to not work, to not market ourselves.

I Fight the War Too

I’m working on a one man show. Most of my friends know that I’m working on it. I was at a party last week and several people asked me how it was going, and all I could respond with was, “It’s hard.” The best work we do as artists often comes from a very personal place and it is easy to be discouraged by an inaccurate depiction, a clumsy turn of phrase, or a mistaken brush stroke. In other words, it’s easy to find a reason to quit.

But I won’t quit. And neither should you.

There’s a discipline to being creative. You have to put yourself in that creative space every day, and you have to work. Even if it’s all crap, you have to work. The same can be said for your business. You have to put yourself out there every day, even if you fall flat on your face. Failure is a part of life. He who risks nothing does nothing, and is nothing. Or something like that.

Taking Inspiration

When it’s hard, there are a number of things you can do to inspire yourself. You can play mental games with yourself to squeeze out a little more work. You can make art for fun until inspiration strikes. You can really delve and puke up all of your little neuroses all over other people’s laps.

I’ve interviewed a host of artists and entrepreneurs who have done some amazing things.

Helen Aldous’ post Why Being a Square Peg in a Round Hole is Your Greatest Asset is all about using your own quirkiness, your own creativity that makes you the artist that you are, as an asset. Go ahead and think differently. Question authority. It’s all about you anyway!

Meilena Hauslendale, the Sharpie Artist, shared some deep insights into how she grew her art into a business that supports her. She’s a pretty inspiring lady. You should listen to her talk.

Paula Manning Lewis has sold more than 30,000 pieces of art. The Starving Artist is a Myth indeed.

There are many, many more interviews. These are just a few. You could probably spend hours combing through all of the interviews on this site. It’s fun to do them and I’ll continue doing them.

Ignore Everybody

What I love even more than doing all of these interviews is reading about artists who do it completely differently than everybody else. There are lots of artists out there who’ve never heard of me and who’ve never read or listened to any of my interviews, and they’re doing absolutely stunning things all on their own.

I already mentioned Hazel Dooney. You probably already know about Hugh McLeod (if you don’t, you should – he wrote the book Ignore Everybody). Lori Mcnee is pretty amazing too. They’re all doing it for themselves, and it’s amazing to watch. These are all artists who do things just a little bit differently, who defy convention – who are winning the War of Art.

Sometimes, it’s not even about ignoring everybody. Sometimes it’s just a matter of what you don’t know can’t hurt you. Michael Whitlark, an artist I just met a few weeks ago when he joined ArtEmpowers.Me, is doing really incredible stuff. I won’t reveal all of his secrets here, I’ll just say that he has sold more art in the last few weeks than most of the artists that I speak to on a day to day basis. Also, he’s still in college. Hysterical stuff.

Some time ago, Brian Sherwin, a well known arts blogger and critic, did an interview here where he talked about how art galleries will eventually have to embrace the Internet. That hasn’t happened yet – not on any grand sort of scale, anyway. There are dozens, if not hundreds of artists out there doing it for themselves, with no hint of a need for a gallery or for an agent.

Art is War

If Art is War, you might say that artists are a the insurgents. There’s no formal training for this kind of art career. There’s no art professors telling their students to build up a fan base and create a movement so that they can have a career. In their world, it all happens through neat little galleries and academic treatises.

Not down here. Not where the rubber meets the road.

In military history, there are many stories about how a vastly superior force is routed by indigenous tribes with primitive weaponry and guerrilla tactics. They don’t stand and fight – they go around the bigger army, attack them from the rear. They melt away when the bigger army comes after them. They blend in among the common folk. They are never seen, but they are dangerous.

The artists that I’ve mentioned here, and dozens of other artists, are like that. They don’t have a big name gallery backing them. They haven’t been highlighted by a big name critic. They didn’t start with a big war chest full of money. Instead they connect with people through free tools like email, websites, Facebook, and other social media. They care about something so passionately that they build a following around it. When the Arts establishment comes calling and criticizes them for the way that they are doing things, the artist who wins the war makes her own decisions instead of bowing to peer pressure. You may not ever know who these artists are – unassuming, plain clothed folk, who are creating the Abundant Artist lifestyle that they want.

One of the thing I love about working with artists is that the very best ones are unafraid to speak their minds, not only in person, but in writing and (most importantly), through their work. Such is the case with Gwenn Seemel’s blog post from yesterday, A Business Model for An Artist Who Does Not Use Copyright.

I don’t normally repost someone else’s blog post, but I think Gwenn’s post is so important, and so good, that I have to repost an extensive quote from it here:

The artist begins her-his career in obscurity, honing a craft and making work that few people see.  She-he is not making money from her-his work.

Slowly, the artist builds a following, showing more and more of the work publicly and beginning to make some money, either from selling work or from some other means related to the creative work she-he does.

One day, the following becomes a genuine fan base.  At this point, whenever the artist wants to launch a project, she-he first turns to the fan base and asks for support.  The fan base funds the project; the artist creates the work; the artist disseminates the work freely, without restrictions on use, commercial or otherwise.

The fan base that supported the project from the beginning still buys special edition versions of the media that’s being distributed freely because they love the artist that much.  Additionally, more people become fans because the work is so accessible that it reaches many new audiences.

The artist continues crowd-sourcing the funding for her-his projects.  She-he probably gets less exposure than artists who are promoted through the middle man of a media corporation (then again, only a very small percentage of creatives ever get the backing of those corporation and those who do are usually required to sign over the rights to the work to the corporations).  That said, she-he is nurturing her-his relationship with the audience, building much stronger ties than are possible through a corporation.

The artist works in this way until she-he tires of the creative life.

This is how Gwenn makes her living, so she knows whereof she speaks. it’s one of the things that I try to help artists understand here at The Abundant Artist.

Intellectual Property Law is a Huge Problem

Technology entrepreneurs and artists have a great deal in common. It takes passion, drive, technique, and a great deal of creativity to thrive in either case. If you don’t have an idea so good that it consumes your every waking moment, you probably don’t want to be an entrepreneur, or an artist.

Because of the huge investment in time and personal energy that innovation takes, it can come as a heavy, heavy blow when you find out that someone copies your work and gets credit for it. When they are receiving accolades, money, and prestige for something you did first, or something you did better, it can absolutely crush your spirit. I’ve seen it happen to artists, web developers, software engineers, and many others.

Contemporary Intellectual Property law doesn’t prevent this – it encourages it. In NPR’s piece When Patents Attack, the Planet Money team explores the world of Patent Trolls – companies that buy up large collections of patents just so that they can sue other companies who produce technology that might be covered under these patents. This happens because US Intellectual Property law is so convoluted that many patents often exist for essentially the same technology, and these lawsuits can drag on for years in the courts.

The story highlights how large corporations like Apple and Google spend Billions buying up patents to defend themselves from patent trolls. A startup technology firm’s biggest nightmare is a patent troll coming after them – there is essentially no way that a small company can spend the millions of dollars it takes to defend a patent case in court.

Artists Are Helpless to Enforce Copyright

Just like these small startup firms that cannot sue large corporations, an individual artist is often at the mercy of litigants and large corporations. In 2009, John Unger, a well known metal sculpture artist, had his fire bowl designs ripped off by another artist, who then sued Unger to break his copyrights, and John had to raise money via Kickstarter to defend his copyrights. Another artist, who goes by imakeshinythings on Etsy, got ripped off by Urban Outfitters. There was essentially nothing that she could do, so she took to her blog. She raised a big stink, and Urban Outfitters pulled the pieces.

What about those artists who don’t have a big following, who can’t raise a stink against large corporations or who don’t have enough money to sue thieves?

Artists & Entrepreneurs Can Work Together

I’m not exactly sure how it would work (I’m no legal expert), but it seems like artists and technology entrepreneurs have an incentive to work together to find solutions to working around copyright and patent laws.

Gwenn’s comments above are a great start. She has shown that artists can create the life that they want, even if it’s unconventional or outside of the normal way of doing things in the art world. I would like to imagine a world where artists don’t have to worry about companies ripping them off because even if someone steals from them, it just reinforces their existing brand. I’d also like to see a world where large corporations don’t have to spend billions of dollars defending their innovations because of poorly written law.

Entrepreneurs and artists are the creative engines that are driving our 21st century world. In the USA, at least, traditional knowledge work, which used to highly valued, is quickly becoming automated, outsourced, and commodified. Intellectual property law, as it exists today, stifles innovation. Those creatives engines should be able to find ways to innovate around these legal road blocks and come up with a new system.

How would you create a career without worrying about copyright or patent law?

Two weeks ago, Melissa Dinwiddie and I launched ArtEmpowers.Me. It was tremendously satisfying. Leading up to the launch, we had a lot of fun spending a week and a half talking with artists from all over the world about their frustrations, hopes and dreams. We talked about money, creating the life that you want, and how to use the Internet to kick your art career into action. You can listen to those recordings by signing up for the ArtEmpowers.Me waiting list.

What I learned, in the mean time, is that there is a tremendous undercurrent of dissatisfaction in the way that the art world works right now. There are hundreds of very talented artists whose work never sees the light of day because artists are afraid it won’t sell, afraid that people won’t like it, or because it’s too much work for the return that they’re getting out of it.

I also learned that there are hundreds of people who discovered art late in life, or who gave it up for something more sensible, only to be pulled back to it later. Thus is the power of the creative muse.

I’m working hard to help as many artists as I can take advantage of modern tools. It’s to the point now where I start laughing when artists tell me that people don’t buy original art on the Internet. I can tell you that some of the success stories that we’re already hearing from ArtEmpowers.Me are absolutely astounding. We’ll try to share some of them in the near future.

It’s also been tremendously beneficial to partner with Melissa Dinwiddie. She’s smart, fun, and really hard working. It also helps that we have complimentary personalities, skills, and passions. She’s detail oriented in ways that I am not, and she has a lot more compassion than I do – which is important, I think.

I know this has essentially been all about me, but I wanted to share with you what’s happening at TheAbundantArtist.com. The launch of ArtEmpowers.Me took up all of my free time, but we’ll be back to your regularly scheduled dosage of goodness very soon.

Upcoming plans: more on how to make an awesome artist website, how to leverage all of the crazy goodness that came out of F8 – Facebook’s recent developer conference, as well as some guest posts from artists who are really out there getting it done.

Hint: Very soon, I’m going to write about War. And Art. You know, a fluff piece.

I couldn’t wait to publish this, so I put it out late in the evening. This is going to be a lot of fun.

As I’m starting the 3rd year of The Abundant Artist, I look back at the last two years and wonder how much has changed. The Internet has enabled an important change in the way that people interact with artists. There is no longer a need to go through collectors to get to artists – but what good does that do the artists?

There are a few artists who have been able to leverage the web to build the lifestyle that they want. I’ve attempted to highlight them in interviews over the past two years, and hope that I have begun to affect a significant change in the discussion of what it means to thrive as an artist.

Let’s Change the Conversation Around Art

The wonderful thing about the Internet is that we can chat with thousands of people at once. I’d like to talk to a few thousand of my closest artist friends and find out what it really means to Dispel the Myth of the Starving Artist.

Starting next week, September 6, my good friend Melissa Dinwiddie and I are going to be hosting a series of discussions around creating the life you want as an artist. Many of you may be familiar with Melissa’s guest blog posts on building a successful art business that totally overwhelmed her, and how she rebuilt her whole life from the ground up. Melissa is going to share with us some more intimate details on what went down, and then we’re going to open up the virtual microphone to questions and thoughts from other artists.

After that, on September 8, Melissa is going to host a discussion with me about what it really takes to leverage the power of the Internet to build the life that you want. It won’t be a sales pitch, just an honest to goodness sit down discussion around how artists are really doing it, and how you can do it too. I normally reserve this level of coaching for members of the Abundant Artist Community, but this time I’m going to open it up to all comers, for one evening only.

For the third call, we’re going to do something really special. It’s a surprise, but I promise that you won’t want to miss it – it could be the thing that inspires you to take your art business to a bold new place (no cost for this one either!).

Want to join us? Click here to register for the call.