Hi! my name is Madison Mayfield I'm a senior at Ole Miss, Hotty Totti, and I'm
here to tell you about my side hustle today which is being an artist in
creating I'm trying to avoid being a starving artist and therefore and
maneuvering this into a side hustle and trying to make a business out of it
first of all I was just always was creating an art for classes and friends
and different things like that my dad is quite entrepreneurial and so
he always would make comments like hey Madison you should sell this and I kind
of had impostor syndrome like I don't know if people would want to buy my
artwork and a little bit of insecurity there but as I was graduating I was a
senior in high school and my friends are going to the respective colleges and
universities and they asked me to start creating artwork for their dorms and I
thought hey people like it like it's good enough and so that's kind of where
it began I just created a gamut of different artwork the whole live love
last movement was a thing with all the moms and so I taught myself calligraphy
and I would just paint and write these beautiful quotes and did watercolor the
little wreaths and flowers all that sort of thing around the artwork and I ranged
everything from basic calligraphy to large acrylic and watercolor paintings
so really kind of all across the board I didn't have a very big strategy I was
just kind of waiting till people approached me to create this work and
hopefully make a little bit of extra money on the side actually how it
started was I followed different artists on Instagram and it was working for them
and they were doing it full-time and I thought oh my gosh like this is
something that I am striving towards and want to do and I noticed that their
strategy in terms of making money was more heavily based on prints art prints
and that that's where the bulk of their income was coming from and so I decided
to go that venue I soon realized that even if I created these hundreds of
thousands of prints that I didn't have people who wanted to buy them therefore
I created a art account on Instagram at Madison Mayfield Art
and I began following people and gaining followers and posting it still it wasn't
enough and so there is kind of an itch little market of moms on Instagram and
some of them have like a million followers and they've just range from
everything from children's clothing to parenting tips and things like that and
so I reached out to a hundred different moms on Instagram via email and DM and
of those hundred only five got back to me and four four three of them were
knows one of them was a maybe and one of them was yes and I only needed one yes
so I took it and ran with it we decided on a Mother's Day project she had these
beautiful captions and of that I would pick a sentence and create artwork out
of it and then in turn she would market it to her followers she actually once we
decided percentages on how to split profit up she decided to donate that
money and so that was another just little tip that kind of I believe pulled
at the heartstrings of a few people and made them more willing to open up their
wallets but just fine for me and so then I was trying to figure out what the best
process was to create these prints and originally I spent hours on these
watercolor and ink artwork pieces and then I would take them down to my local
Kinkos and scan them but the colors weren't right they were faded and it
just the paper quality wasn't right and so I did that for a while but I wasn't
satisfied with the product and I felt like people who were paying you know
twelve dollars for it probably weren't satisfied either it just felt like a
little bit of a cheaper photocopy and so I started researching different price
points and different websites and how other people did it and I actually
reached out to an artist who does this quite frequently and she recommended a
website I don't exactly know it's pronounced it's a French war it I think
it's ji clay today.com I would create the art piece I would take a photo of it
with a high quality camera or I would borrow of my friends nice new iPhones
and take a picture of my artwork with it I would import it onto my laptop and
then edit in Adobe Photoshop and illustrator
create a digital file and then send that into the website so they would print it
on several different types of paper send it back to me I chose my favorite one
and then I went from there much higher quality product and actually something
that I was quite proud of at this stage I moved off of Etsy which was my
original venue for selling it was a great start it has a lot of great tools
on it but it didn't have that kind of professional air that I wanted my work
to be recognized by and so awesome start but I moved there from there and created
my own website on Squarespace which just is a little bit cleaner and also super
user friendly if you're just getting started from the collaboration that I
did with this Instagram mom I ended up making several thousand dollars which is
really really exciting and it helped me pay for school on several other
different things and so that was just an aha moment for me because prior to that
I've been making you know anywhere between twenty and fifty dollars really
randomly and when people were approaching me and so this is something
that was really exciting and it was something that really kind of validated
myself as an artist um it's great so my main biggest cost is art supplies
they're very very expensive surprising that you can get this tiny little tube
of paint like this for $15 so something that I typically do is I save up coupons
or I just wait until someone purchases or Commission something where I need
that specific art supply and then I'll go out and get it but over the years of
couponing and kind of being smart with my art supplies and checking prices at
several different stores I've collected a good amount of paint tubes and
different supplies like that so that's been great whereas now I can just go run
to my stash and start creating which is really exciting but that's definitely my
biggest cost and then as for the prints I do make to order so when someone
orders something then I we'll go ahead and order it from this
website because I don't have the cash reserves to just have you know a stack
of prints on hand because it's just money sitting around till someone buys
it that's goods drive to you hopefully I
can get to that latter place one day and but those are my main expenses so
basically being an artist is not synonymous with being starving and I'm
still navigating figuring out more strategy and more business I to it but
it's really exciting to see where this is going to go and I just want to think
they call it hustle forgive me an opportunity to share my story and also
want to encourage y'all out there to just start just go ahead and do it
so with that being said go ahead and like and subscribe and comment if you
have anything nice to say