[gavinray]

My partner is a digital artist who makes a living off of freelance/commission work.

I've been on the lookout for tools in this area since I suspect they're going to be a large part of art development in the future -- start with something rough out of a tool like this, and use it to save yourself a bunch of time early on + work on the details.

Will share this!

[TekMol]

I often wonder if the internet is useful for artists to earn money. And if so how.

Would you mind explaining how your partner aquires clients?

Are there online marketplaces for this type of work?

[gavinray]

She contracts through various Discord servers, to a combination of friends and random people.

It's definitely not Fiverr or whatever typical thing you'd expect, it's hard to earn money that way.

Easier if you do niche stuff and cater to specific online communities + establish a reputation.

[TekMol]

You mean like going to a discord server about dragons and announcing "Hey, I draw dragons! Does anybody want me to draw them as a dragon?".

That sounds like a lot of effort that has to go into this type of marketing then?

[gavinray]

  > That sounds like a lot of effort that has to go into this type of marketing then?

Ha, yeah that could definitely be the case depending on what kind of art you're doing I suppose.

She prefers to draw "adult art" for certain niche kinks/fetishes, which have a very large "supply & demand" problem. She enjoys drawing this stuff and does it for fun in free time.

(She will draw mostly anything though. She's done logos for small businesses, portraits bought as gifts to friends/family, etc.)

I could ask her more about how she gets clients/commissions if you want, but I think generally it goes something like this:

  1. Join a Discord server based around the particular fetish

  2. Post her work in the channels they have for "#i-made-this" or other original content

  3. Hang out and chat, mention that she does commissions

  4. Wait for people to DM her

And from what she said, it was much harder at the beginning just starting out. What happened was that once she had done a couple dozen commissions, those people would recommend her to other people and the work sort of sporadically but continuously has been rolling in this way.

It's a bit of a snowball effect thing.

[TekMol]

Interesting. Thanks for the info.