Making Money Online from Selling Stock Illustrations

You want to make money online from Selling Stock Illustrations? Passive income for designers, Adobe Stock. I have done …

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hey guys I have been preparing this video for a while and I have done an extensive research to give a lot of useful information about selling illustrations on stock sites as a professional illustrator and graphic designer myself both selling and frequently buying stock illustrations I am going to share my views on the pros and cons of being a stock contributor I will also give you lots of tips and advice on how to be successful and most importantly I will help you to decide why you should start selling your illustrations today alright so before we get started in Adobe Illustrator and look at a few examples and how to prepare files to be sold on stock sites like Adobe stock I wanted to talk about a few things that I prepared slides for and on each of these slides I also included some amazing artists work and all of these artists are on Adobe stock selling their work you will always see the artist name on the right and if you want you can check out their work and see other examples from them but first of all what do you need to become a contributor on a site like Adobe stock well first of all you need to be at least 18 years old and you have to actually prove that by providing a government-issued ID it can be a passport or it can be other IDs but it has to be a photo ID and then you have to also have an Adobe ID which is free by the way so it means that you don’t need to have a Creative Cloud subscription you just have to create this ID for yourself that’s basically going to be your account now once you start selling your work it’s good to know that Adobe stock is going to give you 33% of the sales so that’s going to be your royalty on photography and vector illustrations and if you are selling animations or video files then you will get 35% I think it’s not too bad it’s quite fair I’ve seen worse percentages than these and of course the amount that you get for each of your sales depends whether it was sold as a premium or standard license but I’m going to get deeper into these later on in case you’re not familiar with Adobe stock currently it has over 90 million images video files 3d models and so much more and the unique aspect of it is that it’s completely built into all of the Adobe Creative Cloud applications so for example in Photoshop in the libraries panel you can just search for something let’s say some flower and immediately you will get all the results and they are ready to be used so I can just drag and drop them in here and an of course is going to be a watermark image but it’s high resolution enough to work with and I can even make selections masking adjustments and save it and have it in my composition and when I’m ready to license it all I have to do is to right-click on the layer and choose license image so just like other stock sites you would need to purchase credits and you can spend these credits and of course some assets like from the premium collection or videos or 3d models would cost more than one credit but the integration of Adobe stock within the applications is really cool because not only that you can search but you can also filter so let’s say if I’m looking for a vector illustration at some flower vector illustration I can find them here if I’m looking for a 3d model I can select that as well and there you go we can even use features like right-click find similar which is going to rely on Adobe’s sense ID artificial intelligence built into most of the Adobe applications to find matching similar looking images or illustrations in this case and just to show you again if I drag and drop this in here into my Photoshop composition I can even use things like blend modes just to check it out how it’s going to work since it’s black on white background setting it to multiply blend mode I can very quickly see how it would blend with the rest of the composition now this is how it looks once you have an account and you are selling things on Adobe stock so you can see I have a few photographs that I’m selling and if I want to upload a new work all I have to do is to go up here choose upload and then I can check all the requirements on the right side before I upload the work now of course there is a review process so you have to make sure that you meet all the criteria and the most important aspects that you have to keep in mind are these so these are going to be really looked at first of all whether you are meeting the legal standards the technical qualities which I’m going to go into more detail later on whether your title and keyword matches the content that you’re uploading whether the illustration has commercial value and aesthetically pleasing or in other words nice and last but not least this is actually quite important whether the file offers something unique so whether it’s original authentic and something fresh not just compared to other artists work but also compared to your already uploaded an existing work on your account so there’s a lot of things to consider here and obviously it’s worth looking into it a little bit more in-depth so I included a few links in the description if you want to read into it before you start selling your work now I would like to highlight two artists one of which is Mike McDonald who has a lot of stock illustrations on his portfolio and Adobe stock and he’s the owner of a small New Jersey design studio and he says he spends 90% of his time on client work and only 10% on uploading and creating stock illustrations but his actual revenue his overall revenue is probably around 40 percent coming passively from selling these stock illustrations and there’s something I wanted to quote from him because he gives a really good advice about starting out on selling stock illustrations so he’s saying some new artists submit ten to twenty images and get frustrated by the low sales numbers it takes time to build portfolio with work that is in high demand those early submissions aren’t going to generate much but they will lead you to discover sales trends what will sell and don’t let a portfolio will sit idle new images need to be uploaded regularly to maintain sales so the volume of your output the amount of illustrations you upload to your account really matters and that doesn’t mean that your quality needs to drop it just means that you have to be clever at what type of illustrations you are producing and how you are reusing elements of previously created illustrations now here’s a few technical requirements for Adobe stock specifically but it is very similar on other sites as well that you need to meet four-vector illustrations but first of all your files need to be either Adobe Illustrator or EPS or encapsulated PostScript formats and they have to be on a single artboard within the file that is minimum 15 megapixels in resolution or size and the maximum file size is 45 megabytes now it is very important to make sure that when you save these files you check the create PDF compatible file option so let me show you this in Illustrator let’s say this is the file that I am planning to upload if I go to file save as and I’m just going to save it here as version 2 and set it as illustrator file as you can see at the bottom once this dialog box comes up this is the feature they are talking about so the create PDF compatible file needs to be enabled now although we are talking mainly about vector illustrations it’s worth mentioning that of course you can also sell roster illustrations meaning that if you’ve done something let’s say watercolor on paper or even let’s say you are using Photoshop and you are producing digital art that is not vector based these can also be sold on Adobe stock and other stock sites as well but you have to make sure that you meet again a basic criteria and that is that you have your original artwork without resampling at least 4 megapixels in size now you might be wondering what’s the purpose of selling stock illustrations or what’s the reason why you can make good money from them well first of all vectors are far easier for clients to many relate to them photography so a lot of people when they are thinking about stock sonnets immediately they think of stock photography but as a professional working with clients often as a graphic designer I buy more vector illustrations from stock sites than photographs again because it is easier to edit them and customize them to whatever the client needs so they offer much more flexibility than videos and photos and it is an interesting thing that again a lot of people don’t even think about that if you are a graphic designer or professional illustrator why would you ever need to buy something from an Adobe stock side I think most of the buyers on these stock sites including Adobe stock are actually professional graphic designers or of course working in the marketing department but professional graphic designers even though they might be able to create these illustrations themselves it just saves them so much time and effort to get something from a site like Adobe stock and then tweak things around and place them into their composition or layout so why would they start from scratch when the thing that they are looking for already exists and easy to access they are getting paid for the end result which could be a whole branding by the client in which an Adobe stock illustration is only an element and time is a very important factor for every client work so wherever you can save time in this profession is obviously very useful for the whole workflow now if you can establish a really good style and you continuously and constantly upload your work in that style then buyers will notice that and if they like your work they will stick to buying work from you and eventually they will also probably get in touch with you and get bespoke illustrations created for them now here’s another artist on Adobe stock called jungle out there and the work of this artist is really fun and you can see there’s so much variety ready in the work that you’ve seen on my slides but of course there are artists uploading work in many different or various styles and even this artist although most of the illustrations are cute and kid-friendly some of them are actually more sarcastic like that unicorn I just love that one and the tacocat and this illustrator is a full-time director at a California ad agency and again she works full-time as an illustrator but she does this as a side gig but she manages to sell year after year over 10,000 illustrations so it is again providing her a really good revenue and a thing about this type of passive income that it’s like an investment so maybe you won’t see much income in the beginning and the more time you invest into creating new illustrations the higher chance that you eventually going to reach a level that these artists are already on now you can tell that I’m quite passionate about the topic but I didn’t want to cover this without showing you the pros and cons and again this is in my opinion you might think of other advantages and disadvantages but here’s a quick list of the pros so the passive income and the investment over time is something we already talked about compared to having a physical shop on the high street where you sell your work or physically posting your artwork to customers with stock sites you have no additional costs no production storage delivery or marketing costs because again that’s all handled by platforms like Adobe stock you can work from anywhere and with a completely flexible schedule which is great but most importantly you have creative freedom so you can choose to do illustrations that you like without any annoying briefs and reviews and clients telling you what to do so this means you can specialize in subjects that you are interested in and of course it really shows if an artist can work on things that they are interested in I’d say I love hiking and being outdoor so a lot of my illustrations tend to be about that while my wife who has a side he called her this well is focusing more on colorful and cute illustrations if you’re intrigued to see her work the link is also in the description below now going back to the advantages there’s one obvious point the exposure to a worldwide audience and the possibility of being found by potential clients and I know a lot of artists personally whose stock illustrations led to commissioned work from big clients and once they start working with a client and they are happy with their work it becomes an ongoing relation so once again this is why I call selling stock illustrations online and investment both in terms of revenue but also in terms of building relationships with your potential clients there’s a few other obvious things like you upload something once and then you can sell it a thousand times so even if you are not making a lot of money from it selling it a lot will eventually lead to a really good return but there are other advantages you might not even consider like from the sales that you do let’s say you have a hundred illustrations the most successful ones will be a direct feedback from your customers telling you what you should focus on or what you are good at so I think this is better than asking a friend what do you think of my illustration is here you are actually getting response and feedback from your real clients people who are actually paying money to get that work from you this is especially useful if you are just starting out and trying to establish what style you should do with your illustrations now if you are already working as a professional illustrator and this is just a side gig like I mentioned before then there’s another aspect as well which can be quite interesting and useful and that is whenever you work on client work you most of the time would produce a lot of excess illustrations so let’s say a logo design you would have lots of variations out of which one is going to be picked and refined and sent to the client but you could use all of those additional sketches and turn them into vector illustrations quickly and easily to be able to sell them as stock illustrations so why leave them just lying around when you can actually turn them into something profitable and there’s another aspect as well to doing stock illustrations and that is it can be a great prompt and giving motivation to work on new illustrations and that’s something that really applies to me so in my free time I don’t always feel like doing illustrations but when I think about selling it or when I see my work being sold on stock sites it really motivates me to do something and that’s not just me again I know a lot of artists who feel the same way now it wouldn’t be the full picture without the cons or disadvantages of selling your work online so here’s a few points first of all you have no control over where your illustration is going to be used this might not be bothering you but I heard of cases where it was actually quite bad so illustrations are probably less of a problem than photography especially if you are a model but still it’s something worth keeping in mind even with illustrations and one that is probably the most commonly discussed disadvantage is the low payment / sales which is a huge argument a lot of people have different ideas about this so I don’t really want to go deep into it but again it’s something definitely worth keeping in mind so well let’s say you can sell your artwork if it’s a commissioned illustration for I don’t know probably a hundred times more or sometimes thousand times more than what a customer would pay for it on a stock site having you work on a site sometimes if it gets popular you might get thousands of sales so then you are ending up roughly earning the same amount of money for it now one of the other fears that a lo of artists have is that when you are uploading your work on stock site for copycats it’s much easier to replicate your work and that is actually something that can happen and I heard of cases of that as well where someone just downloads the fully layered vector file and really digs into it and checks how the artist created certain things and then obviously if they have the skills they can copy it very closely and basically doing almost like a shortcut to one that art is developed probably for years again here it’s very important to mention skill so you can’t really replicate skill if you have the skill you will always be ahead of the copycats because you will be the one coming up with new styles and new ideas so if you are creative and have the skills this is not something I think you need to worry about too much now another thing is that volume really matters I mentioned this before as well just wanted to clarify that this can be really daunting because unless you upload a lot of work and quality work you won’t really see much revenue coming from your stock illustrations so because of this and also by seeing other artists amazing illustrations it can be very discouraging so without being persistent it’s easy to give up early without actually reaping the rewards of your work now here’s a few general tips for success but before I get into this I wanted to show you a page on Adobe stock which is the contributors of the week again I have the link in the description below this is a great new feature they introduced that they show weekly the best contributors and you can choose whether you are looking for photographers or illustrators and even specifically vector illustrations so you can see that these artists have let’s say lifetime downloads of a hundred thousand-plus and so on and so forth but the most important thing is you can see a style in their work and you can check out let’s say we check out this pure solution artists portfolio we will be able to see all kinds of different artwork and one of the first points that I wanted to tell you about as a tip for success is that set sell which means that when you combine multiple elements together like here we have lots of little illustrations put together and can be bought all together as one credit or one image it’s going to always be more like to be sold than a single illustration single little character from all of these again you might be thinking that you are selling your work cheap if you are doing that but don’t forget that a lot of things in this bundle or set is reused and that’s the beauty of doing vector graphics because it is quite easy to make amends especially if you set up your files well now it is important to keep in mind that buyers search by terms and not by artists and what that means is that it’s fine to feature different styles in your portfolio so don’t stick to one illustration style but on the other hand it is good to have a series in a certain style so if you experiment with let’s say a single line illustration don’t just do one do a series of them because if a buyer gets one of those illustrations it’s very likely that they are going to get more of them especially if they are building a brand for a client or they are working on a website and here’s a good example even on our site we have these three illustrations here and these are actually from a stock website so we bought this and I intentionally look for someone who has a very distinct style and all of the illustrations are the same so it wouldn’t work using different style illustrations in this case when you can see them clearly next to each other now it is quite obvious that you need to constantly research trends and also try to keep up with the season all the months so upload holiday related images or illustrations well in advance at least like three months before the actual season and of course on the research I mean look at other illustrators work not only on the stock side but also on sites like be hands and dribble but very important it doesn’t mean that you need to copy them you just use this research as an inspiration and then you try to create something unique and authentic something that has your own style and ideas in it and this leads to the next point that I wanted to talk about and that’s to provoke emotions so Vidal being personal with your illustrations it is really hard to get people interested and paying attention to your work so really inject humor and anything that you’re interested in to your illustrations and that is going to really make them unique and interesting and engaging and then of course when you are uploading your work you may have to make sure your key wording correctly so the content that your upload matches the terms that you assign to it also make sure that you’re not spamming meaning that you are uploading the same artwork in different background colors or just different line width because that’s something eventually will be rejected and you might even be banned from using a site but on the other hand if some of your illustrations are rejected try not to be discouraged and be persistent and try better learn from the rejections most of these themes especially Adobe stock steam I think does a really good job at telling you why they rejected something I can actually show you one of my photos being rejected and what they said so here we have this photo which was rejected and it’s explained nicely on the right that it has a too high noise levels so that’s why it wasn’t accepted by the way at this point is worth mentioning also that most stock sites including it will be stock as well allows you to upload photos taken with mobile devices so that’s again something like a common belief that stock photography has to be really high resolution and it’s only professional cameras and artists can use but actually nowadays mobile phones have such an amazing quality and the pictures that you can take with them are just amazing that you don’t even need a DSLR camera anymore you can just use your mobile phones and even myself I take photos on my trips with my phone and I manage to sell them as stock photos and make money from them so if you are not into illustration or if you’re not a professional photographer this is still something worth considering and last but not least here’s a few technical advice that’s worth considering before uploading your files first and foremost you have to keep your files tidy and what I mean by that is to make sure that you have things grouped and organizing two layers so here in this case for example everything is a separate element I can’t really select for example the plane separately because every element is a single path it’s not grouped together so you have to put yourself in the buyers position and you have to think about what would they want to make changes to so you have to really pay it attention to organizing your work deleting unused layers and even get rid of things like unused swatches which you can do very easily by going into the swatches panel choose select all unused and then delete and then say yes and of course if you want you can add all the swatches that you use by selecting all use kimono control a and then go again to the drop down and then choose new color group from the dialog box just choose selected artwork and then when you click OK you will see all the colors you use the new illustration add it to the swatches so this is relevant to the illustration while the original default swatches were completely irrelevant the same applies to graphic Styles brushes and symbols so anything that doesn’t need to be there for the illustration you should delete and just keep your file clean I mentioned is before but also make sure that the illustration is on one artboard and there’s nothing outside the out artboard so you need to delete everything from your page board now the next advice is that try to avoid text when possible and on the right side you can see a few examples of that and instead of actual copy you can just include a few lines and represent that someone is talking about something just with a speech bubble and those lines of course in certain cases like on this previous page we have actual copy and some lorem ipsum text that can be editable to make it easier for a client to see how that graphic could work on a website or on a flyer or what-have-you and some illustrations can be like Hamlet ring or typography base like this creative here where of course text is unavoidable coming back to this artwork there’s another point as well worth mentioning and that’s lines wherever you use lines in your artwork they should stay or remain strokes so here for example we have these dashed lines and they are actually expanded and turned into objects but that makes it really difficult to make changes to them so instead of doing it like that but I would suggest to do for a vector illustration is to set it up as a dashed stroke so we can go into the stroke properties and just choose a dashed line and I can reduce the dashed line maybe down to one millimeters or even less than that in this case 0.5 and then maybe we can increase the thickness a bit more and that way we can make the dashes bigger as well okay so let’s just do one millimeter something like that and that looks very similar to the original one so if you give a client something like that that means that they can easily make amends and move this around so adjust the curves and the path while having that style applied on them it’s a similar concept when you create patterns and you are selling them on sites like Adobe stock for that you definitely need to make sure that they are seamless so they can be used as a repeated pattern so here’s two examples a pattern from a stock site that looks really nice and I love the colors and the composition and everything but if this is turned into a swatch it’s not going to be repeatable I’m not going to turn it into swatch now I can just show it to you like this I’m just going to drag it to the right and you can see that although it is very close to be seamless for some reason the artist didn’t save it as a seamless pattern well here’s another example where it was a stock vector illustration that was already set up to work as a seamless pattern which I can try out by creating a big rectangle and then from the swatches I just use this as a pattern and you will see that there’s no edges or you won’t be able to tell where it repeats another thing that you need to keep in mind is to avoid auto tracing or image trace in a loose because that’s not going to give you good results and let me show you what I mean so on the Left we have a scanned illustration that was Auto traced or image trace and you can tell that it is not a nice result so it would work much better if this was recreated and actually manually traced over with the pen tool the same goes for this image here again you can develop an eye for spotting auto trace illustrations and believe me most people would avoid buying these and even the review team will most likely reject these so there’s no point in even trying uploading them and of course the worst you can do is to auto trace photos and that’s definitely going to be rejected because for these ones you would even need to obviously upload a model release but that wouldn’t make this into a good illustration so hopefully you can see that these are things that you should definitely avoid and similarly to this you should also avoid using raster effects that’s also something that can lead to rejection most of the times so what that means is when you are in Illustrator avoid using any of these effects under the Photoshop category but there’s even a few under the illustrator effects like drop shadow feather and glue that’s going to use raster effects so in this case if i zoom closer this is the feather effect here if I go into document roster effect settings and reduce it down to let’s say five pixel per inch you will see what I mean so that’s a feather effect which looks very smooth if the raster effect setting is high but when you reduce the resolution you can tell that the problematic effect is and the same thing here with this drop shadow again when i zoom closer we can tell the pixelation so these are things you should avoid and instead if you are using effects use vector based effects like the scribble feature I’m not sure whether you would ever need that for your stock illustrations but that’s something that is actually fine and you can also check it with the outline view but if you are using these most likely you would to expand them so you want to select that object on which you have the effect and go up to the object menu and choose expand appearance which is going to turn this effect into editable parts another thing to pay attention to is to avoid stray anchor points so things like these here are completely unnecessary and sometimes you might not notice small anchor points so again the outline view command or control vibe will help you to spot them so there’s one here now I can see it better that should be deleted but any of these additional lines should be also deleted and sometimes you might even need to reduce the amount of anchor points where you have too many of them let’s say here I just select these lines sometimes maybe instead of deleting you can also just go into the object menu choose path and simplify which will give you an indication of what that can be simplified to defining your curve position you can control how similarly it’s going to look to the original artwork but even with a high precision let’s say around 90 percent I will get much less anchor points so originally it had 50 points now I only have 17 of course I could do this on the whole illustration as well and I could save a lot of anchor points and believe me that’s important even on complex illustrations so try to reduce anchor points and get rid of all stray points and similarly to this you should also make sure that you don’t have any open parts so any filled shapes should be closed an example is if you have a triangle like in these geometric illustrations if you have a triangle that accidentally is not closed completely so I’m just going to click somewhere here you might not notice this if it has a filled color like this black color here but what you want to do is to use the direct selection tool select the two endpoints and then press first the ctrl alt J which is the average feature or command all J then choose both and then while still having them selected use command or control J to join them together so that became a closed path and by the way if you are interested how to do this illustration the good news is I just prepared and finished recording a tutorial about this so the full process you will be able to see in one of our next videos here on the channel if you want to make sure you don’t miss this and if you’re not already subscribed it’s a good time to do it and also click on the little bell to make sure you get notified when a new video comes out and that’s all I wanted to cover in this video but one final note is that most of these stock sites won’t ask for exclusivity so that means that if you create something and you upload to one side you can easily resell it on other sites and here’s a collection of my favorite stock sites so it’s worth checking them out again I have all the links in the description below so if I manage to convince you to start selling stock illustrations and besides Adobe stock it’s worth considering selling your work on these other sites as well let us know in the comment section what would you like us to cover next time on this series click on the link in the description or the join button to become a member if you want to work on future projects with us and see the whole design or illustration process live thanks a lot for watching like and share this video if you enjoyed it have fun learning guys and I will see you in the next one [Music]

Order the best illustration at the best price for your business, your company, or to resell them on other sites that pay for the service at more expensive prices, earning the difference:

Quick and economical illustration – Click Here.