A Step-by-Step Guide to Art Licensing: Sell Your First Piece of Artwork Online
Cat Coquillette · Artist + Entrepreneur + Educator
Cat Coquillette turns 100,000 print-on-demand sales into a practical, if promotional, roadmap for licensing art through Society6, Redbubble, and Casetify.
A Step-by-Step Guide to Art Licensing is less a technical class than a business briefing, delivered by someone who has clearly lived through the process it describes. Cat Coquillette opens with her own numbers, a $9.20 first paycheck in 2014 that grew into six figures in cumulative product sales, and that origin story sets the tone for the whole course: pragmatic, specific, and unapologetically promotional about the platforms that built her business.
What It Actually Teaches
The course moves through a clear arc, from print-on-demand basics through niche-finding, trend-spotting, account setup, upload mechanics, pricing, platform features, and social growth. The strongest stretch is the middle. The niche lesson uses a real before-and-after from her own portfolio, the watercolor florals that took off against the digital collages that flopped, to make the case for testing widely before narrowing down. The pricing lesson is even more concrete, walking through Society6's markup system with her actual dollar figures for art prints and framed wall art, and contrasting that against Redbubble's fully adjustable rates and Casetify's fixed ones. Anyone confused about how royalties work on these sites will leave with a real answer, not a vague gesture at "passive income."
The uploading lesson supplies the kind of detail that separates a useful course from a motivational one: 300 DPI, RGB color mode, a 10,000 by 10,000 pixel square master file saved as both JPEG and transparent PNG, and a reminder to use all 20 available tags per piece for platform search visibility. This is the sort of production-line advice that a working artist actually needs and rarely gets spelled out this plainly.
Where It Falls Short
The social media section, roughly a fifth of the runtime, leans heavily on Instagram-specific mechanics that have aged since the course was recorded, hashtag caps, Explore page behavior, and follower-count benchmarks tied to a platform whose discovery algorithm has changed substantially. The advice to mix 30 hashtags per post and chase the Explore page reads as dated rather than durable.
There is also a structural tension the course never resolves: it teaches a strategy built entirely on centralizing distribution through a handful of print-on-demand marketplaces, which puts the learner's income at the mercy of platforms she does not control. The course acknowledges the difficulty of getting noticed among "hundreds of thousands of artists" but does not seriously address what happens if a platform changes its royalty terms or algorithm, a real risk for anyone building a business this way.
At 50 minutes, the class covers a lot of ground without going deep on any single skill, and its examples lean almost entirely on Coquillette's own shop screenshots rather than a spread of case studies. It is a solid orientation for someone who already makes art and wants a first sale, not a comprehensive business course, and its niche focus on print-on-demand marketplaces means it will not translate directly to fine art galleries, licensing agencies, or other distribution models.
The standout
The specific file-prep system, one giant 10,000x10,000px 300 DPI square file saved as both a flattened JPEG and a transparent PNG, that covers nearly every product template without redesigning for each one.
What you will learn
- How print-on-demand royalty structures actually work, including fixed versus adjustable rates across Society6, Redbubble, and Casetify
- How to define a recognizable art style and target audience by testing multiple directions before committing to one
- How to spot and act on visual trends using Pinterest and design blogs before they peak
- The exact technical specs for uploading artwork, including a 10,000 x 10,000 pixel 300 DPI square file workflow
- How to price prints and framed wall art to balance customer appeal against personal royalty targets
- How to grow an engaged Instagram following using hashtag tiering and the Explore page
Best for: Visual artists with an existing body of work who want a concrete first-sale plan for print-on-demand platforms and have never set up a shop before.
Skip it if: Anyone without existing artwork to upload, or artists looking for technical Photoshop instruction rather than business and marketing strategy.