How to Make Money as an Artist: Proven Ways to Creative Career You Will Love
Iva Mikles · Illustrator | Top Teacher | Art Side of Life
Twenty short lessons survey 17 income streams with real numbers, but none deep enough to actually start earning from tomorrow.
A wide map, not a deep one
Iva Mikles built this class around a simple premise: after interviewing more than 200 working artists on her podcast, she distilled their income strategies into 17 categories and gave each one roughly five to seven minutes. The course moves briskly through employment, freelancing, private commissions, print on demand, licensing, stock platforms, Patreon, Etsy, galleries, AdSense, sponsorships, affiliate deals, self-publishing, crowdfunding, art fairs, teaching, and membership sites. Each lesson follows the same template: how it works, what income to expect, and how to start. That consistency makes the course easy to skim and easy to return to for a specific chapter, but it also means no single path gets the depth needed to act on immediately.
Where the course earns its keep is in the numbers. Mikles cites payscale.com figures for salaried roles (a visual development artist in Los Angeles running $75,000 to $147,000), hourly freelance rates by specialty and region, and gallery commission splits that can run as high as 50 percent. The Etsy lesson is the strongest single piece of evidence in the class: she walks through a real seller who moved roughly 8,500 items over six years at an average price near $55, arriving at an estimated $500,000 in lifetime revenue. That kind of concrete arithmetic is what separates this course from generic "how to sell your art online" content, and it recurs in the Kickstarter and gallery lessons too, where she names specific fee percentages rather than waving at "platform costs."
Where it thins out
The tradeoff for breadth is that almost nothing gets a workflow. The teaching lesson explains that Skillshare pays based on watch time and that in-person workshops might run $400 to $5,000, but it never shows how to build a pitch deck for a school or price a first workshop. The Patreon and membership lessons describe signs that you are ready and general content ideas, but stop short of showing a tier structure or a content calendar. Anyone hoping to leave with a checklist for one specific path will need to look elsewhere, likely to the very podcast interviews Mikles repeatedly points toward throughout the class.
The pacing also leans heavily on repeated structure. By the tenth lesson, the rhythm of "here's what it is, here's a salary range, here's how to start" becomes predictable enough that a viewer skimming for relevant sections will not miss much by jumping straight to the two or three income streams they care about. The closing class project, a simple mind map of appealing income combinations, is a reasonable synthesis exercise but a light one for a nearly two-hour class.
What ultimately works in the course's favor is honesty about tradeoffs. Mikles does not oversell any single path. She flags that galleries take large cuts, that AdSense needs real traffic volume to matter, and that freelance income is irregular enough to require savings discipline. For someone early in figuring out which of these seventeen doors to open, that even-handed survey has real value, even if it will not, by itself, get them through any one of those doors.
The standout
The lesson-by-lesson income breakdown, especially the Etsy case study tracing one shop's six years of sales into an actual annual revenue estimate, gives a rare grounded sense of real numbers instead of vague potential.
What you will learn
- A framework for distinguishing active versus passive income streams available to visual artists
- Rough salary and rate benchmarks across employment, freelancing, commissions, and galleries in different countries
- How platforms like print on demand, stock sites, Patreon, and Etsy structure payouts and fees
- What galleries, Kickstarter, and AdSense actually take in commission and what triggers eligibility
- A short self-assessment exercise to narrow 17 options down to a personal shortlist
- Where to find deeper interviews for each path via the teacher's podcast back catalog
Best for: Artists who already make work regularly and need a map of which monetization paths exist before picking one to pursue seriously.
Skip it if: Anyone wanting step-by-step execution, such as how to actually price a commission or set up a Patreon tier, since each path gets an overview rather than a walkthrough.