Print on Demand for Artists: Earn While You Sleep

Nic Squirrell's course runs 21 minutes across ten short lessons, and it earns that brevity by staying narrowly focused: this is about preparing and positioning existing art for print on demand sites, not about building an art practice from scratch.

The arc is sensible. It opens with the case for passive income (upload once, earn repeatedly), moves into an honest cost-benefit lesson on why POD suits some artists and frustrates others, then spends its middle stretch on the technical meat: designing for mass appeal, preparing traditional versus digital art, building a per-site workflow, uploading with proper metadata, and marketing without becoming a nuisance on social media.

The strongest material is the file-prep math. Squirrell walks through scanning an 8 by 10 inch painting at 300 ppi versus 600 ppi and shows exactly how the resulting pixel dimensions differ, tying that directly to how many products a given image can support. That is a specific, checkable number, not a vague "scan it big" gesture, and it is the kind of detail that saves a beginner from wasted work.

The workflow lesson goes further and is genuinely useful for anyone who has never thought about production efficiency: Squirrell keeps a written, step-by-step process per site, builds Photoshop document templates sized to each product (a towel template at 3700 by 7400 pixels, 300 ppi, RGB), and demonstrates dragging separate art layers (background, subject, pattern) into that template and repositioning them to fit a new aspect ratio. Keeping elements on separate layers rather than flattening early is the practical habit that makes this repeatable across dozens of products and sites.

Where the course is thinner is anything past the file itself. It never names a single POD platform's dashboard, signup process, or actual royalty split, so a viewer still has to go find that information independently before they can act on anything taught here. The marketing lesson is similarly general: post to social media, join site communities, use IFTTT to cross-post, participate in forums. All reasonable, none new to anyone who has sold anything online before.

The uploading lesson admits its own weak spot when Squirrell says writing good titles is "on my must do better in future list," which is a candid moment but also underlines that copywriting for search and discovery is not something this course actually teaches, only mentions as important.

As a beginner-level primer on file preparation and workflow discipline, this delivers real, specific value in a short runtime. As a business how-to for actually launching on a specific site, it stops short and mostly gestures at a companion class for the fuller process. Anyone who already has a body of artwork and just needs the scanning math and a templating method will get their 21 minutes back quickly. Anyone hoping for a guided tour of Redbubble, Society6, or similar platforms will need to look elsewhere.

What you will learn

• ·Why passive income from Print on Demand suits artists better than made-to-order sales
• ·How to scan traditional art at 600 ppi to hit the 6,000-pixel dimension most POD sites need
• ·How to build reusable Photoshop templates sized to each site's product dimensions (demonstrated live on a towel at 3700 by 7400 pixels)
• ·How to keep background, subject and pattern on separate layers so one image can be cropped to square, portrait and landscape
• ·How to write titles, descriptions and keyword tags so a listing actually surfaces in on-site search
• ·How to spread the same art across multiple POD sites and read early sales data to decide where to focus