Broadening my horizons (and income sources)

previously published on my Halcja's Place blog

You can never know, how your life may turn around or what new opportunities will show up on your horizon. Just a few weeks ago I was set on working on my Shutterstock portfolio, which basically meant trying to spit out as many illustrations a day as possible. Make them decent enough quality wise, and hope that my drawings will fill up some obscure niche and get their small share of sales before drowning eternally in a flood of more stock-worthy images.

Let's be honest. The quality and style of my drawings are "not there yet". Their level of "stockiness" is dwindling somewhere between "I've never drawn anything in my life" and "I took an art class in high school". I'm not complaining. I'm just trying to be realistic. I know what I'm good at. I can see how my skills have been improving over the years. And I'm still learning and improving every day.

Sentiments aside, I still need to stabilize my income and maybe even increase it to the point of not having to stress over it every time I look into my bank account.

But I think I'm rambling too much, so I'll just get to the point.

Last week I got a surprising splurge of activity on my Fiverr gigs. I took out my calculator, as I always do, and figured out that it wouldn't hurt to level out my priorities a little. So these writing gigs will now be on par with my stock illustrations. It's a good thing to diversify your income sources, so I'll do just that. I'll also try not to succumb to the "quantity over quality" trend, that's been going around on microstocks with all those image mills that daily upload hundreds of almost identical icons just to occupy the frontier of the "New" search results. Instead, I will take my time and put more effort into each and every one of my illustrations. I'll improve my skills. The quality of my art will get better, which means that my illustrations will potentially rank higher in search results and have more chances of reaching the elusive top that everyone is talking about.

In other news, thanks to the courtesy of Payoneer, I've finally got my first payout from Shutterstock. My hard earned money is no longer just a number on the screen. Well... technically, it still is. But what I mean is that I now can finally transfer it to my Ukrainian bank account and... omg, I can't believe it.... spend it on food and stuff! I can chip in and pay the bills. I can now stop burning through my savings.

All is well. Now it's time to get back to work.

Starry Night Sky. A fragment of my Illustration (available on Shutterstock).