Take a Small, Creative Action Today

So while we could talk about how our newest Mr. Owl silkscreen print is up in our shop, but today we wanted to focus on taking action.

While we talked a lot about creating a concrete business plan in terms of if you're looking to make a career out of art, sometimes once you create that plan things get a bit..overwhelming.  Maybe you've realized that you're selling yourself short by pricing too low, or that maybe you've been marketing to the wrong demographic all along, or maybe your head is spinning and you just want life to be simple again.

Whatever it is, take a deep breath, and take a step back.  Sure, having a plan is great, and is the easiest blueprint to achieving a goal. However, part of creating is letting that rigidity go and just doing whatever you need to do.

Yes, this sounds contradictory - how are you supposed to have a plan, but not pay attention to it?  Well, we're not saying that you should abandon said plan, but if it's impeding in your creating, then you might need to push that plan to the backburner.

Monkey, being the business-focused one of us, tends to sometimes get too caught up in the business side of art.  He starts making crazy budget spreadsheets and starts going blind looking at google analytics and just get a bit nutso trying to figure out how to hustle some art.  Seal then sees that Monkey is working himself into a frenzy of madness and stress and she reminds him to just calm down and to create.

Really, while you need a plan to act as your framework, if you spend all your time fretting over how many paintings you need to sell, you're losing sight of what you probably really want - to be able to making a living doing what you love.  Monkey tends to think TOO much about the "how" when he really should be painting, or working on a comic, or doing what he really wants to be doing.

So make sure that you start up a habit of doing some small, creative action today.  Even if you're in the midsts of writing your marketing plan, or doing your finances, or tackling some bureaucracy, make sure that you get a thumbnail sketch down, or a doodle, or just work on that masterpiece for 15 minutes.  Strum something out on your guitar, or rehearse that choreography.  Whatever it is, make sure that you don't lose sight of what should be the real important thing - creation.

The Balance Between Business and Art

Monkey reads a lot of marketing and business blogs, courses, and books.  He makes sure he has a strong grasp on the business side of Monkey + Seal, as he handles a majority of those aspects.  However, while educating yourself about the business side of art is helpful and necessary for most, many artists have trouble managing the balance between the business development side of art, and the actual creating.

When Seal is working on a freelance project, she usually hits a 70% creating - 30% business, which is super awesome.  Monkey, on the other hand, is lucky to hit 50-50.  So how do you manage your own creation-business balance and what is the ideal?


While if you're already familiar with the business side: marketing, budgeting, pricing, distribution, accounting, and maybe stuff like web designing or printing, you may struggle to find more time to devote to your creating.  However, if you're already making art like a fiend but have no idea how to do any of that business stuff, perhaps you need to spend more time developing your business skills.

So what's the ideal ratio?  Well, it all depends on you.  Personally, a good balance with a stronger emphasis on the creating is what we recommend.  For us, we'd rather be at 90-100% creating, and doing very little business stuff (maybe we should hire an agent or assistant), but there are definitely people out there who really enjoy some of the business part, so you should lean more towards the business side.

The reality of it is that an ideal is probably about 70-30 creating-business.  Seal has found that works well for her, and Monkey agrees.  Monkey has been struggling with this personally for some time, usually spending closer to 80% of his time on business, sadly skimping on the creating.

If you make this same mistake, what happens is that while you may be great at drawing an audience and making sales, what you soon find out is that you run out of stuff to promote or develop.  Monkey lost focus on what was really important (making art), and focused too much on the "gotta make money" side of things.  He recently shifted more towards 50% creating (a big swing for him), and he found that by doing more of what he loves (creating), the money (the business) is following.

So we encourage you to spend more time doing what you love and less time doing what you don't like to do.  While learning the basics of marketing and selling art is important if you want to make a living off of it, make sure that you don't forget what your main purpose is: creation.  Do more of what you love, and the money will follow.  

The Secret to Surviving a Crazy Deadline

Chronos, King of Deadlines and Missed Buses

As professional artist, you will have deadlines. That is a truth that cannot really be escaped, unless you are so famous that people are willing to wait however long it takes (ala one of Seal's heroes, Yuri Norstein and his wife). But for most of us, we face deadlines, either by having to get work delivered by a certain date for a gallery show, or overnight deadlines for newspaper illustrations, etc. etc. How to survive?

Well, let's rule out avoiding the crazy deadline in the first place. Whether you procrastinated too much, or life happened, or your client is sorta nuts and expects miracles, you're in this situation and that's that.

So, what do we do? First things first is to figure out a plan. While it may seem counter-intuitive to take a quick breather and map out a game plan, this step is crucial. Seal is great at this, which makes Monkey very grateful to have her, since he tends to take action before thinking at times. Planning your course of action is very important, since time is not on your side, you want to be as efficient as possible.

By figuring out all the steps you have to take, you can figure out your priorities, and create a flowchart of action items. For something like silkscreen, figuring out a proper flowchart can save you hours of time. Since the bottlenecks in the printing process usually revolve around waiting for the screens to dry, you have to constantly jump back and forth in the process to maximize your time. If there is a part of the process that can't be sped up (ie. paint drying, etc.) try to do other things that might take you a long time that can be done in any order while that's happening (ie. going out and buying a frame, or writing up price sheets, etc.).

At the top of your priority list should be any extra materials you might need. If you can make sure that you won't run out of some crucial supply ("Nooooo, I'm out of cyan ink and it's 3am!!"), you'll save yourself crazy amounts of stress. Also, it'll help you overall as you won't get distracted with a sudden stop due to lack of materials. You want to make getting the work done as streamlined as possible.

Now that you've got your plan of action, Monkey + Seal recommend grabbing a quick snack. Monkey prefers Cliff Bars (the Blueberry ones are pretty awesome). Carbs or sugars are generally a great way to go, as you want to make sure that your blood sugar is high. You're going to probably be working harder and faster than usual, so you want to make sure that you have some readily accessible energy. Nothing is worse than going at it and then suddenly have your energy just tank on you. Also, in order to keep from crashing, it's a good idea to snack here and there if time permits to keep that blood sugar as stable as possible. Make sure you're staying hydrated - it'll help to prevent headaches and will aid in digestion.

Next - make sure that you can get rid of as many distractions as possible. If you can, turn off the phone. Close all the extraneous blog windows and social media sites. Get off twitter and facebook. Turn on some music (if you work well with music) or turn it off (if you need silence) and get some earplugs. The least amount of stuff you have vying for your attention the easier it'll be to stay focused and work more efficiently.

Finally, (here comes the hard part,) you get down to work.

There. You've somehow managed to survive another crazy deadline, and it's time for some well-deserved rest (hopefully). Now you can use the knowledge gained from this experience to make next time a bit easier. The more knowledge you have about your working habits (how long it takes to paint a 16x20 landscape, or how much ink you need to make 50 prints, etc.) the better you can plan for the future. Congratulations!

How to Save Money on Printing

Hey everyone, it's Monkey today.

Today, I'm going to go on about a website. Ebates.com. Why? Because as artists and as business people, we are constantly trying to find a way to save money on supplies. I spend a large amount of time looking for the best online printers. By best, it actually changes depending on what I need. For quick turn-around times on order with good quality and a great price, I use PS Print. For high-quality postcards in small quantities, I go for Overnightprints.com. For highest-quality everything, or for stickers, we say Moo.com, but you have to order in advance.

Anyway, the reason I bring this up is that I happened to stumble across Ebates.com. From what it looks like, they've partnered with some of the biggest online retailers, including both PS Print and Overnight Prints in order to give you discounts (and of course, make themselves some money). The site is totally free, and they do what's known as playing the margins. What (I assume) they do is promise large numbers of customers in order to get a large % of each referred sale (for this example, let's say 10%). Then, they offer you (and me, and everyone else) 9% back. So you need to print up some holiday greeting cards, and you use Ebates, and you find a coupon for an extra $20 savings. Then, you'll get kicked back an extra 9% on top of that. Sweet, you just saved some money. Ebates then gets your business, and they get 1%. Everyone wins, right?

So the pros:

*They give you $5 for signing up ($5! )

*They have a crapload of online merchants, including Target, Barnes and Noble, Lulu.com (print your own books!), PS Print and Overnight Prints, Best Buy, Office Depot, Staples, REI, Safeway (you can even buy your groceries...holy crap!) and tons more.

*You get access to pretty much everyone online coupon that store offers (if they offer coupons)

*They send you a check every quarter or so of all the money you've saved

The cons:

*It's an extra step to go to Ebates.com first, then go to the website you want

*They don't have every single store in the universe on there

*You get an email once a week or so about their featured vendors.

So in the spirit of fair play, I'll be totally honest with you. If I refer 50 people who make a purchase, I get an iPad. But like we say about all of our affiliate links - we don't represent companies who do shady things, or offer crap services. Soo, I would be greatly appreciative if you signed up via our referral link here: We love Monkey + Seal! We love ebates!

Also, we want to give you the option of checking out their site, affiliate free, here: www.ebates.com.

Cool, thanks a lot, and back to your regular scheduling of Monkey + Seal.

Getting Your Work Out There - Part 3

Monkey drew this to be funny, but now he's seriously considering investing in a squid suit..

Today, we wanted to talk about the importance of getting your work out there into the world. For more on the getting yourself psyched up to show, check out Part 1, and for the business side of why you should get out there, check out Part 2. This is Part 3 (of 3) and will be about some practical ways to actually have your work seen.

While craft fairs/art shows, comic conventions are cool ways to get out there and sell some stuff, they do cost money to register for booths. If you really want to get out there though, these really are the best ways to do it. If you can't afford it now, try to save up, or sell art to friends, or even apply for artist grants. If you aren't ready because you don't have anything to sell, we recommend signing up for an event a while off, that way you can make a concrete deadline for those that need them.

If showing at one of these events isn't for you, however, there are a lot of ways that you can start getting the word out, most of them for very little cost. You could start a blog of your art for free on a site like blogger (what we currently use), wordpress (what we're going to migrate to eventually), or flickr or tumblr. There are lots of options and besides the cost of a computer and access to the internet (which you can access for free at most libraries), are all free.

Ideally, if you want to make a profession out of your art, you'll eventually want a website with your own personal URL or something, as it looks more professional. To start out, if you can afford it, I would even go and register a domain that you want (ie. rickkitagawa.com, eveskylar.com, monkeyandseal.com, you get the idea), and you can even have it just redirect to your blogspot or tumblr account.

An example of this domain forwarding is Monkey's collaboration with his friend Matt Na Sal - their project can be found over at www.thelocustfeeders.com, but is actually just a tumblr blog.

Other key ways of getting out there is just having business cards made. You'd be surprised how often we ask artists for their card, and they don't have any. Make sure your name, website/blog, and your email and phone are all on there so they can get a hold of you! Monkey and Seal have both had business opportunities come up to a year later of giving someone a business card. It's a quick and easy way for people to find you, and you can get them printed quite inexpensively at someplace like PsPrint. If you're going to use them, we always appreciate you using our affiliate link here, but if not, no worries. You can get them even less expensive at Vistaprint, but we don't recommend them as their quality isn't quite up to snuff.

Along with business cards, if your budget can handle it, print up some postcards with your work on it. People always love free stuff, and if you leave them in coffee shops, stores, etc. (just make sure you get permission first - you don't want the owners dumping your cards), you'll find your audience as people who like your style will gravitate towards your cards, pick one up, and most likely will check out your website, later if not sooner.

Another way to show off your work in by participating in online forums and art communities. DeviantArt is one of the largest, and if you're into concept art, conceptart.org is unparalleled. Most of these communities have weekly/monthly challenges to get your inspired, and winners have gone on even to be hired by other companies! You can also get your weekly illustration topic on at Illustration Friday. Fun!

While all that online activity is free, once you're more confident in exposing your work, you should think about entering into contests. While there are a lot of contests out there that are sort of sketchy (ie. high entry fees for little-known contests), entry into annuals such as Spectrum and Society of Illustrator's Annual are big deals, and can pay back their entry fees tenfold - that is, if you can get in. Competition is quite stiff - you'll be competing with illustrators from around the globe - but it is frequently used by art directors to scout up-and-coming talent.

If you're not quite there yet, there are a lot of other ways to get your work seen. You can always show your portfolio to various coffee shops and bars to see if they'd be willing to hang some of your work. In San Francisco, the opportunities are nearly endless.

For those with organizational experience or are up for a challenge, you could always curate/organize/promote your own show. Monkey + Seal created Paper Hat Productions just for that reason - we wanted to get out and have really fun, super packed shows that people would remember. Seal ended up selling some of her originals as well as being commissioned for a personal piece, while Monkey has sold some paintings and picked up graphic design gigs through it. That said, it is quite a bit of work to put on a show, but if you are determined and willing to work hard, much can be gained from it.

Of course, once you get enough work (or you could always collaborate with a large group of your artist friends), you can always publish a zine or book about your art. Print-on-demand sites like Lulu and Blurb (two of the largest) make it easy to publish your own art book. If anything, you can use them to professionally print one or two copies of your portfolio. Having your own hard-bound, professionally printed portfolio can never hurt. If you're on a tight budget, you can always make color photo copies, staple it together, and sell it.

Finally, you can't underestimate the power of family and friends. Between facebook, twitter, myspace, and whatever other social media sites you and your friends use to keep in touch, make sure that you're sharing your links. Of course, you don't want to turn your FB wall into a billboard, but updates that tell a bit of backstory to your work will intrigue people who see your post and if they like it can share your links. Also, if you have family and friends who are supportive of your art, make sure that you keep them in the loop to what you're up to. We are fortunate to have some great networking-type friends who say "oh yeah, I met this animator at a business conference, let me give you their info."

So that's it. There are probably a lot more ways of getting your stuff out there (please leave suggestions we forgot in the comments for others to read!), but those are some of the basics, and if you work everything on the list (or even 50% of the list), you'll most definitely start making waves and people will start to recognize you and your style. Thanks for following along in our series, and if you'd like more (or less) multiple-part entries like this in the future, let us know!

Getting Your Work Out There - Part 2

Today, we wanted to talk about the importance of getting your work out there into the world. This is more about the business reasons why you need to get out there. Stay tuned for Monday's post which is part 3, which will cover some practical ways to actually have your work seen.

So why is it important to get your work out there? The most obvious answer is so that people can see it. While this can be scary, if you are serious about making it as an artist, it is a necessity. The big myth about being an artist is that you slave away at your craft, year after year, and then, someday, somehow, someone finds your art, falls in love with it, and buys all your paintings and promotes you to galleries and you explode out onto the art scene.

While this may be true for very, very, very, VERY few individuals, if you look at the careers of most artists, this is not the case. With the emergence of the internet, suddenly it's a lot easier to go and get your work seen by lots of people. While this is generally a great thing, it also means that there is a lot more competition. With everyone and their mothers and great-aunts, and nephews out there with their own flickr accounts, suddenly the art scene has become very saturated. It gets hard to weed through all the tons of art to find any single individual.

Thus, the era of the hustler was born. If you want to live off your art, it's no longer enough to be relevant, or funny, or thoughtful, or scary, or unique. Now, you also have to think like a business person. You have to hustle your art and make sure that people see your work. The people who are making a splash in the art world, I would say 50% of the time, are not necessarily the ones with the most skill or creativity, but the ones who know how to market themselves the best (however, the ones who are at the top of the game are those who are amazingly creative/talented AND have the marketing skills).

So, long story short, you need to get your work out there. So you just finished a comic book, or a new painting. Great, that's definitely an achievement in itself. But if you want to sell your new product, you have to get it out there. If no one sees your work, no one can buy your work. If no one buys your work, you can't make a living off of it. It's that simple.

So how are you going to get your work out there? Stay tuned for Monday's post to learn some easy (and inexpensive) ways how.

Getting stuff done

Sometimes, if you're like this little red-haired dude above, you feel trapped, stuck in a rut, creatively drained, tired, and a bit hopeless that you're ever going to finish/succeed/reach goal X/etc., etc.

We know that we can certainly relate. Monkey and Seal are both managers for two different retail stores, and after being on your feet for 6-9 hours per day dealing with sometimes irate (but usually awesome) customers, the last thing we feel like doing is working more when we get home. Besides running errands, cooking dinner, doing other household chores, and trying to spend time with one another, the Monkey + Seal team is usually pretty pooped out by the end of the day.

However, we find the motivation to continue working, to continue painting, to continue creating into the wee hours of the morning (usual bedtime is around 3am) because we have to hold ourselves accountable.

Whether it is to clients, customers, or ourselves, when something needs to get done, it is not a matter of "if," it's a matter of "how." Yes, we do admit that sometimes it might be worth it to get some rest and put a project off for a day, but we find that most of the time that leads you to a space where all you're doing is playing catch-up, and we end up sacrificing (or at least not starting) on projects that we would like to do since we're so backed up.

It all really comes down to integrity. In our retail jobs, we've seen a good number of people quit over email, or just stop showing up to work. Regardless of how much you hate your job or your boss or if you've just won the lottery, by bailing on your job, someone else has to pick up your shifts and your workload so things keep going smoothly. Nothing frustrates us more than flakes, so we strive to make sure that we follow through.

Our friends will attest - we admit, it is sometimes hard for us to commit to parties, or checking out friends' gallery shows, or just anything that pulls us out of our little urban cave. But if we say we're gonna be there, we show up, no matter how tired we are or how backlogged we are in our work (we might not stay for too long, but we'll be there).

Honestly, Monkey has a ton of work to do, and he's been going on about 4 hours of sleep a day for the past week, and to meet his deadline of launching the wedding guide by Sunday, there are a lot of fine-tuning that he still needs to do. But, he told the mailing list that it was going to be up for download, (and now you know about the release date) so now he's got to suck it up and follow through.

Planning something, having great ideas or tons of talent, all that is great, and makes lots of parts of life easier, but the thing that really gets stuff done is action. Following through is perhaps the hardest thing to do, but it's the most important. Whether it's about integrity or chasing a dream, following through is what turns the world 'round.

What do you do to motivate yourself to get business taken care of? How do you follow through?

Tax Time

Well, the deadline has passed - we hope you all managed to file your taxes on time this year! We cut it a bit close, filing at around 2am the day before they were due. Whew! Every time Monkey thinks about taxes, he thinks of Maggie Gyllenhaal screaming "Get bent, tax man!" at Will Ferrell in "Stranger than Fiction."

It has been a good process going through all the records and books and using this mandatory, stereotypically-icky event to look back and reflect on all the major financial gains and losses throughout the year as Monkey + Seal. When you get right down to it, as much as Monkey + Seal both want to make their business fun and exciting and full of art and goodness and yummy food, the reality is that it can be all of that, but you also have to manage your money, track financial records, and handle all the business side of things. It can be sort of rough at times, but in the end, anything that brings you one more step to your dream is worth it.

For all you budding entrepreneurs out there, how do you manage to keep the balance between the fun side of business and the business side of business in check?