From Hiding His Art to Designing for Pro Teams

Good morning and happy Solar Eclipse Day for those of you reading from North America 🌚🌞. It’s not without a little irony that we realize our (unnamed) mascot may, at times, resemble a grumpy eclipse himself. A good omen, no doubt.

This week we’ve got:

• ⭐️ Erikas Chesonis as our featured artist case study

• 😎 Some cool plugins & products you may not have known about

• ✏️ The usual tips, tricks, and surveys

Erikas Chesonis - Designer, Illustrator

When was the last time you made one of your childhood dreams a reality?

For New Yorker-turned-Texan, Erikas Chesonis, that was just last month.

Like most artists, Erikas was drawn to art during childhood. But where most kids were drawing dinosaurs and painting flowers, Erikas was recreating the logos of his favorite sports teams.

Erikas’s love of sports branding drove him to fill sketchbooks with meticulously copied logos and to eventually make his own reimagined designs using free vector software like Inkscape (if you know, you know). He eventually traded Inkscape for Adobe products, and his sketchbooks were swapped for online forums, like those found on Chris Creamer’s Sports Logos database, where he was able to get feedback from other sports fans about his art.

In these (super) niche online forms, Erikas truly realized his love of design.

With the help of a high school teacher, he secretly honed his skills in a tiny computer lab during the week, all while keeping his athlete friends in the dark for worry that they’d think differently of him if they knew of his passion for art.

At Ithaca College in upstate New York, Erikas enrolled in a Sports Marketing program thinking it would provide him an opportunity to work on the design side of sports branding. After realizing this wasn’t the path he wanted, he switched to a Communications major and continued to improve his Adobe Photoshop & Illustrator skills on the side.

Craving an opportunity to put his skills to use, Erikas joined the Student Activity Board and offered his services as an illustrator. This was his first taste of real graphic design work.

He made logos and did branding for various student organizations, and eventually landed his first design job working for the college making official posters for events and receiving a paycheck for it.

After graduating, Erikas worked in entry level design roles at various companies and design agencies until the beginning of 2023, when he took the leap to go freelance and work completely for himself.

As a freelance illustrator and graphic designer, about 80% of Erikas’s income comes from inbound client work. The other 20% comes from various channels like selling original art and stickers from his online shop.

In a very real sense, Erikas made his dream of working as a full time freelance artist come true early last year. So what was the childhood dream that came true for him last month?

Well, after nearly a decade of client work and building up his portfolio, Erikas was finally asked to design a gameday poster for a big rivalry match between two Major League Soccer teams, Austin FC and FC Dallas.

Over 20,000 people attended the match and hundreds of spectators were able to take copies of the poster home with them after the game.

After years of hard work, Erikas was finally designing for professional sports teams and having that work viewed and appreciated by tens of thousands of people.

So, what are some insights Erikas can share to other artists in order to help them achieve some of their own dreams?

You don’t need to go to art school to become an artist.

Erikas obviously didn’t go to school for art or graphic design, yet he still has a successful career as a freelance artist.

Although he said maybe purusing a design degree in school would’ve helped him learn some things faster, he made a point to say that there’s more than one path to becoming a full-time artist, and they certainly don’t all require a degree.

Create a dedicated Instagram account for your art.

This might seem like a no-brainer, but it goes without saying.

Don’t mix an existing personal account with something you’re hoping to grow into an art business. Future clients & customers will likely be confused by the variety of posts on your page and won’t follow you as as result.

Additionally, your art account must be set to public whereas many people like to keep their personal accounts private. If you make it so that someone must follow you in order to see your work, they’ll just skip over your profile entirely.

Whether it’s a good thing or bad thing, Instagram is still extremely relevant as a marketing channel for artists.

A large number of Erikas’s clients find him through Instagram, then later reach out to him on his website.

Perfect your style.

Erikas explains how it’s better to have a unique, recognizable style, than to overreach and do too much.

If it’s hard to find your own personal style when starting out, he suggests studying artists you admire and incorporating pieces of their style into your own. Try new mediums and use different tools to find what works for you. You should settle on a style you feel you’re good at that you enjoy creating. Don’t choose something that feels too forced or you’ll end up drifting away from it.

Erikas insists that if your goal is to work professionally as an artist, you must stick to a given style.

That’s not to say your style may change naturally over the years, but your portfolio shouldn’t look like it was created by 3 completely different people.

As a tip, Erikas says that if you’re getting bored and want to freshen things up, try applying your style to new mediums.

More recently, Erikas began creating painted wooden sculptures that still express his signature art style - pretty far from his comfort zone of 2D digital illustration.

Unexpectedly, the Instagram community loved this, and his following grew by many thousands of people in just a few short months of posting these new creations.

Tap into niches with “cult” followings to grow your audience.

Many artists choose subjects in their work that can be somewhat generic - landscapes, flowers, objects around the house. The issue with this is that these things don’t often have die-hard fans.

Even if you go to the other end of the spectrum and look at extremely unique or abstract works of art, these sorts of pieces may only be appreciated by other artists, and may only win you your own group of die-hard fans & customers after you become well established.

When Erikas was in the early stages of growing his following on social media, he drew things like Pokemon and Star Wars characters in his own recognizable style.

This allowed him to not only gain the attention of artists and fans from more general subject work, but also tap into huge, niche audiences that otherwise wouldn’t have found his art.

Make a website, and make it as beautiful as possible.

This applies more to artists working in the design space that plan to make most of their income through client work.

As a graphic designer that wants to create illustrated web pages, logos, and graphics for companies and brands, it’s extremely important for your website to look good. It’s the professional representation of your abilities, and should show potential clients what they can expect when they hire you.

This is your chance to inject your style into a handful of webpages and really show what youre capable of.

TL;DR

• Find your own style and get good at it.

• Grow your brand by creating art for local brands and organizations in your area.

• Create a dedicated art Instagram account and website.

• Leverage niches with cult followings to attract new audiences.

• Expand your style to new mediums in order to grow your skillset and further boost your following.

Erikas’s Tech Stack

• Adobe Illustrator - design & illustration work

• Astute Graphics plugin package for Adobe Illustrator - increase efficiency & speed of workflow

• Adobe Express - generate branded invoices for clients

• Squarespace - website

Additional Tidbits

• As a freelance designer with his experience, Erikas can expect to make anywhere from a few hundred dollars to multiple 5 figures for client work. This involves a very wide range of job types with some jobs only taking a few hours and others taking several months.

• Erikas puts all client work under contract to avoid doing work for a client only to have them disappear without payment. This contract has standard legalese throughout with wording that states the client will pay 50% up front and 50% upon delivery of work. This reduces Erikas’s overall risk, especially when working with new and unfamiliar clients.

• When you’re starting to regularly get jobs, you may wish to consider taking on clients that pay a little less per job but will likely become repeat customers, as opposed to taking on higher paying one-time clients that you never hear from again. This part definitely involves finding a balance, but a steady customer can be a boon for freelance artists.

• Erikas noticed a big spike in Instagram followers when he started making reels about how and why he makes his art the way he does. These “educational” reels essentially taught Instagram users his style, and can be something that any artist can imitate with their own work.

Plugins & Products That Can Change How You Make Digital Art

• Astute Graphics 🏎️ - A software add-on for Adobe Illustrator that improves efficiency and usability of the program. The package currently contains 21 plugins and is used by over 200,000 illustrators and designers (including our very own, Erikas Chesonis).

• True Grit Texture Supply 🖌️ - This company sells dozens of unique brushes, textures, & effects for Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Procreate, and more. If you’ve yet to find the right brush or texture within your standard drawing software, companies like these may have what you’re looking for.

• Photoroom ✂️ - For those of us who just want to quickly remove the background on a photo, this website is super useful. It’s free and we’ve used it here at Stay Sketchy for months. It takes absolutely zero skill and can give you a clean looking, background-free PNG in just a few seconds.

Why every artist NEEDS their own newsletter ✉️

The simplest step an artist can take to improve their sales is to create a mailing list.

That’s right. Not a huge following on Instagram or TikTok, but a modest - or even small - list of email addresses belonging to dedicated fans.

Why is this so valuable?

1. Customer Retention. Don’t just get a sale then send that customer back into the marketplace maelstrom 🌀. Capture their email. Establish a longer term relationship with them. Sell to them again in the future! Build hype for upcoming projects. Maybe they’ll become a collector of your work 👀.

2. Platform Independence. Don’t be beholden to the algorithms of Instagram, Etsy, Facebook… A mailing list is completely platform independent. You control the narrative, and if you decide to change the platform you use to send your newsletter, you can just export your entire mailing list and take it with you wherever you go. It’s yours forever 🤩.

3. Cultivate Relationships. Use your newsletter to create long-form content for your fans. These folks love your work and might want to hear more about your process than what you squeezed into your latest Instagram caption. This can even lead to new business opportunites and partnerships down the road 🤝.

The list goes on and on.

If you’re asking yourself where you can get started, look no further than this newsletter! Stay Sketchy is built on a dedicated newsletter platform called Beehiiv.

Beehiiv was created by the developers that made the Morning Brew newsletter into the media giant it is today (so they sorta know what they’re doing). It’s got a ton of tools that help you grow and better understand your audience.

The best part is that you can make your newsletter on Beehiiv for free - and not for a limited amount of time, but free forever.

If you DO, however, want to take advantage of one of their payed tiers that offer more features, the button below will give you 20% off your first 3 months with Beehiiv after a complimentary 30-day free trial.

Whether you want to send your newsletter weekly, monthly, quarterly, or even just a couple times per year, adding this one feature to your business might be the lowest-effort, highest-return change you ever make!

That’s all we’ve got for this week! Signing off ✌️

If you have any comments or suggestions on how to improve the newsletter, please let us know by replying to this email.