Turning a Side Hustle into a Full-Time Career

Morning artrepreneurs! Welcome to another edition of the Stay Sketchy newsletter.

We’ve got a lot today so we’ll jump right in! If you like what you see or have some sort of feedback, drop a comment, reply to the email, or answer the poll. We take what you say to heart! 🙏

This week we’ve got:

Fiorella Granda - Multidisciplinary Designer

Not everyone manages to find their calling in life.

Some people spend a lifetime trying to figure out what they’re meant to do, while others simply pass on the opportunity and pursue safer, more traditional paths.

For Fiorella Granda, the call sounded so strongly that she knew she didn’t really have a choice.

As a college athlete and architecture student, Fiorella felt a perfect alignment of interests when, for her final year thesis, she studied and defended how sport & recreation can benefit marginalized communities in Peru - the country she’s originally from.

The project was so fulfilling that she knew without a doubt she was meant to spend her life pursuing work like this.

In the years that followed college, Fiorella found herself working for a prestigious architecture firm.

The job was fulfilling in many ways, but she felt it didn’t provide enough of a creative outlet for her to express herself. Because of this, she started her Instagram account, Fiorella Doodles, where she began exploring digital illustration and graphic design.

When Fiorella began sharing content that combined sport and design, her following began to take off.

People not only resonated with how she incorporated her own identity and background into her designs and content, but also with how she often used her work to bring awareness to underserved and underrepresented communities.

In September 2023, Fiorella won a competition to design Canada’s first outdoor WNBA basketball court. Throughout the project, she got to collaborate with the WNBA, NBA Canada, MilkUP Ontario, and Buckets & Borders.

This was another project that Fiorella felt suited her perfectly.

Some months later, as more projects were completed and her Instagram account continued to grow, Adobe reached out to her and invited her to a conference in New York where she had the opportunity to meet a bunch of other creatives and freelancers.

Talking with other designers like herself who were making a living doing what they loved, ultimately solidified thoughts Fiorella was already having about taking her little side business more seriously and growing it into a full-time career.

Just 3 months later, Fiorella took a leap of faith and began working as a multidisciplinary freelance designer full-time - doing the precise work she envisioned herself doing back during her college thesis.

In just a few short years, Fiorella has:

• Created her own small business

• Designed Canada’s inaugural outdoor WNBA court

• Been featured in stories by the Toronto Star, NBA Canada, and Intel

• Collaborated with companies like Adobe, The Give and Grow, Round21, and The Gist

• Grown her Instagram following to 22K+ people

Mini Gallery

To see more of Fiorella’s work, visit her website or Instagram account.

Artist Insights

Our chat with Fiorella was jam-packed with helpful tips that will help you land more freelance gigs, use your time more efficiently, and connect with people that may offer you exciting career opportunities.

🔹 Tailor Your Resume for Projects You Really Want to Work On

Whenever you apply to a job you really want, it’s not a bad idea to tailor your resume a bit so it better fits that particular job description.

The same thing applies when considering freelance art gigs, brand partnerships, and competitions.

Highlight the strengths you have that give you an edge. Create mockups of your work on products similar to the ones the company already sells.

Help make them see you as someone who’s already a member of the team.

When Fiorella won the competition to design Canada’s first outdoor WNBA court, she made sure her application accurately represented her intense passion for both basketball and design.

🔹 Let Your Followers Get to Know You - Not Just Your Art

For many of us introverts, creating a face-forward Instagram channel where we appear on camera alongside our art, can feel a bit cringe at first.

But you have to think of all the artists you admire most on social media. There’s a good chance they have some sort of presence on their accounts alongside their art.

This allows followers to connect with the person behind the paintbrush or pen. Artists can share their stories, discuss certain artistic choices, and connect with their fans on a more human level.

Whether it’s through comedy, quirkiness, or style, adding yourself to your content provides many more dimensions to your account that people can connect with.

If the thought of being on camera makes you squirm, try starting with a simple voiceover!

🔹 Better Utilize Your “Dead” Time

Whether you’re a seasoned artist or just starting out, you’re probably well aware that there’s a lot more to do when running an art business or side hustle than just creating artwork.

Inventory management, social media, and random administrative tasks can eat up way more time than you initially expected.

That’s why it’s important to utilize the pockets of time throughout your day that you’re typically not doing anything productive but are unavoidable - dead time.

For Fiorella, she had a long 1+ hour commute to and from work each day by train. She used these two hours to create social media posts and perform other activities for her business. She also used her 1-hour lunch break to work on creating new designs as well.

Try to come up with a list of things you’ve been meaning to do, but keep pushing off, and assign doing them during commutes on public transit, unnecessarily long lunch breaks, or while waiting at the doctor’s office or mechanic.

🔹 Connect with Artists That You Admire

Like Gene and Katie have said in previous editions of the newsletter, you should definitely be trying to connect with other artists in your niche - especially those that seem a few steps ahead of you.

Fiorella does this regularly by DMing or emailing the artists she admires, and scheduling short networking calls with the ones who get back to her.

This allows her to pick their brains and learn a bit about what it is to be a full-time artist/designer. She learns a little from each artist and establishes a positive professional relationship with them in the process.

🔹 Actively Pursue the Attention of Brands You Want to Work With

A great way to passively attract the attention of your favorite brands is to tag them in a bunch of your posts. Over time, they may take notice and comment on something you’ve shared or even reach out to you and offer some kind of collaboration.

If you’d like to take a more active approach, consider designing art and creating content directly around a brand and the products they sell.

Fiorella has done this recently with Strava and Adidas.

You can also try connecting with members of a particular brand’s marketing team by looking up members of the organization on LinkedIn.

Adding or following the right people on LinkedIn, and reaching out to them there, is another great way to take a more active approach in acquiring some sort of brand partnership.

🔹 Consider Forming an Official Business Around Your Art

It’s easy to lose money on an art business that isn’t an officially recognized art business.

Registering your business with your local, state, or federal government may allow you to consider most of the things you spend money on for your art business as business expenses.

Business expenses are subtracted from revenue when calculating total net income. This means that you can deduct eligible expenses from your total income each year and often save quite a bit of money on taxes.

Art supplies, social media ads, even a new laptop… these are things that may be eligible business expenses.

Registering your business also allows you to open up business bank accounts and credit cards which makes it easier to separate business & personal finances, and may offer special signup bonuses and perks.

As a disclaimer, you should always consult your own financial planner, accountant, or other professional business advisor before making any serious financial decisions.

Fiorella’s Tech Stack

• Adobe Creative Cloud - Creating illustrations and content

• Adobe Portfolio - Designing and hosting her website

• ChatGPT - Generating content ideas and captions

• Miro - Mood boarding, creating content calendars, sharing ideas with clients, etc.

• Google Workspace - Assiting with administrative tasks

• CapCut - Editing video content

Wait, what’s Miro?

Today’s featured artist, Fiorella Granda, told us that Miro is the tool she uses most for her business.

We did a little digging and found that Miro is an extremely versatile tool perfectly suited for owners of creative businesses.

It offers the following (and a lot more):

• Interactive Whiteboards: Expansive digital whiteboards that enable users to sketch, draw, and visually map out ideas - perfect for brainstorming artwork and content.

• Templates and Frameworks: Access to a ton of templates designed for various creative processes like user story maps, mood boards, and design sprints that encourage structured (but flexible) creative planning.

• Real-Time Collaboration: Teams can work together in real time on whiteboards, making it easy to co-create, share instant feedback, and iterate on visual projects, regardless of each person’s location.

• Integration with Design Tools: Integration with popular design tools like Adobe Creative Cloud, allowing designers to import assets directly into whiteboards for comprehensive visual planning and discussions.

• Security: Ensures data security and privacy, adhering to industry standards to protect user information and activity on the platform.

The best part? They have a free plan that you can stay on as long as you’d like. If you find you want access to some of the features behind their paywall, you can always scale up.

Art Business News (that isn’t a snooze 😴)

• How not to make money with art 🥷 - Step 1: Don’t try to sell a fake Leonardo da Vinci painting for €1.3 million. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what a Spanish man tried to do in July 2022. Experts who examined the painting were able to conclude it had likely been painted in the early 20th century and thus several hundred years past da Vinci’s expiration date.

• Banksy frees the zoo animals 🦍 - as a follow-up to one of the stories we shared in last week’s newsletter, Banksy has not just released two new works of street art, but nine. A new piece sprang up daily for 9 consecutive days around London, each depicting some sort of animal in an unnatural setting. The finale? A Gorilla freeing a collection of animals from the shuttered entrance of the London Zoo.

• Biggest competition winner (ever?) 🌳 - Did you know that Central Park in New York City was the result of a design competition held in the 1850s? Every aspect of the park has been created with intention and isn’t a result of nature nor serendipity.

Thanks for checking out another edition of Stay Sketchy. Catch you next week! ✌️

As an Amazon Associate and affiliate of various partnership programs, the owner of this publication may receive commissions to linked products or services in this newsletter at no additional expense to the reader.