Art Business DISCORD Community

TL, DR: Pay what you can and join a like-minded community of artists who are all committed to growing and promoting their business.

Ok, so who are we and what is Drawn + Drafted and Make Your Art Work?

We (Marc and Lauren) started Drawn + Drafted because we want to help artists achieve breakthroughs and bring more cool stuff into the world.

As Art Directors, we hear a lot of questions from artists, and many of them are the same year to year. We wanted to make the answers accessible so that when we did get real time with people, we could make more progress with them on their careers.

Since then, we’ve built a few great projects that, like the time that we...

1. Created our Art Business Bootcamp cheat sheets with a handy guide to running your art business, for free download

2. Created the series of Art Business Bootcamp live courses for artists, which we delivered at various art fairs and conventions

3. Put those courses online so more people could get answers to more questions

4. Found more experts to offer more courses, like our Art of the Pitch and Kick Start Art crowdfunding intensive.

5. Interviewed creative juggernauts like Inktober founder Jake Parker and habits expert James Clear and drawing guru Stan Prokopenko.

6. Published daily answers to questions on Dear Art Director

7. Published a blog digging more in depth on Make Your Art Work.

8. Hired artists to create work for our readers.

9. Created a gallery that is now 7 years old and paid out hundreds of thousands of dollars to artists.

We’ve done a lot, and we’re really proud of the work.

Why Are We On Gumroad?

We do a lot for free. We both have other sources of income and are able to put time in when we can to build helpful tools for our community.

That said, there are some things we would love to do that require people get paid.

The only thing stopping us from a subscription model, frankly, was we wanted to be sure that it was worth it for you. And now, with the larger community, we are sure this value is here. And frankly, we got excited about what more we might do.

What if we could achieve some of our longstanding goals?

Well here are some things we would love to do.

• Blowing up the Blog : Hiring and paying more blog contributors

We have a deep network of ADs and experts, and with some extra scratch we can bring their knowledge around the business of art to our site.

• Books!

We have so. many. book. ideas. And while Lauren and Marc CAN do all the things, they actually can’t. We would love to hire a junior designer and project manager to help put out more of our content like a book about running your art business, and even art books from Every Day Original (with profit share for the artists of course!)

• Regular live coaching sessions. This is probably the thing we will want to do first, really sinking more energy back into the community.

Our Stretch Goals

Like we said, we’re doing ok, so we did our best to keep all the numbers reachable and reasonable.

$100/month – We stick around and do the thing and feel really really great about it. Plus now we have a channel where you can ask us anything

$500/month - We start our monthly group sessions where we will select one person from our paid supporters, to work with live. Members will be able to join live and they will open for Q+A/discussion. Sounds scary! Maybe, but we've found in our teaching experience, these group sessions can really open things up for everyone who joins in.

$900/month – Weekly Dear AD video chat/podcast! We are actually super excited to do this so we hope to get here quickly. We want to check in on Dear AD and discuss the Q, the A, and what we may have missed. No, we won’t reveal our secret identities :D We do need to pay someone for editing, thus the goal.

$1,500/month – Now we can start paying more people to gather more resources for the community. We can hire our first industry expert blog contributor too. How cool is that?

$5,000/month – More money for contributors, and more contributors! We can hire a part time PM to start some of our back burner projects like a quarterly publication from Every Day Original.

$10,000/month – Hire a staff writer to contribute and manage our writing projects

Above $10,000 – More for everyone to make more stuff for you. Straight up this will give Marc and Lauren more time to think up new projects that will help the community at large! And this will also allow Marc to focus more time on building these things. Plus probably a round on us if you see us out in Brooklyn or at fairs and conventions.

No matter what kind of stuff you make, we hope you’ll consider supporting our work with a membership subscription. We want to do more for our community of creators, reach more creators, and pay as many of them as we can by making more awesome stuff.