Brief

1. Research the world of 'Illustrator as author' or illustrators who sell personal work online.
2. Explore ideas for a subject that satisfies both your own personality and which may realistically find a home amongst existing communities.
3. Develop a collection of Illustrator authored work
4. your outcomes should be presented in such a way as to make your intentions clear and belivable.

Research

I first looked up online how many professional artists made money nowadays online, luckily there were many helpful videos online which shed some light on this matter.

The most important lessons I took away from these were the following points:

• Making money online seems far easier than I'd previously thought
• very little start up costs in my current situation in Uni since I could use a lot of the equipment there, which people outside of university would have to spend large start-up costs on.
• Look at what successful people within your industry are doing and look to replicate that success.
• Stop undercharging.
• Document my hours of work, revenue, overheads, start-up costs and profit margins. 
• Plan out how much money I will be making under the business model over a long period of time and adjust it accordingly within reason to my circumstances and goals.
• making T-shirts and other such items such as stickers from my currently existing work is a very real and easy possibility already open to me.

Researching graphic t-shirt trends

Audience: Zoomer generation audience that likes tshirts

I researched how the changing landscape of fashion has affected the sell-ability of graphic T-shirts, since that was one of the markets I was interested in entering. I'd say that some form of post-modern, internet age yet retro grunge like aesthetic seems to be fairly popular currently according to this Man in the Youtube video who seems in-the-know on Fashion.

The type of shirts popular and 'cool' tend to be just images which clearly have no relation to anything that someone can understand as a piece of media. For instance, a stranger things T shirt is uncool. But a t-shirt with a cowboy on it that just says "Cowboys, Cowboys" that may actually be cool since nobody understands what it is. But it still works as a believable T-shirt that's not just tryin to be funny. 

Learning what Not to do

More of my own research into the specific market and community

learning how gradients would affect the final result, what stitching does in different contexts, how the machines deal with negative space and so on were important when considering practicalities.

Creating designs

Final designs for marketable tshirts which can now be sold

using an app called printful, the production work is all done on the company's end. I recieve money and I just give money to printful to make the t-shirts which are ordered. Meaning there is zero risk, zero start up costs, zero running costs. Very useful way to potentially make money passively in the background as an extra stream of income.