Welcome to

OwlsChicago

Should Artists Invest In The Online Market?

If you’re an artist looking to open up more opportunities for yourself, there’s no better place than the internet. There are enough different means to make a living through your artwork online that nearly every artist has a chance to make it. You just have to be willing to put in the work.

Many wonder if its worth it for artists to invest in the online market, but you ultimately get back exactly what you put in. It’s exactly the same as with traditional methods in that regard. In order to give you a strong starting point, here are some of the most useful online platforms and practices to focus on:

1 – Commissions

The best possible way to make it as an artist online is to offer commission work. Sketches, full renderings, or even entire scenes can be offered for arranged price points. Many people are even willing to pay for completely digital illustrations or mere scans, so you don’t need to feel held back by an inability or hesitance to ship packages.

The only caveat to commission work is that you have to do a lot of marketing upfront. That means starting social media profiles on the likes of Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and Instagram. By utilizing hashtags correctly, you can easily get a lot of eyes on your artwork and gradually build an audience. A Deviant Art account will also be useful. Once you have some followers, it should be quite simple to start landing some commission work. Be sure to offer custom avatars and the like for a great “in” that will draw in plenty of business.

2 – Patreon

Similarly, Patreon is a platform that allows creators to receive monthly payments from their supporters. You can offer to regularly share artwork with anyone that happens to pledge a certain amount of money each month. If you have enough of an audience, you can make a respectable living even by only requiring an amount as low as a single dollar per person. As with commissions, the success of your Patreon is all in the marketing. You should also consider streaming on the Creative section of Twitch or uploading “speed drawing” videos of Youtube to provide added content that will make supporting you seem worthwhile.

3 – Etsy

Finally, you can’t beat Etsy as far as marketplaces for original artwork. While you’ll have to eventually navigate the wild world of self-employment taxes, you can easily post up paintings, prints, crafts, and drawings to a huge potential audience. As long as you’re willing to send physical mail, this is one of the most tried and true means of selling artwork online.

Read more

The Best Artists Located Around The World

Artists help us escape from our lives through many different mediums.  However, no medium is as internationally loved and recognized as music.  There are many good musicians out there, but some are considered the best in the world.

Chicago

The band Chicago started, as the name would suggest, in the Elmwood Park suburb of Chicago.  This band is one of the longest-running successful rock groups in the world.  The first album they released was in 1970 and sold over a million copies.  They also created many iconic songs such as Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is and Saturday In The Park. The band still tours around the world performing some of their best-loved songs.

Ludwig Van Beethoven

Ludwig Van Beethoven is considered to be one of the greatest composers of all time.  He is also known for challenging the authority of the time by refusing to accept the cultural norms of the Classical Era.  Being born deaf did not stop him from composing some of the most iconic Classical music which is still studied and played today.

Louis Armstrong

Louis Armstrong can easily be named as the first superstar of jazz.  The creativity he showed in his music broke the conventions of early New Orleans jazz and he took the sound of the trumpet to new heights.  His performances started the shift from the jazz group to a soloist and he was one of the innovators of scat.  Many believe that one of his greatest achievements was to popularize jazz across social and racial lines.

Joao Gilberto

Joao Gilberto is a great musician who is credited with the creation of a new type of music.  Born in 1931 in Brazil this singer and guitarist was the creator of the Bossa Nova music genre.  Very few artists are able to say that they created a new type of music, but this is one who is still alive today.

Ravi Shankar

There are actually very few Americans and Europeans who knew about sitar music before Ravi Shankar.  Ravi Shankar started touring the world in the 1950’s and his fame sky-rocketed when he taught George Harrison from the Beatles how to play the instrument in the 1960’s.  Since then Shankar has had 4 top 10’s in the World Album charts and become a global headliner.

U2

U2 is perhaps one of the most recognizable bands in the world whether you like their music or not.  Coming from Dublin the band has been touring the world since the 1970’s and have released 12 studio albums.  They have also won 22 Grammy Awards.

Luciano Pavarotti

When Pavarotti passed away in 2007 it was the end of the run for one of the world’s most well-known tenors.  Pavarotti started to gain attention around the world with the Three Tenors alongside Jose Carreras and Placedo Domingo.  However, it is on his own that most people remember him as he when on to sing at the 1990 World Cup and the 2006 Winter Olympics.  He was also known for his charity shows known as Pavarotti and Friends.

Read more

Benefits Of Search Engine Optimization For Artists

Artists can use SEO to their benefit for quite a few reasons. How does it work and why is it something you should get help with? These questions and more will be answered for you, so you know why this is such a good idea to invest in.

When someone wants to find something, they turn to a website like Google to look it up. That’s the number one type of website that people use to find out about pretty much anything. If you can make your website appear when someone searches for certain terms, you can get your work in front of them quickly. For instance, if you have paintings for sale of ocean scenes, you can make your website with your art on it show up for searches that are for “ocean paintings for sale.”

What is the main reason you are into art? It probably isn’t just to make money, but if you can’t make money with it, then you certainly won’t have enough time to do what you’d like to your work. For most people that work with art, they have a main job and do their passion afterward. If you can use the internet to your advantage, you can start to sell more of your projects and may end up making your primary source of income what you create. It can take the time to build up to that, but it is possible with SEO to do so.

A website is not worth the money you pay to have it online if it gets no traffic. If you update it all the time with new photos and things like that of what you’ve been working on, it’s not worth that time you spend on it without traffic. You may say that you’re sharing out of love for your craft, but still, it’s not sharing if nobody else can see it! Check your traffic statistics now, and you’ll see that not many people look at much. Eventually, with SEO, you will know that there are a lot of people looking at what you’ve done with your website.

You can optimize your pages so that you can just have what you make out in the world. How can you get better at what you do if you don’t find out what people think? You may discover that a lot of people hate what you have made and that some love it. If you can get it noticed and it makes people feel a certain way, then you have done your job. Without any way to show off everything, it can end in you feeling like you’ve wasted your time if what you’re making has a message.

Art can cost a lot of money and time to create. Even if you’re not using a ton of expensive materials, you invest a lot of your time, and that is why art is worth something. Not only because of that, but it also helps people to feel a certain way and is important to them, too. With SEO, you don’t have to feel like you wasted your time because more people will be able to appreciate what you have created. Eventually, someone that has to have what you’ve made can find it and will contact you so that you can make a sale and spread your work around.

Search engine optimization doesn’t cost a lot of money but can lead to you making more. If you pay a few hundred dollars, for example, and it helps to propel you to a higher ranking for lots of different keywords, it could make you very wealthy. Anyone that has some success has either gotten very lucky, or they have marketed themselves in some way. You have to find a way to get yourself out there and search engines are a fantastic place to make that happen no matter what you’re creating.

The benefits of search engine optimization for artists are plentiful. Anyone that has art they have created wants people to see it. By using SEO, you can share everything you make with people all around the world from all walks of life.

Read more

How Artists Are Changing The Online Market Place

Artists are changing the online marketplace by creating more and more avenues in which creators can become their bosses. New money making opportunities are opening up all over the place thanks to enterprising artists taking advantage of the relatively “Free Market” styling of the internet. The time of having to put all of your faith in the hands of someone else to open up the door to success is long behind us. If you have any skill set, it’s easier than ever to let the world know and start benefiting from it.

The work of artists in finding a wealth of freelance opportunities has also created a lot of new choices for consumers. For instance, just look at Etsy. With that platform, artists can create handcrafted items such as paintings, sculptures, jewelry, stuffed toys, and so on. They go on sale for whatever price the artist feels is fair, and site visitors are free to pick and choose from whichever items might suit their fancy. Thanks to this, it’s much easier to find truly “one of a kind” items to give as presents or even merely decorate with.

The same is true even with clothing. If you or someone you know has a love of pop culture and enjoys wearing that on your sleeve, there’s a huge market for t-shirts, hoodies, hats, and other attire with custom artwork designed by individual artists that are far more likely to have your exact taste in mind. Prints of this nature that are sold in stores often have a corporate feel to them, sucking the life out of what may have once been some legitimate artistic value. Even better, many of these offerings are much more affordable in comparison to whatever tends to hit retail stores.

Many other mediums have flourished with new options to choose from thanks to the work of artists. There’s a richer variety of music in the world, with even the most niche of genres well covered. Independent film is also thriving thanks to the advent of more affordable cameras, editing software, and simple hosting platforms such as Youtube or Vimeo. Even entertainment mediums such as video games have seen a massive spike in independently generated titles, complete with services like Steam that highlight them for a wider potential audience.

Thanks to social media, artists can also market themselves now. There’s no need to rely on finding anyone, in particular, that’s “in the know” within the limited scope of a hometown or even some kind of agent or talent scout. Now, anyone with a creative vision or project can take it online and do all of the groundwork and make the connections themselves. It can all be promoted in a personalized manner.

Connections are also effortless now. If you’re looking to start up a particular project, but you’ll need the help of others to fulfill certain aspects of it, you can find someone online with those exact qualifications after only a cursory search. You can do so locally or even abroad, with communication platforms such as Skype or Google Hangout offering a wonderful means of interaction even from a distance. The internet has brought many artist/writer duos, bands, and other creative teams together that may have never met otherwise.

It goes on and on. Artists are changing the online marketplace by continually opening up more opportunities for people to set out on their own. It benefits creators and consumers alike. While often taken for granted, this is one of the clearest examples of just how much good the internet has done for people.

Read more

The official website of Owls of Chicago

Owls are launching very soon with an incredible website that is going to blow away a lot of people. Make sure you bookmark this website so you can come back and visit back soon.

 

There are currently no upcoming dates.

Read more

    To get the latest update about us and our works