This award is made by AI. In about a month ago, I opened a etsy shop trying to sell AI generated artwork like this in digital format. In this article, I'm sharing my analytics, how much money I made in a month, and I'll show you three tools that helped me upload 75 listings in just a couple of days. Now despite that, there are some harsh realities with selling printable wall art, so make sure to stick around if you want to see realistic results.
For context, I'm selling wall art to generate it from mid -journey, which is a text to image AI. I pay $10 a month, which gives me commercial rights, and I sell the art in digital format, More specifically as a digital file in five different sizes. Anybody who buys it can take it to their local printing service and have it printed and framed. This way, I don't have to worry about printing, shipping, and I keep a 90% profit.
The downside is, I don't make as much money as with physical prints, because I can't charge that much for a digital file. So a little background, I opened the etsy shop on April, and as soon as I did, it was Immediately suspended. I didn't violate any of Etsy's policies, and I wasn't given a reason for it. Naturally, I appealed the suspension and even raised the ticket to their support team. In my case, Etsy reactivated the shop around three weeks later.
Now my first mistake was that I didn't do anything while the shop was suspended. I could've used this time to make products and have the first listings ready to post, by the time I was going to be reactivated.
Also Read: Make money from Steps For Rewards Step GO app
So I only started listing my first products in the first week of May. Then, my second mistake was overestimating the value of my first products, which were pop art posters. Based on my research, I concluded that these products would sell really well, And as you probably guessed it, they didn't. I run another Etsy shop selling websites in Canva templates, and I got my first sale there in the first couple of days, so I thought I could repeat the same thing here.
But turns out, it's a bit more difficult than that. So I did some more research and decided to expand my offerings. I added abstract art, contemporary art, and oil paintings. After I did that, I got my first order for $3.
This gave me motivation to keep pumping out new art and listings, so I hopped onto Creative Market and bought some abstract shapes, and started putting them together in Photoshop. Couple days later, I got two more orders, and now my total revenue was around $13. Now, considering I spent $18 on the abstract shapes on Creative Market, plus the Etsy listing and transaction fees, I was at a loss.
But that didn't stop me from continuing to make some art and uploading more listings, however, there was a serious problem. Up until this point, I was doing everything manually, upscaling the art, resizing and placing It to mockups, wasting multiple hours every single day just to upload a couple of listings. So after spending a few days researching how I could speed up my workflow, I found three tools that completely changed my shop.
Since mid -journey generates low -resolution art, I had to upscale it to make it suitable for printing. I previously used upscale media, but I had to do each image one by one, so I switched to Topaz AI, and I could now upscale multiple images in one go.
The problem is that Topaz AI is a paid tool, so I was now at an even bigger loss. But I was pressing on, and after upscaling, I had to do the most exciting part of wall art business, Placing the art into mockups. I first did what most shops do. I manually added the art into mockups. At first, I used Canva, but the mockups weren't that great there. So I bought some higher quality ones that I could edit in Photoshop.
Since I was doing around 8 mockups for a single piece of art, it took me centuries to do it manually. When I first found out that there are scripts and plugins that do it automatically for you,
I was just over the moon, until I started using them. Maybe it's just me, maybe it's my version of Photoshop, but none of these scripts worked well for me. I tried like 4 of them, and they either didn't place the art into the mockups properly, Or would just completely crash Photoshop. Several failed attempts later, I just gave up and started resizing again manually, while researching other tools on the side. And I eventually found the perfect solution on Reddit.
This guy called Lukadali built an online mockup generator called Mockcity.com, where you can add your Photoshop files, and the tool will place your art into the mockups automatically. This made my job so much easier.
I added my mockups, added the art, pressed a few buttons, and it was doing everything in the background. It was an absolute game changer, but there was another problem. You see, printable wall art is usually offered in 5 different sizes or aspect ratios, And it needs to be in specific pixel sizes to be printed properly. So I had to find a way to resize the art generated from mid -journey into these exact sizes.
So I used Photoshop again. I created canvases in these exact sizes, And placed my art into those canvases. Again, this was just a lot of manual work, so I tried to automate it by recording my actions in Photoshop. But this didn't work at all.