There are a number of different strategies you can use to pursue and hone your art form while making enough to live on. It is much easier, of course, to do this if you don’t have children. And, of course, raising children is its own art form and an extremely important one. But even with children, artists can find ways to do their other art; it just takes commitment and ingenuity.

 

It helps if you can figure out ways to live on not much money, skills that can come in handy for other situations as well. When Richard and I were living on the road, we rarely ate out, and when we did, we went to inexpensive places and usually ordered the cheapest thing on the menu. We kept our food costs down (ate lots of potatoes, pasta, beans, tortillas, and canned tuna), and our entertainment expenses, too. At that time, we drank beer instead of wine, and we almost never had soft drinks or any other bottled drinks. One thing we’ve found is that during times of little money, we usually had lots of time (the inverse seems to be true as well). And one of the things we enjoyed about our modest, time-rich lifestyle was that we had time to explore places by bike and on foot; we owned just one car and used our bikes as alternative transportation. If you live in a city with good public transportation, you might be able to get by without any car at all, and now there are starting to be Share Cars. Another thing we did was to shop at thrift stores, and we did a lot of trading of labor and bartering, too. There were also times when we cruised neighborhoods on trash night looking for discarded furniture. (But never couches or mattresses, which are now more problematic than ever, due to the resurgence of the bed bug problem.)

 

There are two basic strategies for earning income when you’re an artist: One is to work in a field that is related to your art form, such as graphic design or web design if you’re a visual artist, or ghost writing or editing if you’re a writer. The other is to work in a completely unrelated field. I’ve known artists who made money doing yard work, washing windows, house cleaning, care-taking the elderly, dog-walking and dog-sitting. I’ve tried both paths at different times in my life. One of my favorite ways to earn money was as a carpenter or carpenter’s assistant; I was also a professional shopper for a multi-millionaire for awhile, too, and that was a kick until the novelty wore off. One of the nice things about working in an unrelated field, especially for a writer, it seems to me, is that you’re always gathering material. But the same could be true, really, for any art form.

 

No matter which one of these two paths you take, you have several options available to you within them: part-time work, seasonal work, temporary work, job-sharing, a home-based business, and flex-time. (If you’re an elementary or high school teacher, you have your summers.) If at all possible, I try to schedule my part-time work in the afternoons, since I write best in the mornings. An evening shift can work well for people who like to work on their art in the mornings, too (those who prefer to work at night would do better with a day shift, obviously). Seasonal work is a nice option, and if you’re interested in that, you should do some research into resorts that are only open for a season or two. We had a friend who was a chef who worked at resorts in the high country and far north in the summer and then worked in ski towns in the winter. He had his spring and fall free. Flex-time usually offers individuals the opportunity to work four 10-hour days, for example, so that you have three days off.

 

I’ve often thought that, with an aging population, a viable home-based business could be helping the elderly to live independently by providing a chauffering service or taking care of errands for them. Richard and I have also had a hard time finding people to help us with our yard work and gardening, which would be great work for an artist. It’s self-scheduling, and you can take on as many or as few clients as you want. Being able to help people who aren’t all that computer literate with their computer woes and website problems might be good work for those with good computer skills. The trades are another well-paying home-based business if you’re skilled at electrical work, plumbing, tiling, carpentry, etc.

 

You can look around for jobs that have a high turnover rate, too. There seems to be high turnover in the restaurant business, for example, so if you had skills as a cook, waiter, or sous-chef, you could probably have an easier time finding work in that field than others where the turnover is low. Care-giving for the sick or elderly tends to have a high turnover as well; work as a medical assistant at a clinic or doctor’s office can be one of the easier jobs to find, too.

Even if you don’t actually housesit, you can provide a service for people who travel and need their mail collected, plants watered, and animals looked after. Again, the nice thing about this work is that it’s self-scheduling.

 

And then there is the time-honored strategy of getting up a couple of hours earlier in the morning before you go to work in order to write or make art, or working after everyone else in your household has gone to bed. There are always weekends, too. If you set aside two or three hours every weekend in order to pursue your craft and you stick with it, over time, you’ll realize that you’ve actually written that novel or produced a respectable body of work.

Whatever you do, do it well and you’ll find doors opening for you over time. Anything can be tough to get started in, but perseverance can really pay off. Networking is a good skill to develop in all respects, and maintaining a good work ethic is a great habit for both making money and art.

If anyone has any ideas or strategies to share on this topic, I’d love to hear from you and add your contribution to this discussion.