I Had 1 Year to Build a Full-Time Art Career

A little over a year ago, I accidentally became a full-time artist. My whole life I've daydreamed about being an artist. It's what my mind wanders to every time I'm burnt out at work or trying to picture my perfect future, but every time that I've faced with the option between following that dream or choosing a more practical, safe, stable career option, I always chose practicality. But then I was laid off and then I was laid off again and then I moved states for a job that very quickly made me miserable and after that traditional nine-to-five jobs stopped representing safety and stability for me. I had so much fear that I was going to spend my entire life just continuously starting over at new jobs just to have the rug pulled out from under me over and over again and all of a sudden it actually seemed safer to have an art business. To have something that felt within my control that couldn't get ripped out from under me. So I gave myself a challenge. I would stay at my miserable job, save up as much money as I could, and give myself a year to take art from just a hobby to a real, stable, sustainable business. And then if, at the end of the challenge, I'd reached my revenue goals, then I would take the leap and become a full-time artist. I made a business plan, mapped out what art I needed to create, where I'd sell, where I'd promote. I made a marketing plan that mapped out my audience's messaging and content strategies, and I made guidelines for this challenge. Long-term benchmarks I'd aim for, a checklist detailing the amount of art and content I was expected to produce every month, and specific timely goals for each month. But then, in December 2024, I hit my breaking point and quit my job. So yet again, I found myself at this crossroad, choosing between art and a 9 to 5. Every other time I'd pick 9 to 5 because it felt like the practical, safe, stable option, but this time it felt very different. I was seeing every job sector facing mass layoffs, AI replacing so many people's jobs, people that I used to work with posting on LinkedIn about how they were unemployed for over a year, and suddenly the art path looked so much safer. I was already bringing in an okay amount of money just doing art passively and I had a business plan, marketing plan, and a pile of finished art. So I started this challenge anyway but with one huge change. Instead of having a year to build up to becoming a full-time artist, I already was a full-time artist. Art had become my sole source of income and I needed to make money as soon as possible. Somehow this year is over now and it's time to tell you all how it went and what's next for Green Velvet Creative. The New Year's a perfect time to reflect on the past and set goals for the future. And one of my major goals for this year is to have fun with art again. I want to explore new mediums, try new things, expand my skills. And today's sponsor, Craftsy, has been helping me do that. Craftsy is an online resource for all things creative. They have tutorial videos covering not just fine art, but everything from sewing, quilting, knitting and crocheting, to things like cake decorating and baking. If you've watched my channel before, you know I do a lot of pet portraits, but you'll also know I don't ever do oil paintings. I pretty much only do pen and ink drawings, and then occasionally watercolors. But my future in-law's dog passed away recently, and I'm painting a memorial portrait for them. And I knew I wanted to work with oil painting to capture all the color and detail in their favorite photo of her. So to prepare for this painting I watched Pat Weaver's pet portrait video series where she talks through how to capture a pet's likeness in a drawing, adding values, and then mixing and applying color. She works with acrylic paints not oils but I actually found that what she teaches is helpful for any type of painting including oil and watercolor. I've taken in-person painting classes before but I got so much more value out of this video series. Being able to watch someone draw mixed colors and paint in real time, having her narrate what she's doing, and being able to pause and go back whenever I wanted was so helpful. The techniques she taught were so different but so much easier than the way I learned to paint and I feel like it made painting feel so intuitive. If learning something new is also one of your new year's resolutions, the first 1000 people watching this video to use the link in my description will get a full year of premium membership to Craftsy for only $1.49, offer valid for new members only. So it's time to talk through everything I did, my performance metrics, sales, revenue and expenses, benchmarks, what had an impact, what I learned, what I plan to change, and what the future looks like for Green Velvet Creative. So first let's talk about everything I made. Green Velvet started out as just the Fable Collection. This is a collection that's very close to my heart. It's a Victorian storybook-inspired series depicting fables that changed my perspective on life. In its current iteration, this collection has sweatshirts, shirts, glasses, mugs, tea towels, pen and ink, bookplate-inspired prints, and naturalist watercolor-inspired prints depicting the Frog and Scorpion and Fox and Crow fables. I love this series and initially planned for this to be the only thing that I create and expanded upon as green velvet. However, I had a really tough time marketing this series. I feel like there's not a large existing community of people who love fables and automatically connect with these. And I didn't do a very good job of explaining why I connect to these, so it didn't really give people a chance to relate to them in the way that I do. The next series that I made was a series of pet portraits that I made after a painting that I did of my dog started selling pretty well on Etsy. I made this initial painting just for myself because I have a lot of Delftware and Delft-inspired decor and I wanted a portrait of my dog that kind of fit with that style. On a whim, I posted a video of me painting this and put the painting up on Etsy, even though this was at a time where I had just been laid off from my job and was not actively promoting or making art for Green Velvet. For some reason, sales for this listing started picking up a few months after I initially listed it. So because this listing did really well, I kind of went all in on Pet Portraits. I wanted to run a little test to figure out why this listing was so successful. Was it the fact that it was a commission? Was it the style of the painting? Would this sell better if I was just selling it to Jack Russell owners? Or does it sell well because it's a custom offering? So I went all in on this collection, made a whole bunch of different styles of pet portrait commissions, made a whole separate Instagram to promote to Jack Russell Terrier owners. And that's how I ended up with a whole collection of pet portrait offerings. This series definitely made me realize how much easier it is to market work when there is a definitive audience. And that's when I really started loving the idea of selling locally rather than online. So that's when I started my next series, which was Postcards from Cincinnati. I love doing architectural drawings, and when I first started this challenge, I thought architectural commissions were going to be the main focus of my business. However, during my first month, I did a giveaway and then also sold an architectural commission. And just having those two commissions took up basically every waking hour of that first month. And I realized it would be really hard to sell these if I actually priced them based on how long it took me to finish them. So I moved away from the commission idea and decided instead to have an architectural series based on Cincinnati landmarks. I've only been in this city for about a year so this series was a really good opportunity for me to not only learn the history of this city but also to just fall in love with its architecture. Right now I only have two buildings complete in this series, Music Hall and then the American Sign Museum, which I drew because I had the opportunity to participate in an art pop-up in their gift shop. But this is a series that I'm really excited to expand and actually start promoting. And then I have a few more prints and products that don't really fit neatly into these collections. I had started a series of prints that was kind of adjacent to the Fable collection. They were the same kind of pen and ink bookplate style, but these were animal idioms about Embracing Rest or Slowing Down. So in that series I have Cat Nap and Rat Race. And then I also just have a green velvet themed print and green velvet sweatshirt. So to break it down, I have 15 prints, 13 clothing items, seven other products like stickers or mugs, one architectural commission offering, and 10 pet portrait offerings. And then breaking that down by collections, it's basically six products that fall under the Postcard from Cincinnati collection, 13 products that fall under the Fable collection and then a few more that are just kind of miscellaneous or unsorted. All right now let's go through all of my posts and promotions for this year. I mainly focused on YouTube, email marketing, Instagram, which cross-posted on Pinterest, and I was very inconsistent with posting. So within 2025 I posted 13 times on YouTube, 15 times on Instagram and Pinterest, and sent out three email campaigns. So on YouTube I posted eight monthly check-ins, one tutorial, one A/B test, one drawing video, one marketing video, and one commentary video. I am kind of surprised by how much I ended up enjoying making YouTube videos. I've always enjoyed shooting sort of like cinematic B-roll type footage, but I really dreaded sitting down and talking to a camera. It's just not something that feels comfortable or comes natural to me. But to my surprise, it's been kind of cathartic to sit down and talk about this journey. It kind of just feels like journaling, and when I'm making these, I often forget that anyone will see them. I'm excited to start making kind of a wider variety of videos in 2026. However, because I'm working full-time, it is really hard to find time to film. So my focus for next year is definitely going to be quality over quantity. And for those of you who have been asking, I do plan to continue my digital marketing series. However, it will not be released monthly like I originally planned. So on Instagram, I posted 15 times on my Green Velvet account, but that did include a couple of collaborative posts with my pet portrait Instagram. I work in marketing, and I've talked a lot on here about the kind of diminishing returns that I've seen with short form media. These social platforms are just not for us anymore. They're always going to prioritize advertisers, viral content, and rage bait over content from accounts that you've actually chosen to follow. And because of that, it no longer feels like a reliable place to reach an audience. Because social content also has such a short shelf life, and because I'm someone who doesn't enjoy and isn't good at the type of trendy content that performs well on social media, social media is just not where I thrive. I do have a very in-depth social media strategy, but I think my plan for 2026 is to completely ignore that and just post when and what I want, because until proven otherwise, I just don't see this as a useful marketing channel for me. And then lastly I sent out three email campaigns this year but on top of that I have automated emails that send out when people download resources from my website so I sent 102 of those individually. My email campaigns are called letters from the studio and they're very informal recaps of what I'm working on that month, what inspired me, what's new, and then I always try to ask some sort of question or provide a prompt. So that I can have conversations with the people who subscribe to my email list. As you'll see when we talk about performance metrics, I don't really get sales from my email campaigns, but it is just a good place to have conversations. So for that reason, I do want to focus on it more in the future. And that brings us to performance metrics. Since we're already talking about it, let's start with social media. So on Instagram, I got 15,147 views, 881 likes, 21 shares, 14 new followers, 50 comments, 30 saves. And Instagram accounted for 83 of my website visits and 56 of my Etsy visits. This giveaway post, which was the first thing I posted this year, earned me the most followers and had the most shares. This triptych post, which was my favorite thing that I posted this year, had six saves, so it was my most saved post. I got the most comments, which was seven, on this post of me packing an order. Not necessarily because people resonated with this content, but just because this was my most recent post when I posted the first YouTube video in this series. And then lastly this video of me painting one of my Delft pet portrait commissions was the most liked post with 85 likes. Obviously since most of what I posted this year was drawing videos there's not a ton of varied content that allows me to see what types of things resonate with my audience. Because I only posted 15 times that's not a huge data set to go off of. However since social media has never really been an important part of my marketing plan I don't necessarily care what content does well. Because I kind of see social media as more of just a nice portfolio of my work, a way to show my process so that people know my work is not AI generated, and just a way to stay engaged with people. And even though I didn't post very often and my performance metrics are not very impressive, I do think I achieved all those goals this year. And then like I said, all of my Instagram posts automatically posted to Pinterest as well, which I didn't realize until about halfway through the year. So those same posts earned me. 137,000 impressions, 6,000 engagements, 54 outbound clicks, 735 saves, 4 website visits, and 133 Etsy visits. Pinterest lets me see my overall metrics for the whole year, but it only lets me look at pin performance from the last 90 days. But based on that time period, it definitely seems like there were two pins that drove most of my performance. This crow watercolor time lapse, which had 7,000 impressions, 419 engagements, three outbound clicks and 68 saves in the last three months, and then this pen and ink drawing of my old apartment which also had 419 engagements, 370 pin clicks, two outbound clicks, and 52 saves. So I sent three emails out this year, one announcing my collectors club sticker subscription, one announcing my architectural commission offerings, and then one announcing my pet portraits. When I sent my very first email I only had 18 people on my email list, And since then, my list has now grown to 123 people, which I think is a huge accomplishment. I would have never expected that that many people would sign up to hear from me. And this is definitely something that I want to focus more on in the future. Like I said, these really do not drive traffic for me. I think these emails got six, five, and nine clicks respectively. But it does feel like a more intentional way to show up for y'all. And I've had some really good conversations with you because of it. So on YouTube, I got 117,000 views, almost 9,000 watch hours. 4,407 subscribers and I made $325 and got almost 2 million impressions. This also led to 414 visits on my website and $227 in sales. The first video in this series drove most of that traffic. Right now that video has 58,000 views and 2,268 of my subscribers came directly from that video. Like I said, I definitely prefer making long-form videos as opposed to social media content. The first video in this series continues to get hundreds of views every single month, even though it's been almost a year since I posted it. And knowing that content has more of a shelf life on here than it does on social media definitely motivates me to put more effort into it, because I know it's not just going to get buried in one day like it might on Instagram. All right, now that we've looked at social media, let's look at my website metrics. Driving traffic to my website has definitely been my biggest shortcoming. Etsy does so much of the behind-the-scenes work to drive traffic. Placing ads, retargeting people who viewed my items, sending out abandoned cart emails, collecting reviews, and I found it a lot easier to just kind of let Etsy run in the background rather than learn how to drive traffic to my site myself. Obviously there's a huge advantage of selling on your own website instead of a marketplace like Etsy. You don't have to pay a fee to host or a fee every time that you make a sale. You don't run the risk of your site getting shut down for a policy mistake. You're able to track user behavior and you have more control over the look and functionality of your site. However, with my current experience and time commitments, I love the convenience of a marketplace like Etsy and because of that I haven't necessarily made it a priority to shift off of Etsy and more onto my website. All that being said, my website traffic was very low this year. I had 997 sessions in total and traffic was pretty much evenly split between my prints. Goods, About, and Commissions pages. The most viewed products were my Bookplate Print, Collector's Club Sticker, and Fig Tree Print. As far as what drove traffic to my site, YouTube drove the most traffic to my site, followed by Google and Instagram. Interestingly, I looked at what people clicked the most often on my site, and other than the Shop Prints button, the thing that was clicked the most times on my site was the FAQ dropdown for the question, Are your prints your own original art? It's got 58 unique clicks across my prints and goods pages. I'm wondering if people clicked this because plagiarized AI generated and repurposed public domain art is so common now. However, I guess just knowing my user behavior, the first thing I do when I find an Etsy shop that I really like is scour their page for some indication that they are a real person creating their art. So I guess it's not surprising that people are really interested to hear the answer to this question on my site. One of my goals for 2026 is to just figure out what I want my website to be. Right now it feels like it's serving the exact same purpose as my Etsy site, except my Etsy has the built-in social proof of having reviews collected, and also the built-in credibility of showing how long I've been on the platform. Sometimes I'm tempted to just scrap my website because it is kind of expensive to maintain, but I've heard from a lot of artists that it's kind of risky to put all of your eggs in the Etsy basket. because people do get their shops shut down out of nowhere all the time or have their shop performance tanked because of one bad negative review which is really risky on a platform like Etsy because if you lose your shop you lose everything. speaking of Etsy let's talk about my Etsy performance before we get into sales data. so my traffic tripled year over year with 11,000 visits, 1,523 item favorites, 138 new shop followers, and most importantly 29 five-star reviews and four repeat buyers. 57% of my traffic came from Etsy itself, either their homepage, search pages, or SEO. And then the remaining 43% primarily came from Pinterest, Instagram, and then the ads that I paid to place on Etsy. All right, let's get into sales data. First, we'll break things down by platform. So for the smaller income sources, I had two sales on eBay, surprisingly. My website platform has a feature where I can automatically cross post all my products to Google Merchant and eBay. So I did that and then completely forgot about it and this month for some reason I got two sales out of nowhere which brought in $108 and accounted for 1% of my total revenue. Also at 1% of my revenue was PayPal. I had a PayPal payment for an architectural commission which was about $90. In person sales also accounted for 3% of my total revenue. I sold wholesale prints for an art pop-up at the American Sign Museum, and a friend of mine sold my prints at two Pride events in Kentucky. So between those three events, I made $203 total. YouTube ads also accounted for 3% of my total revenue. My website brought in $920, which was 12% of my revenue. And then the remaining 82%, or $6,164, came from Etsy. So in total in 2025, I made $7,743. Breaking that down by item, I definitely made the most money from my Delft Pet Portrait commissions. I sold 48 and made $3,760 in sales. The next highest item by quantity was my Collector's Club stickers. I sold 43 of those, but because they were such an inexpensive offering, they only brought in $250. The next highest selling item was my American Sign Museum postcards. I sold one on my website and then 25 wholesale, but I sold them very cheap so they only accounted for $40 in sales. And then the only other items that I sold more than 10 of were my Fox and Crow shirts, which I sold 15 of and made $527 from, and then my Fox and Crow bookplate prints, which I sold 10 of for $364. I sold 7 catnap prints and 5 rat race prints in person, 5 custom Delft tiles and Frogman I'm going to put on some Fogment Scorpion stickers. Four frog and scorpion mugs, fox and crow glasses, and fox and crow watercolor prints. two dog sketch commissions, green velvet sweatshirts, fox and crow mugs, and frog and scorpion sweatshirts, and then one jack russell terrier glass, big tree print, architectural commission, and frog and scorpion print. i thought it would be really interesting to see what type of item and then what collection contributed the most to my revenue, so here are some charts breaking those down. commissions and prints accounted for the large majority of sales, and then interestingly fox and crow vastly outsold I sold Frog and Scorpion and made up almost 19% of my sales. But obviously the biggest portion came from pet portraits. I always think it's helpful when business owners also share their expenses and not just their revenue. It can be really easy to think that artists are bringing in a ton of money when you see these really high sales numbers, but their production costs also might be high. And that's not even taking into account the fees, shipping, advertising costs, tech costs, and other business expenses that they might be paying for. So in total, I brought in $7,743.44, mostly from Etsy and my website. But my expenses totaled $4,850, with 54% of that being production costs, 20% advertising costs, 14% fees, and a marginal amount going toward shipping, tech, and miscellaneous expenses. So that left me with $2,893 in profit for the year. My expenses will go down a ton next year because I now have a printer at home, which means the 27% of my expenses that went toward my print provider will no longer be necessary. All in all, this profit margin is fine for me. I broke this down a few monthly check-in videos ago, but at this stage of running my business, I am definitely willing to pay a premium for convenience. I don't have the funds, space, equipment, or knowledge to handle production in-house, and I also don't have the space, funds, or amount of orders necessary to order in bulk, so it makes sense for me to pay more for print-on-demand production rather than having a whole bunch of inventory on hand. I also don't have the experience or time to run all of the advertising that Etsy runs for me. So it's worth it for me now to pay more in fees to have all my products on Etsy than it is to learn how to do all of this myself. Again, especially now that I'm back at work full time, it's definitely worth it for me to pay extra just so my business can run in the background. When I set the rules for this challenge, I wanted to make sure to separate out achievements that were within my control versus outside of my control. So I kept track of goals, which were measurable actions that were within my control, so things like posting a certain amount or getting a certain amount of art done, and then benchmarks, which were long-term achievements that I was working toward but didn't necessarily have control over the timing of. So the goals I was working toward completing each month were being consistent on YouTube, uploading two or three times per month, sending email newsletters each month, monitoring data and optimizing monthly. Continuing to create new art, finishing one print a month, promoting prints at least five times, being consistent with outreach, taking care of my physical and mental health, taking one day off a week, connecting with my community, posting on Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest two to three times a week, and staying focused and not starting new ideas until my goals are met. So for the six months that I was actively working on completing these goals each month, the most I completed in a month was nine, which I did in February and March. And the least I completed in a month was two. two which happened in april after i went back to work full-time because i monitored data by making these videos that was the goal that i completed consistently all six months that i was working toward these goals but during five out of six a month i also created a new piece of art took one day off a week and stayed focused without starting new ideas the goal i was focused at was posting consistently on social media i only did that one month in february so this is where i get a little disappointed in myself for not doing a doing a better job of sticking with these goals. Obviously I had a lot more going on this year than I expected when I set these goals in January and I do think I was a little unrealistic to set these goals without considering the fact that I was going to have to do these goals on top of painting commissions, actively managing my business, and fulfilling orders. However, I do think it's hard to consider this year an accurate measure of what I was able to achieve because I didn't stick to my own plan and my own promises. I mentioned in my last video that one of the things that bothered me about self-employment was that I didn't feel like I was being directly rewarded for the amount of effort that I was putting in. But when I was looking at my data from this year, I actually think I proved myself wrong. This graph shows the amount of goals I reached each month compared to where that month ranked in terms of sales. So for example, February and March were my top sales months and also the months where I completed 9 out of 10 of my goals. So when you look at it like this, I think it's pretty clear that my sales actually did directly correlate with the amount of effort I was putting in my business, with the obvious outliers being November and December, because regardless of how much effort I put into my business, sales will always increase during the holidays. This graph is honestly really motivating to see. I think anybody who runs their own business knows how frustrating it can be to feel like you're putting 80 hours of work into your business every week and not necessarily seeing returns. So it's nice that having this graph has kind of allowed me to zoom out and see that my effort really was worth it. So benchmarks were long-term achievements that I was working toward that weren't necessarily within my control. And those achievements were selling 10 commissions a month, 30 prints, meeting YouTube's minimums for subscribers and watch time, 30 Etsy sales. Selling prints in three locations and then hitting my sales goals. So based on my benchmark graphs, February and June were my most successful months. In February, I reached YouTube's monetization criteria, which meant those two benchmarks hit 100% for the first time. I also hit my goal of 10 commission orders that month and was 85% of the way toward my sales goal. And then in June, because my art was sold in three in-person locations, I met my benchmark both for 30 print sales and also for three in-person locations. Other than the store location and print sales spike in June, this graph pretty much follows the exact same trend as the other one, where all my performance metrics peaked really strong in January and February, decreased when I went back to work in April and put my business on the back burner, and then increased again around the holidays. I am actually really proud of a lot of this data. These were long-term goals that I was working toward, not necessarily expectations that I had for myself right off the bat every month. So the fact that I spent seven months over the 50% mark for my commission benchmark, the fact that I reached YouTube monetization criteria in one month, the fact that I hit 100% on my store location goals, even though that was the one I thought I would never get above zero, those are all things I'm really excited about. Again, even though I objectively failed this challenge, I still feel like I succeeded as an artist this year. And not even in like a yeah I didn't technically achieve anything but I still feel like I learned something type of way. Like I actually am impressed by these numbers. I am proud to have a business that not only had sales every month but was profitable every month. I'm proud to have repeat buyers and five-star reviews. I'm proud that I have people who regularly come back to watch my videos. Like that is all stuff that I do not take for granted. Long long before I had Green Velvet I had Rachel Dawn Art and in the entire time that I tried to sell art under that name I never sold one single thing But it was so exciting every time I got a follower or a website visit or someone expressed interest in my art in any way. Because even if I wasn't making sales, all those things made me feel like I got to be a real professional artist. So every time I find myself in this business wishing I had done better or gotten closer to my goals or sold more, I just think back to the version of myself that was so thrilled I'm thrilled that people even wanted to see her art. If I told her that we'd sold one single thing, she would have been over the moon. So I can't even imagine how excited she'd be to know that we sold to 187 people this year. All right, so what went well and what didn't? This one's hard to answer because y'all can probably tell that I'm the type of person who likes usable, unbiased data to answer questions like this. And because there weren't really any tactics that I was consistent with all year, it's hard to cleanly attribute any actions to sales. If we're looking at it objectively, what had the biggest impact on sales was my Delft commission offering. Commissions made up 66% of my sales by product category and then pet portraits made up 64% of my sales by subject category. But I have a hard time with this being the answer because it feels like I just got lucky with this listing. I listed this painting right before I was laid off from my job and put my business on the back burner and it sat there for a few months while my business was inactive and then All of a sudden, with no change, no promotion, no ads behind it, it started getting orders out of nowhere. I have an entire video where I tried to recreate the success of this painting by making similar listings, but none of them have ever sold the way that this one does. So that means if traffic for this listing dropped, or this listing started getting ripped off by someone, or if I decided that I wanted to stop doing commissions, I couldn't just get something else to sell as well as this has. I really wanted there to be an actual repeatable action that I did or some type of formula that I could follow again to consistently bring in sales, but there's not necessarily an explainable reason why this listing continues to do well. I think that's probably the story for a lot of artists. In fact, I think most artists at some point in their career will have one style or subject that they become known for and sometimes it's just for no reason. They might not feel that it's their best work, what they work the hardest on, or what they're the most passionate about, but they have to make a decision when it starts getting popular about whether they want to lean into it and let it become what they're known for, or if they want to try to diversify or distance themselves from it. I don't think I'll ever stop looking into why certain listings sell well just because I like data and it's helpful. But I do think next year I need to learn to just accept that sometimes the answer is just luck or the right people seeing it at the right time and because they started buying it the algorithm started pushing it and there might not be anything that I could have done to produce the conditions that led to its success. I think I need to find the balance between just enjoying its success while it lasts but then also making sure that I have a backup plan and I don't get so pigeonholed that I'm screwed if it stops selling. Also, speaking of luck, I feel like YouTube was the other thing that had a huge impact on my success this year that also kind of felt like it was just a stroke of luck. I know it obviously wasn't purely luck because I worked hard on both that painting and my YouTube videos and people were drawn to them because they felt a connection and saw the effort that I put into them, but with both that Delft listing and the first YouTube video in this series, the success felt kind of random because when I first posted it they got pretty much no traffic and then out of nowhere like a month or two later they both started catching on with no promotion, No ads behind it, no random influencer reposting it, they just caught on. I do think it's kind of a karmic lesson for me as someone who clings very tightly to control and has a spreadsheet and a strategy for everything and wants everything to fit within this perfect correlational system. That the two things that led to the most success in my business this year were two things that I just did with no expectation and people happen to like them. But I think the third thing that had an effort that was in my control was just showing up consistently I don't think I could necessarily say that doing social media or email marketing or any marketing tactic in particular consistently guaranteed sales, but as I showed you all in that graph earlier, my business directly improved during the months where I was actively engaged no matter where I was showing up. People seemed to find me and opportunities seemed to come my way during the times where I put myself out there. Even if I wasn't necessarily putting my best foot forward or posting on a specifically scheduled cadence or following all the marketing rules. I think that's the two biggest lessons that I'm bringing into 2026. I need to learn to lean into luck and let go of control. Not every success can be explained with data and sales can't be perfectly predicted by how closely I adhered to a checklist. The only thing that predictably improved my business was putting in effort, showing up and trying new things. So what didn't have an impact? For this section, I want to talk not only about what had no impact, but also what negatively impacted my business. This year, my website had pretty much no impact other than sticker subscriptions. My website was pretty dead. Social media had very little impact, but I was also very inconsistent and disengaged. And my Jack Russell Terrier drawings also had no impact. What negatively impacted me was trying to do everything all at once. Every time someone suggested a new idea to me, every time that I got excited about a new opportunity, I went all in on it. I couldn't just test one listing and see how it went. I had to create a whole new collection and a new Instagram and a video series about it. In some ways I think I was just working to my brain's strength by giving myself a project to complete rather than just having an aimless to-do list of potential things I could work on, but I also think it kept me in a constant state of overwhelm because I would finish a new project without thinking about the fact that now that meant I had yet another plate spinning that I had to balance with everything else. By the end of the year, I had like four separate collections and YouTube series and social accounts that all had their own strategies and project plans that I was expecting myself to work on every month, even though I was already feeling overwhelmed with just doing one collection. And again, I do think to some extent it's incredibly necessary to do this as a new artist. If I had just stuck with the Fable collection and then refused to work on anything new and been so stubborn about only promoting this, I would have only made 22% of the sales that I made this year, and I would have missed out on local opportunities and connecting with people who bought commissions from me, and I think I would have felt really creatively limited. I don't know, honestly as much as I burned myself out like crazy this year, I still wouldn't have wanted to do this any other way. It was so valuable to me this early on to explore so that I can see what types of work and workflow I want to sustain. It's not my long-term plan to stick with all of these different collections, but I won't know which one of them I want to stick to until I try them. I wouldn't have known that these architectural commissions were impossible until I sold them and had to juggle multiple in one month. I wouldn't have known that my local offerings would lead to local opportunities until I put them out there. I wouldn't have known that my other pet portrait commissions wouldn't gain as much traction as my Delft commission until I listed them. Every single thing that I did this year, whether it worked out or not, taught me something about what paths I can take in the future. And then I would say the other thing that negatively impacted my art sales was going back to work But I also think that's the best decision that I could have made for myself, and I'm very happy that I did it. I'm very, very grateful that I got a taste of being a full-time artist, but I'm also really grateful that I don't have to keep feeling like I'm missing out on a life that I would love so much more than the one I'm living. I spent so long dreaming about being a full-time artist and it only took me a few months of being a full-time artist before I realized it wasn't what I expected and it wasn't what I wanted out of life. And now that I know that, I don't have to sit at my job every day thinking that the grass is greener on the other side because the grass is plenty green where I'm at and I'm very grateful to now have the perspective to be conscious of that every day. I know there are probably people watching this who want to start their own art business and want something applicable to take away from this section, but I really do think the main thing I learned from this year is that what's going to work for one person won't necessarily work for everyone else. Even though I didn't love being a full-time artist, it doesn't mean it's not incredible for other people. Even though I didn't find that social media had an impact on my sales, it doesn't mean other people won't get sales there. Just because most of my sales came from pet portrait commissions doesn't mean every artist should stop what they're doing and sell pet portraits instead. In general, the things that had a positive impact this year were things I was excited to put my energy toward that felt the most authentic to me, and the things that didn't have an impact in general were the things that I dreaded doing or only stuck with because I felt like I was supposed to. At the end of the day, unless we get lucky early on, most of us just need to give ourselves the time and space to explore before we can figure out what works, what we enjoy, and what we want to do long term. And just like in life, there's no one path to success. We all have to take the time to find our own way. So initially my plan for 2026 was to release collections every quarter. So I would work ahead to get three months worth of art and content done and then I would automate posting so that I could have three months of downtime to work on the next collection. I of course have a whole spreadsheet built out of all of the art and content that I need to create for the entire year. And with this plan, I would essentially be simultaneously handling a quarterly release for three collections. But then I realized, I'm getting married this year! I will still be working full-time, I need two surgeries that will require undetermined downtime, and this is not the year to be structured and add a whole second full-time job's worth of work on my plate. Last year, I couldn't meet my own expectations because I'd made my plan without anticipating any of the obstacles that I was going to encounter that year. But this time around, I've been given the gift of foresight and knowing in advance that next year is going to be overwhelming, I just feel like if there's something I can put on the back burner, I should. As I said in my last video, this year-long challenge ended up being the exact opposite of what I wanted it to be. I called this challenge taking my art from hobby to full-time business in one year because that initially was what my plan was. I was going to take 2025 to build my art business from the ground up and take a year to plan, test, and prepare. But after I quit my job, the challenge then changed to become a successful full-time artist as soon as physically possible. Which meant I never actually got to take the time to slowly build this business into something sustainable. I just jumped in with both feet. And now I get a second chance to take a step back and actually take things slow. So my 2026 plan will take a pause, I'll move that back to 2027, and I'll take this next year to plan, prepare, and most importantly, have fun with art again. I'm not going to put pressure on myself to hit deadlines or reach goals or stick to plans. Whatever I get done will be an achievement. Whatever I sell will be a success. My plan is to still update y'all at least once a quarter, hopefully more often, and just show you what I'm working on and what's new. And I might end up loving running my business that casually and make that the new norm. I might not need all the systems and checklists and sales projections. I might just need to make art and connect with people when I can. I might like running this business more when I'm just making art and connecting with people. Even though I failed this challenge, this year was so incredible and empowering and eye-opening in so many ways. Just seeing what I was capable of and trusting myself, I'm just overflowing with gratitude for this year and this experience and for all of you who took this journey alongside me. It's been an honor to have y'all here while I navigate this, and I'm excited to see where this journey goes. As always, I'm glad you all are here. Thank you so much for listening.