How to Make Money from Your Digital Artwork

When I initially got interested in 3d art was when I needed book covers for my self-published romance novels. Not being someone who could draw, I stumbled quite literally onto the 3d art scene when I saw a website created using 3d art by one of my favorite authors. Intrigued with the idea, I began to get all sorts of ideas about what I could do with this artwork should I be able to teach myself how to use the programs. Imagine my surprise when I was, with a lot of help from the 3d art community, able to learn to use both Daz Studio and Poser.

Once I got those programs under my belt, I immediately began to see how such a skill could be used to increase my work-at-home income. Here are some ways you can turn your 3d art hobby into some extra money.

1. Create a unique piece of artwork and then open your own Café Press store with products such as t-shirts, coffee mugs, and mouse pads containing your artwork. Since I had already done this with my book cover artwork, it did not take much of a stretch of the imagination to see me doing it with other pieces of my 3d artwork.

2. Create book covers for self-published artists, and or for publishers. There are several electronic publishers that use artists versed in 3d art to create covers for their authors. Also, there are many self-published authors out there, I used to be one of them, who need a cover for their book, and do not want to use the canned versions available online. Offering this as a service on your website, and elsewhere is another way to make income using your 3d artwork.

3. Do you also know how to put websites together? Maybe you're an expert at HTML? Here's another chance to make money using your 3d artwork. Offer to create artwork that you will then use to put together websites for those who do not have the time or knowledge. 3d art can make a website look unique and less canned. I'm not suggesting you go overboard to where it takes forever for pages to load, but using your 3d art program along with whatever paint program you're partial to in order to make pictures, banners and buttons for your or someone else's website is a great way to put together a website that is fun, creative, and makes some extra money at the same time.

4. Another option for making money using your 3d artwork is to sell Prints of it on Deviant Art. Deviant Art is an artist's dream website. You can view other people's art, not just 3d, as well upload your own. The beauty of this is that you only have to have a free account to be able to sell prints of your artwork on Deviant Art. So, do you have a really good piece of work that you think would make a cool poster? Then here's your opportunity to make it available to the world. One thing with Deviant Art is that with a standard account, the artist does not always make that much from each sale, but if you have a premium account, which of course costs money, then the artist makes 50% of the remainder of whatever is left after the base cost is subtracted from the sale price. This is assuming the sale price isn't less than the base cost. In any event, you can check out their rules on prints by going to their website.

One thing to keep in mind though is that if you are using free content in your pictures, you need to make sure that the content is licensed for commercial use. If it isn't and you use it for products you're going to sell, then you can get into trouble with the creator. So, always make sure your content is licensed for commercial use.

There are many options available to 3d artists for making money with their artwork, these are only a few. I'm sure if you think about it, you can come up with others.