Microstock report for January 2012

Here's my latest microstock report:

This month I've decided to include lifetime totals for each of these stock sites.

I thought it would be informative to see what each of these sites has actually made.  It might help anyone looking to submit photos or illustrations to microstock to pick the right ones - or at least focus on the ones that pay the most.


Shutterstock leads the way this month and every month.  They've been the top money maker with licensing my illustrations from the beginning.  They were the easiest company to get approved on (you have to submit 10 images).  My wife and I have been submitting images for about 2 years now (we got our first sale/download on January 31st of 2009) and there have only been a handful of days (less than 5) where we didn't make at least one sale.  In the Spring of 2009, when we were at our freshest and we devoted hours a week to uploading, we were making almost $300 a month.  But now, sitting on a big portfolio of illustrations, and not uploading anything new - we still make at least $100.  And that's why I got into stock illustration in the first place.  I had drawings that were just sitting around on my computer collecting dust - so I brushed them off (colored some of them) and uploaded them and now they're making money.  Some make more than others...but it's nice that they all have a chance.  And by uploading to several sites we increase our chance of having that file make more money.  And our ultimate goal with Shutterstock is to reach the lifetime total goal of $10k because we get our final raise from 36 cents per download to 39 cents.  It's a small raise, but it adds up - and, as you can see, 2 years (or 24 months) of those small downloads have made about $5,500.

Dreamstime and www.istockphoto.com are the next two big companies.  Istock used to be my second best performer and, at one time, threatened to overtake Shutterstock - but last year they changed their royalty structure and they slipped below Dreamstime in the amount of money they bring in.  I hope it comes back around, but it doesn't look likely...Dreamstime is probably the company I upload to and focus on the most - but only because they have a monthly contest that I like to participate in.  I have yet to win, but all the images accepted into the contest sell for a higher price point which still makes it worth it.

The rest of the companies are hit and miss from month to month.  I still upload to them because the money adds up eventually.  And ya never know when a big sale could come.

Anyway - that's all I have this month.  Hopefully I'll never be this long winded in another microstock report...

Squaremania: Lil' Square Bear

I drew this bear originally as a mean old crotchety character...This is a different take - where he's a little more friendly and not so prone to ripping into flesh:

Sorry about the copyright nonsense, but you can't be too careful these days...

Laughing kids

Dreamstime has another contest - this time the subject matter is about body language - I just finished this rough using a wacom tablet and drawing in Adobe Photoshop:

I drew the one boy with the front teeth missing, but I'm not going to do that in the final drawing.  Because it looks dumb.

This is the cleaned up version.  I did it in Adobe Illustrator. I rounded out the blond boy's cheek (it was a little too stylized) and removed the gap teeth.

Microstock report for December 2011

Decembers are usually a really bad month for stock licensing.  The holidays and vacations keep people from downloading.  This December brought a couple of days on Shutterstock where we didn't get any downloads, and while it was down from last month, it was still a fairly good month.

Shutterstock once again carried over 50 percent of the sales this month.  Bigstockphoto rallied after last month's disappointing fifty cents showing by coming in 3rd overall for December.  When we first started with Bigstockphoto we consistently had months like that (where regular $3 dowloads happened each week), but recently it's been a struggle to sell anything on that site.  Hopefully this is a sign of Bigstockphoto picking back up.

I decreased the sizes of a couple of portfolios because I had an illustration on several sites that I've decided to take in a different direction:

I drew this a few years ago with the idea to turn it into a vinyl toy.  I put that idea on hold for a while because I started pursuing other avenues - and recently I've teamed up with a couple of friends from work to create apps and vinyl toys.  This one eyed blob monster will be our first vinyl toy.

And what's interesting is just as I took this image off the stock illustration sites, I was suddenly contacted by someone that wanted to do an Ipad game with this character.  So I was able to negotiate a license with the person directly.  So this year could see this character with it's own toy AND game app!

In October, I found out that you could drag any picture into Google.com (in the image area) and it will do a search based on that image.  I found several of my stock illustrations being given away for free or being used by blogs illegally (or at least without any credit)...This year I'm going to start including a copyright on each image.  It's kind of lame, but it's a good way to ensure that people won't use these images without permission.

Quick Sketch

Today they passed around a sketchbook for everyone to sign as a going away present for the doorman who just retired.  I did this quick little sketch of my panda character for him.  It was a sad day to see him go - but hopefully he can find some happiness and fulfillment in his time away from Nickelodeon.

November Microstock Report

This is November's Microstock Report:

Shutterstock led the pack once again.  Along with Istockphoto, they're one of the biggest agencies that deal with licensing photographs and vector illustrations.  It's strange that all this time Shutterstock has maintained an average over $100, whereas www.istockphoto.com (which had a couple of months with the century mark about a year ago) has faded, and was overtaken by Dreamstime last month.

Vectorstock is a site that a few vector artists don't care for - the reason why is that the payouts are very low per image.  I'll have a ton of sales each month (which i like because I visit each site at least once a day, and it's a lot more fun when the dollar amounts change, even if it's just a little), but it only amounts to just over $20.  I like to stick with them though because sales are sales - and Vectorstock is one of the more consistent selling sites I'm affiliated with.

There are a bunch of other sites that I signed up with that aren't really doing much of anything.  Crestock is one of the original sites I joined and it's made zero monies in four of the last five months.  Some other dud stock sites (for me) are Stockfresh (which just started, so I'm waiting to see if that changes) and Veer (another new site, but another one that doesn't sell much).

With that said - I think it's better to have a portfolio of illustrations across a variety of microstock agencies.  It means that more businesses and people in need of images have a better chance of finding your stuff and purchasing the license.  If you're thinking of selling your own vector artwork (or photographs) - I'd say start with Shutterstock - it's one of the easier sites to get into (you have to have 10 images approved, but their approval process is lax compared to an agency like Istockphoto).  But once you get going, I'd suggest at least signing up with the big three (Shutterstock, Istockphoto, and Dreamstime) and then think about the rest.

A boy and his puppy

This is another illustration that I did for Dreamstime.  I had an idea to draw a kid with big round eyes getting a puppy on Christmas so I drew this on my wacom tablet using Adobe Photoshop:

What's great about using Photoshop is that you can easily lighten and darken the lines and work on separate layers to quickly and easily draw and edit.  What isn't so great is using a wacom tablet to do it.  But it still gets the job done - because it's just a sketch that I transported to Adobe Illustrator (in stock image sites like Dreamstime, they always like photographs and vector drawings...vary rarely will a raster illustration do as well).

I might have made the eyes too big and round...but he looks happy (if slightly alien).  Anyhow - I wanted to do a very subtle background, so all of that color (not the ornaments) is a gradient mesh with a few lines for the fireplace.

Squaremania: Panda has an Epiphany

Here's the final illustration:

I think it turned out quite alright!

Squaremania: Happy Panda

I printed out the rough drawing and revised it with a red pencil:

After scanning it back into the computer I completed the revisions in Adobe Illustrator and then transferred the lines into Photoshop to color.  So far I'm done with the Panda, and now I have to work on the background:

Feeling Great, Feeling Happy...with a kite!

This illustration is for the Dreamstime contest.  This month's topic is "Feeling Great, Feeling Happy."

This is the rough I did in Adobe Photoshop:

I took that into Illustrator to clean it up and color it:

I, personally, never got into kite flying as a kid.  I had a couple of kites, but  each and every time I took them out a tree came out of nowhere and swallowed them whole.  I felt like Charlie Brown...all I needed to find was a jerk girl to pull a football away when I tried to kick it.

Anyway - kites don't agree with me, but these two kids seem to be getting a kick out of it.

Here's a variation:

Happy Panda Rough Drawing

This is the baby panda surrounded by sunlight.

The ears will be a little smaller in the final version.

This is Halloween, 2011

Last year we got a group together to do a Mario Brothers theme.  This year we visited the Tim Burton exhibit at the LACMA.  It inspired us to make our own costumes using the Nightmare Before Christmas as our theme this year.

My wife and two friends were Lock, Shock, and Barrel - the three little kids who kidnap 'sandy claws'.  I wanted to be something a bit harder and went with the Mayor.  Every year at Nickelodeon Animation Studio (where we work) they do a costume contest.  So while we were waiting for our turn, a girl dressed as Sally joined us and we all went together. 

We won for 'best entertainment characters'.

There's also a pumpkin carving contest that we entered:

My wife stayed with the theme and carved a Jack Skellington head and painted it white.  It also won!

I changed my plan at the last minute and went with an Angry Birds theme:

the red bird is an orange and the little blue bird is a lime.

 Angry Birds in their natural habitat.

This was part of the process of painting the Mayor head - I did a layer and then hung it to dry while I worked on my pumpkin.  I cut out the pieces for the eye, the nose and the mouth (which is where I saw out of).   The other cone (the white one) was the bottom part of the hat.  The material I used was a light weight black foam, so I had to do an undercoat before painting it gray.

And here are a few pictures of the making of the pumpkins:

The pear was too difficult to work with, so I ended up not being able to do a yellow bird.

precision cutting for Jack Skellington's eyes

Lil' Kid

Here are a couple of drawings I did in Adobe Illustrator:

Nightmare before Christmas Girl

Tim Burton's artwork was on display up until last month in Los Angeles.  There were drawings from his childhood, random sketchbooks and each of his movies.  One of his most prominent motifs are stripes.

I've had Nightmare before Christmas in my head for the last month.  It's not just that it was the season for it - but my wife, a couple of friends, and I made Nightmare before Christmas costumes for our company costume contest (our group won for best entertainment characters).  I still have to post the pictures of the costumes, but in the meantime I've had this illustration of a girl in cute hats and I wanted to do a Jack Skellington version:

I thought the girl looked a little too cute with that hat, so I thought I'd see about pushing it a little further...like if she was stitched together like Sally (from the movie).

That's probably a little too stitchy though, so this is my final version:

cute and scary - and I thought I could make it a little more Tim Burtony and goth by giving her a desaturated skirt and matching striped scarf.

Little girl with bear hat

I have a couple of variations on the little girl in an animal hat.  This is the little girl in a bear hat:

Microstock report for October 2011

This is our microstock report for October 2011.  We uploaded a couple of new images, but they were for Halloween and I wasn't able to finish them until the end of the month...so there wasn't enough time for them to get accepted and be available for people to download...

The thing is, if you're going to make pictures for a particular day, you should probably have them up and ready to go at least a month before.  And it might be better if you have it 2 months before that holiday.  My illustrations weren't available until the week before Halloween, so we only got a couple of downloads and now everyone is focused on thanksgiving (and the big one) or Christmas.

Here's the October breakdown:

Shutterstock is the only site that seems to keep delivering month after month.  Since we started doing microstock in February of 2009, we have only had one month where we didn't make the $100 minimum to get paid (If you make less than a hundred dollars, it just rolls over to the next month and so on until you do reach a hundred).

I might try to put some Christmas images up in the next couple of weeks, so we'll see if that helps spark more interest in the rest of the portfolio across the different microstock sites....

123rf and Vectorstock are both doing fairly well too.  Those are two smaller sites that seem to stay very consistent each month.  We had our best month ever on 123rf this month...and Vectorstock seems to hit around $15 each month.  Both totals are kind of on the small side, but it's nice to check every couple of days because they always have sales.

Kid in a Frog Hat

Why are kids in frog hats so cute?  And why are there so many hats out there (these days) that have animal faces?  They look horrible on regular people...just incredibly dorky - but you strap one of these on a little kid and suddenly even the ugly ones are sorta cute....

And then you get a hat on a cute kid and watch out!  You'll go home and punch your own kid for not trying hard enough.

I was drawing a lot of scary looking characters (a toy line I'm working on) and somehow this drawing found it's way into the mix.  I thought it'd be funny to create a line of cool toy monsters in those blind boxes (where you buy one in a toy line, but you don't know which one you'll get until you open the box)...and every once in a while you'll get this little girl toy which would be the completely opposite of every other toy.

One day that'll happen, and it'll be funny...unless you're the boy that opens the box...

Kid in frog hat head

I'm working some toy designs...this is one of the first thumbnails that I wanted to finish up:

I haven't finished coloring the body, but I'm currently working on it...

Scary designs!

I'm teaming up with a couple of other talented folks to create some vinyl toys.  This is one of my concepts that we're thinking about..

I transferred it (from Adobe Illustrator) to Photoshop to do a color version:

This is an illustration for the microstock site Dreamstime.

They do a monthly contest based on an idea.  Most of the submissions are photographs, but I always like to throw in an illustration to add some creativity to the whole thing.