Microstock report for July 2013

This is our microstock report for July 2013:

Shutterstock is finally faltering.  We've gone months without uploading a new file and it's finally starting to take effect.  The last two months we've not crossed the $100 payout level, so it takes at least 2 months to squeeze any money out of it.

I guess it means we'll have to start uploading new files - I don't like seeing it so low.  But we have other projects taking priority and, at least for us, microstock was always just an experiment in how much pocket change we could muster.  Turns out quite a bit!

All together our uploads have achieved over $15,700.  Of course that's over the course of years...we started in January 2009 where we had only one sale (so we almost never count that as our first month) and made 25 cents.  So 4 and a half years later we've made 15.7k.  Not bad.  It averages out to about three and a half thousand dollars a year.  Of course most of that was in the first two years where we were uploading a couple of files a week...

Anyway - that's all for now.  Enjoy the chart.  Or don't.  If you're looking to do your own microstock illustrations or photographs, I'd suggest starting with Shutterstock and slowly working your way down the list in the order of money we've made.  Those top three are the biggest for a reason.  They actually sell files - but none as much as Shutterstock.

quick drawing

I never draw people...so I thought I'd post one quick sketch that I did at lunch on the back of a receipt.

Beware Cthulhu the Cutie

Beware of Cthulhu the Cutie!  He'll make your eyeballs coo as he's feasting on your innards.  Or whatever Cthulhu is supposed to do...I don't know.

My brother and I are thinking of a project to do with H P Lovecraft and somewhere in there I thought of doing Cthulhu as a little monster, more cute than dangerous - in looks anyway - I'm sure he could still...um...Like I said, I have no idea what he does.

I've heard of H P Lovecraft quite a lot - from people doing movies inspired by it or writing books that pay homage...but I've never read Lovecraft until yesterday.  I started with the Alchemist.

And I've heard of Cthulhu - I know he's a monster, and I think I've heard that he's over 50 stories tall...and he's quite cranky...but I don't know why or who or what he does.  There's a book called the Call of Cthulhu - so eventually I'll read that and maybe it'll all make sense.  Until then - beware of...something!

June Microstock report

It's been a little while since I posted a microstock report.

Shutterstock continues to blow everyone else out of the water.  Deposit Photo seems to have sales every few days - but nothing is as consistent as Shutterstock.  We're still getting close to getting a payout with Shutterstock every month (or so) and haven't uploaded a new illustration since last year!

So it's nice that we continue to make money (even if it's small) without paying much attention.  There was a time I would check Shutterstock every couple of hours to see how much we sold, but these days I pop on every once in a while as it's no longer a focal point of our Illustration business.

The only downside to Shutterstock these days is that they've done a real disservice to people with referrals.  It used to be that if you referred someone to Shutterstock, you got 3 cents for every download they sold...but now they've put a cap on that.  So you get to enjoy it for a couple of years, but then Shutterstock goes back to making money off of them and you get nothing.  It wasn't the biggest deal for us, as our referrals equated to about $15-$20 a month, but still - every bit adds up.  Only now, thanks to their new rule, it doesn't.

Quick Sketch

We play softball on Monday nights against a variety of businesses.  Each one has a unique name that hints at what they do - ours is the Splats.

Last Monday we played against a team called, "the Force."  Turns out they were Market Force Talent - but for a little while we were hoping they were Star Wars related.  Guess the Star Wars people are too busy making money to bother playing softball...

Originally he was going to be raising an x-wing, but then I just made him floaty so I could stop drawing.

Horton hears a Doctor Who

Everyone's favorite little elephant (not named Dumbo) crosses over with Britain's favorite doctor (not named Edward Jenner).

If you could pan out, you'd see that Horton is sitting on a little flower being held by Doctor Who.  Who in turn would be on a flower held by Dr Seuss...

I thought up this illustration as I finished watching the last episode of the latest season of Doctor Who.  The lines were created in Adobe Illustrator and then everything was painted in Adobe Photoshop.

After finishing with that, I decided to add some more elements:

Square Koala

Sometimes you feel like a koala.  Bear in mind this was created completely in Adobe Illustrator.

It's a new character we're welcoming to the Squaremania world! 

Latte Coffee

I've got coffee on the mind these days.

It might have something to do with the short week....after so many days off, all it does is make it harder to come back and sit down for 8 hours.

So coffee helps.

I did this drawing of a coffee cop and a water cooler.  The idea behind it is that it's always time for coffee - and this particular drawing illustrates that in the afternoon it's time for a coffee break.

This drawing was originally "Morning, time for coffee" - but the pose made it seem more of a fast moving happy coffee cup, so I thought of 'coffee on the go' and I had my illustration!

Tea for three

Tea is one of the best things you can ever have the fortune of drinking.  Most people waste it by slogging a tea bag into a cup of water.

The real way to drink tea is getting loose leaf tea.  The cruddy bits in the bags are what's left over from the good stuff.

I did a series of drawings for Happy Pantry based on a little bit of word play.  Only the first one is used...the other two were deemed not Happy Pantry worthy.

Tea He easily led to Tea She.  But then as I was going for the third...trying to think of how to make a tea an it - I remembered Cousin Itt from the Addams Family.  He always wore sunglasses and a bowler hat.  So, if Cousin Itt happened to be a tea cup, it would be a weird little hairy tea cup with a hat.

Not for Happy Pantry consumtion

These are illustrations for our Happy Pantry Facebook page - www.facebook.com/happypantry - fun stuff, but we ended up having better illustrations or felt that we didn't need to talk about pee...

I thought it was particularly funny - but since we're trying to appeal to moms and kids - it was deemed off brand.

This next one was fine, but we have a better illustration in mind so this went in the scrap heap:

Check us out on facebook!  Buy stuff from our store!  Or do none of the above!  Horray!

Happy Pantry sells items now!

It's the thing we've been working on for the last year or so

The Happy Pantry Store is finally open for business!

We currently have a bunch of cute necklaces with a variety of adorable illustrations:

These are just a few of the characters...many more at the store.

We also have a great looking apron and towel:

artwork...

I've been very busy with all the Happy Pantry stuff my wife and I have been working on.  Here's a sample of some of them...

Microstock report for January 2013

I'm pretty sure I skipped a month, but here's a fully updated microstock breakdown:

Shutterstock let us down last month - every month, if you get more than $100 sold, Shutterstock pays it out.  Sadly, in December, we only sold $91...but it gets added on to the next month and we'll collect February 1st.

We still haven't added any new files - and a lot of the sites are selling less - but they're still selling, and that's why I figured we might as well put out a report.

instead we're working on actual licensing.  We've drawn a series of characters we call Happy Pantry and they even have their own facebook page. 

Star Wars: Darth Gonzo

Disney recently purchased Star Wars - and a lot of people immediately started photoshopping Princess Leia into pictures with the Disney princesses, or putting Mikey ears on Darth Vader.

I thought it would be awesome if another Disney property was mashed up with Star Wars.  What about a Muppets Star Wars?  Obviously Luke would be Kermit...or would he? - because Miss Piggy should be Leia, but that would mean that Kermit and Piggy would be attracted to each other AND brother and sister.

Oh well...that's for Disney to figure out.  But hopefully sooner than later!

I drew this:

Darth Maul was one of the few good things to come out of the first trilogy.  Too bad his death was such a lame end.

microstock report for October 2012

This was a pretty decent month.  We've moved on past microstock licensing and are currently working on creating an actual line of characters that we can license for real (or is it called macro licensing?).  Those are over at www.happy-pantry.com and we've even set up a facebook page (now in it's second month!) at www.facebook.com/happypantry.

But it's nice - even though we've not contributed anything to these microstock sites, they continue to produce for us.  If you're interested in even just dipping your toe into the microstock pool - check out shutterstock first.  And once you have a handle on that, look into the other sites.

Microstock report for September 2012

Shutterstock - this was only the second time in the history of licensing illustrations from this site that we didn't make the minimum payout amount for the month (we were off by one dollar!).

We had some high numbers for August - and since we're still not uploading new images, it wasn't going to be too likely that we sustain that amount each month.  Slowly each site is selling less and less, but we have other projects taking up our time, so microstock licensing isn't as important.

Microstock report for August 2012

This is our microstock report for August 2012:

It was a much better month!  In July we saw a sag in all of the sites - none more disappointing than Istockphoto which was at an all time low of $5.38 - but this month many of the sites rallied back with high(er) numbers.

Shutterstock, as always, led the way with.  It helped to have 2 EL sales (that's a $32 download).  And it continues to sell the most on a daily basis.

One big surprise was Istockphoto - we used to have sales of almost $100 a month on this site - and it waned slowly lower and lower, until last month we only had $5 in sales.  Well this month it finally beat Dreamstime (which has been a consistent second place).

Overall it was a nice month - several sites reached their payout amounts and overall we reached $302!  Here's to hoping September continues to treat us kindly.

Star Trek Kids

We had some friends that had a Spocktoberfest party last night.  That's a Star Trek themed Octoberfest party, for those of you who didn't get the mashup.

So Tracey and I decided (mostly it was Tracey) to do cupcakes and cookies with a Star Trek theme.  We made the cupcakes and spray painted them silver (which felt more space agey) - I drew this little kid in a Trek shirt and did two variations which we cut out and (using toothpicks) placed on top of each cupcake:

There's the red shirt guy that will usually die before the episode ends, the middle one is Spock and the right side guy is based on Kirk (before the weight gain).

and here are the red shirts in cookie form:

Lotzi: taught

I did this for the Illustration Friday topic this week - Teacher.  Sadly I'm finishing it on Thursday night, so it won't see much time on the site as it resets every Friday.

Lotzi's pose was inspired by my time in history class.  It was a general art history class - and even though I was quite interested in the topic, I made the mistake of scheduling the 8:00 class.  And I've since become a morning person, I couldn't get up before 10 back then...well, I could, but I need frequent naps in class.  I still ended up learning a lot, but it probably would have worked better if I was actually awake for more of the class...

I created this in Adobe Photoshop...starting with this sketch:

 Then I solidified some of the lines and revised the drawing a bit:

And then it was just a matter of cleaning up the lines on a new layer and painting color and texture on a different layer.

Oh - and I had another teacher in junior college that insisted we always hold our writing implement - the reason was that if you're not holding your pen/pencil then you probably weren't going to take notes...or, at least, you were more inclined to take better notes if you were holding something to write it all down with...

Zombee

I love zombies.  I was trying to think of a different take on it - or even a possible bad guy to accost the hero of a story and I thought, "what if it was a zom-bee?"  So here it is.

I created this in Adobe Photoshop.