THE INSPIRATION PLACE PODCAST
Miriam Schulman:
Well. Hey, passion makers. This is Miriam Schulman, and you’re listening to episode number 155 of The Inspiration Place Artist Podcast. I am so grateful that you’re here. Today, we’re talking all about licensing your art. So in this episode, you’re going to discover whether you’re right for licensing and whether licensing is right for you. We’ll also discuss the three pathways for art licensing and the biggest thing that is holding you back from taking that first step. Today’s guest is a licensed artist, art director, art licensing agent, author, teacher, and coach.
She’s the author of License to Draw: How to Monetize Your Art Through Licensing…and more! Gratitude with Attitude: And Start Here, Start Now, Start Anywhere. She’s also the creator behind Coloring Cafe, brand of coloring books for adults which have sold well over a 100,000 copies. Coaching and consulting with artists, agents and manufacturers in the creative space is her jam. Our guest loves the art and licensing business and connecting amazing art with the perfect products. Through it all, her focus is to help artists to discover and stay true to their unique voice and vision. Please welcome to The Inspiration Place, Ronnie Walter. Well, hi, Ronnie. Welcome to the show.
Ronnie Walter:
Hi Miriam. It’s great to be here.
Miriam Schulman:
We’re so happy you’re here. I have so many artists in my audience who are looking to get their art featured on products, and my experience is so limited with that, that’s why I always like to bring in experts like you. So I’m really honored that you’re here with me today. Just so my listeners know, we did all the small talk before I hit record. So I feel like we’re so business right now. Sometimes they’ll save a banter topic for this part. It’s like, “So, tell me about Florida.” People think we’re human beings like, no, but it’s all business.
Ronnie Walter:
Okay. Good talk sister.
Miriam Schulman:
Okay. We have a lot to talk about. So I feel like we’re going to need every minute of this time together. Okay. So first of all, how does an artist know if they’re right for art licensing? Let’s just start there.
Ronnie Walter:
One thing I know for sure about art licensing, it is not right for every artist and it’s not right for every style of art. And what you have to remember fairly early is that often making a licensing deal is not about you. It’s about them. So it’s really about their products and their customer. Do they align with you? Do they align with your work? Do they align with your point of view?
Miriam Schulman:
And before you go any further, I just want to say that wouldn’t you agree in business? It’s never about you. It’s always about… Truly, that’s the main thing. It’s not about us.
Ronnie Walter:
Right, right. We are creative people. We can all envision our work on a thing. We can go, “Oh my gosh, my paintings would look fantastic on tote bags. My paintings would look great on coffee mugs.” And we can always put art on a thing, but to make it work and to make it saleable, and to have people that actually strangers, that you don’t know already, it’s not your sister to buy it. The people that you are working with have to have a compelling reason to do that. And so you have to be thinking in terms of, sure you can put your art on a coffee mug, but should you put your art on a coffee mug? Does it make sense to the person that buys it? They might just go, oh, that’s cool or not cool or whatever, but there has to be compelling reason. And when you are working with manufacturers who you’re having a conversation with, they have to know that A, they can manufacture it appropriately and price wise. And they also need to know that their eventual customer is going to resonate with that art on that product.
Miriam Schulman:
Let’s give an example of an art that in your mind would be very obvious, not a match for licensing. So give a made up example like, this particular art would… just stick to wall art.
Ronnie Walter:
True. Being an agent and looking at dozens, hundreds of portfolios. So one of the… fine art photography is really hard to license, because often it’s super specific to either a location. Yes. We have seen things that are licensed onto products, particularly wall art or journals or something like that. But to have a deeper relationship with licensing, photography is one of the things that is difficult in general. And I say in general because so many things, there’s lots of nuances with this. Someone had a huge line that was licensed in the nineties of little kids dressed up in old fashioned costumes and it was black and white photography. That blew up. That was huge, but that was lightning in a bottle. It was hit at the right time. So I find that photographers, it’s a little trickier. You have to somehow connect with that customer and that retailer.
Miriam Schulman:
That was Anne Geddes, right? Her… the babies.
Ronnie Walter:
There were several people that did it, Anne Geddes, did the babies like the babies in the flower pot and again, blew up. Rachel Hale, puppies and kittens and all of that and that was all photography based, but it had a real emotional component to it, but just like landscape photography, photography around locales and not so much, that’s a little harder to do. I also find some abstract for sure. Although there’s a couple people, there was a woman that goes by Etta, E-T-T-A, that is all abstract. And she’s just all of a sudden gotten a bunch of licenses. They’re amazing and beautiful. But in some ways, once someone has done that, that’s done. Abstracts can be tricky. You just have to have the right combo platter of personality and interest, color, all of those things. And sometimes that works but not everything, particularly super representational art sometimes is hard as well because it is so specific to your viewpoint and it’s not broad enough.
Miriam Schulman:
That was always my feeling with the art licensing world, is the type of art that I really excel at is either representational water color, which I felt was a poor match. And then I also liked to do collage art, which is a little more loose and more abstract. But the problem I always had with that is that I use elements that are really… you can’t use in licensing because if you’re using other people scrapbook paper, they own the rights to that. And you put that into your artwork with their flowers as part of a collage element, you can’t license that. If you’re using a stencil made by whatever Stencil Girls, Tim Holtz, they have rights to that and they don’t want you profiting off of their… it’s really their intellectual property. You’re creating art from their design elements. Can you say more about that?
Ronnie Walter:
Well, that is completely true. That is completely true. And there’s a lot of mythology around things like these in copyrights. And one of them is, well, if you change at a certain percentage, there is no percentage to change it. If it shows up it’s theirs, they already have the copyright on there. So unless you are getting permission from them to use that in that form, realize that you just cannot use that. That is not yours to commercialize because they already did.
Miriam Schulman:
So we already talked about how do you know if your art is right for licensing? Let’s flip that question around. How do you know if licensing is right for you?
Ronnie Walter:
That’s a very good question. They’re artists. This is the non-judgment zone. Sometimes people are told by other people that they should license their art, oh, your art should be on… fill in the blank of products. So that artists starts to think, “Well, maybe I should do that.” Even though deepen their heart of hearts. They’re like, “I don’t love my stuff on coffee cups. I don’t want to commoditize this thing that I love and I want it to be true fine art. I don’t want to be on this stuff.” It makes their eye twitch. I’m a firm believer in doing nothing that makes your eye twitch. And so you might not want to do that based on your own soul.
The other reason you might not want to do it is that you have to be very careful, particularly if you are a fine artist and have a collector base, that you’re not cheapening and I’m using that in air quotes, your artwork by making money on… doing other products. And so your collector looks at it and goes, “But wait a minute, your stuff’s in Walmart now,” or ,”Your stuff is in Target and I just paid X amount of dollars for this painting.” So you have to always be thinking about the relative merits of licensing your art onto products that they need to align with your vision for your art, and your vision for what your clients are expecting of your art. And so you have to balance those things. And sometimes it’s fine. There are collectors that love the idea that they have the original, and people are licensing it on other things because no one else will ever have the original, but you have to be very sensitive to that and it has to be a very careful decision. Whether, you go down this road based on what you’re already doing.
Miriam Schulman:
Is a very good point. I do believe that just offering reproductions in prints is not going to undervalue the originals. If you look at Monet, there’s plenty of posters out there, and the art is still worth millions of dollars. But I do also agree with you at the same time, it’s a question of venue. So Monet’s posters are normally offered by the museums that hold the copyright to reproduce the artwork in their museum, and that’s one of their biggest moneymakers. You don’t see it as much in HomeGoods, you’re are on a poster or a canvas. It’s a big difference when it’s offered in a museum gift shop versus mass market, we will call it.
Ronnie Walter:
Right, totally. There’s a lot of nuance to licensing that we obviously cannot cover here. But the level of retail is very important because again, within the levels of retail, if you have licensed something that’s going to go into a department store level, then you’re not going to sign a license to put it in Walmart or Dollar Tree. So there are nuances to some of this, and there’s a lot to know. You don’t have to know everything. You don’t have to know everything.
Miriam Schulman:
You can make a choice. You can be… and someone who license your art, but makes decisions about where the art is placed.
Ronnie Walter:
Totally. Yeah. You always get the final decision.
Miriam Schulman:
I think that leads us to the next question. So we talked about there’s three pathways to licensing for artists. So let’s talk about what those three pathways are.
Ronnie Walter:
Sure. Okay. So the first path, when you start to look into art licensing, this is where you usually land as far as education and understanding the business. And that is what I call the generalist illustrator. And that is someone who just makes lots of artwork that aligns with that mass market look that they are working in collections. They are just consistently putting out work, they’ll be doing holiday and Halloween and they’ll do spring and florals. And they build portfolios with commodity artwork that always gets used in the marketplace. And there are certain product lines that align with that like, paper tableware, gift bags, gift wrap, all of the social expressions stuff, gift wear. The things that you typically think about as far as licensed goods. There’s just a lot of artists that are really aligned with doing work like that and for that market. So they have a real fresh approach. They’re constantly updating their portfolio and they are just really moving artwork into the market.
Miriam Schulman:
Let’s give them an example of somebody that they can check out like an artist just off the top of your head.
Ronnie Walter:
Sure. There’s a woman named Tara Reed. She aligns completely with this pathway. She designs in collections. She’ll have an idea and she’ll draw it out, no pun intended, but she will develop a collection around an idea whether that’s Christmas, whether it’s a floral story, should I know she does a lot of things around sewing and crafting. And so she develops these large collections that people can use in kit form to make products. So her sewing concept ended up on fabric. It ends up on coffee mugs that ends up on little cosmetic pouches, all kinds of things. So she is definitely right down that road of… her brain works in collections. And she illustrates based on the ideas that she has and the concepts that always need to be refreshed in the marketplace.
Miriam Schulman:
Okay, perfect. Because Tara was a guest on the show. So I’ll make sure that we link to her episode in the show notes, because those of you who are interested in licensing, that was one of my favorite interviews. We talked about Surtex and her thoughts on that and trends and she’s so generous. So I’m so glad you use Tara as an example. By the way, I wanted to make sure that you knew that as of this recording, I have one spot open in my mastermind.
Now some of you know about the Artists Incubator program, I have two tracks, the Mastermind and the self study. The Self Study is closed, but there is one spot open in the mastermind. Here’s how you know if it’s right for you. If you’re lacking a solid strategy and a winning mindset, and you’re disappointed with your sales, we can fix that. The Artist Incubator Mastermind is for professional and emerging artists who want to take their art business to the next level by mastering the art of sales, and marketing. To see if you qualify, go-to schulmanart.com/biz to apply now, that’s biz as in B-I-Z. Now back to the show. Okay, next category. Next pathway.
Ronnie Walter:
The next category is what I would call a conceptual artist. And that kind of artists starts with a big concept, and when I say a big concept I mean things like friendship, motherhood, spiritual platform, a faith based platform, a political point of view, where their whole idea, their artwork is the delivery system of the concept. To understand the nuance of that. I started out being way more of a commodity artist when I started licensing my work. And as I developed as an artist, I… Well, for one thing, I started to see some limitations of being a commodity artists. I just didn’t have the stamina to continue to come up with a lot of collections over time and I started working more on the conceptual side.
Miriam Schulman:
Yeah. Can you describe the difference between a commodity artist and a conceptual artists? Because I don’t think everyone’s going to know what that means.
Ronnie Walter:
Okay. A conceptual artist to me means that they are starting with the concept. They’re not necessarily just showing up going, “Here’s my Christmas, here’s my florals.” They’re not necessarily based on subject, but they may be driven by either writing or another idea that they’re propelling through the artwork. So for instance, there’s an artist named Laurie Siebert who is a crossover in these pathways, but she will take a very deep concept like friendships say. Now friendship can be very broad and it can be very heartfelt. So she will work around the topic of friendship and determine what the artwork is going to look like, and how it’s going to be presented as opposed to, here’s a bunch of artwork. Let’s put friendship on top of it. It’s… I have this idea around friendship. This is what it means to me. This is the writing I did around it. And so really the concept is the driver and the artwork is the delivery system.
Miriam Schulman:
Okay. And when you mean commoditized artists, you’re talking… that is the first pathway. So you’re saying the first pathway is commoditized what Terry does. And the second pathway is conceptual. Is that… do I have that right now?
Ronnie Walter:
It’s not necessarily… Sometimes people do both. And sometimes people just start with concept. And sometimes with the concept artists, they’re coming from a complete different arena, they may have written a book, or they may have another thing that they do, whether it’s a vibrant website or a blog about a certain subject. And then they bring that more to a licensing situation where they have this audience and they have an idea and they have a very obvious point of view and the artwork drives that concept. So they may start as concept artists. They may never be the snowman person and here’s my Halloween. They may never do that. So it’s not necessarily a stepped up pathway. It’s three separate pathways that you could be on all three or one of them for you entire career. You could be a commodity artist and make piles of money and do that until you decide not to do that anymore and never, never dabble into the concepts side.
Miriam Schulman:
Okay. So first pathway, what you described commoditized, second pathways is conceptual. And I feel like the third is… we didn’t talked about the third yet.
Ronnie Walter:
Okay. The third pathway to licensing is what I would call an art brand. And an art brand is, you and your art are completely aligned. This is what you do. This is what you don’t do. There’s a surfer artist named Drew Brophy, Drew is a surfer artist. You’re never going to have him paint a snowman. You’re never going to say to him, “Hey, we need some florals from you Drew, because we love your style.” Drew is going to do surf art. That is who he is. That is his life. That is his lifestyle. And the people that love him, love him. Other people are like, “Yeah, I don’t get that. I’m not a surfer. I don’t understand that, and that’s not for me.” So when you’re an art brand, you are very much in the, take it or leave it. This is who I am.
This is what I do. My work is fantastic. Love it. Great. If it resonates with your customers, let’s make a deal. If it doesn’t cool, let’s just move on from there. So there are artists that are very, very aligned with what they do and they’re not going to be doing anything else. They’re not going to be coming at it from the concept side. They’re not going to be coming at it from the commodity side. This is my art. And if you love it, then we got something that we can do here together.
Miriam Schulman:
No snow men surfing.
Ronnie Walter:
Exactly. Exactly. Yeah.
Miriam Schulman:
Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but could be a cute…
Ronnie Walter:
It could be really cute.
Miriam Schulman:
It could be really cute. I did see a lot of Flamingo in Christmas a few years ago, or maybe that’s what I seen in Certex a few years ago and now it’s out, I forget. But yeah, you saw that whole Flamingo trend in winter.
Ronnie Walter:
Right. Right. And that’s the thing about these three pathways is they do get a little mushy on the edges, for sure. For sure. So you don’t have to decide before you start that this is who I am. Sometimes this reveals itself to you as you go toward this method of monetizing your artwork, that you may not know from the get go what you are. If you’re a commodity artist you probably know, because that’s how you’re built. You just want to do collections and you love snowman and you love Christmas or you love florals. And more than likely, and sometimes people are like, “Yeah, I don’t need a big concept.” But sometimes things happen in people’s lives where all of a sudden, a big concept is revealed to them. And they do want to use their artwork to deliver that message or to help other people through whatever that thing is. So once you’re down one of these paths, you can definitely view the other ones and think maybe that’s a better place for you, or you can do them simultaneously.
Miriam Schulman:
Yeah. You said something really important back there that I want to highlight. So I’m going to do it by asking you, I’m going to ask you a two-part question because the answer is really the same. So I get this a lot in my world when I’m working with artists who… and I mostly help people who are marketing their original, not necessarily licensing. The question becomes, do I need to figure out my signature style before I start marketing? What’s your answer, Ronnie? And we’ll see if we agree on this answer.
Ronnie Walter:
Well, I think styles are a moveable feast. You grow and change as an artist. Your style that you have today may not be what you’re doing five years from now. If your artwork is decent, if you are skilled, then why wouldn’t you… you don’t have to nail down a style early on, because you don’t know what your style is for one thing. And also it tends to change over time.
Miriam Schulman:
I find artists, they just want to hide away until they get their style perfect. And I think what? You need to market it to see how it’s going to resonate. You can’t just be up in your cave, in your castle, working on your art and then emerge with this perfect thing. You have no idea what the response is going to be and the best way to evolve as an artist, especially if you want to do something like commercial, like licensing, you got to know what the feedback is. You got to know what the response is.
Ronnie Walter:
Totally. Well, and I have read on Facebook groups or whatever that people want to give you some advice. And people are like, “Well, you can’t get an agent until you have 125 collections.” And I’m like, 125 collections. How do you know after the 12th collection? Wouldn’t you want to know what the 12th collection that you have something going on, as opposed to you did 125 and you released them. And everybody goes, “Yeah, they’re not so much. Yeah, thanks. But no.” I have a whole thought about work that looks like work, and hiding in places. It’s easy to hide in the research phase like, “Well, I need to know everything about licensing. I need to know everything about contracts. I need to know everything about this,” or, “I need to have all of this artwork.” And it’s like, yeah, that is definitely holding you back from seeing… the feedback you will get when you start releasing it is you can improve that artwork. You can improve that artwork. And so if you wait until the very end, you got a big road ahead of that. If no one’s resonating with it.
Miriam Schulman:
I also think that people who have that mindset don’t reach that end, because they have this… Right. The, “I’m not ready yet,” thought. Is just from coming from a fear based mind that wants to keep you safe and will continue to provide reasons for you about why you shouldn’t take that scary step. Because, that is when you are introducing risk and people are afraid of two things. Either they’re afraid of failing or they’re afraid of success. And sometimes people say, “What do you mean I’m afraid of success?” There’s a lot of people who are imagining the bad things that come with what they imagine that success looks like. So basically either way, there are things that you’re imagining that you’re trying to protect yourself from. That is keeping you from moving forward. Ronnie is basically just saying, amen, and-
Ronnie Walter:
Yes. And we’ve all been there. It’s way safer to stay in the studio and draw another picture. Of course, that’s where we want to be. But if you want the thing that you say you want, there’s that part in the middle, that’s going to be uncomfortable. It always is. It always is. Pick anything that you’ve done in your life. There’s the messy middle. And so you just have to eat the frog or whatever you want to say about that. But you have to get in front of people. That’s the only way this happens. I wish there were magic fairies, but so far they’ve alluded me.
Miriam Schulman:
Yeah, I know. So many people have that Rapunzel style marketing where they think if they make a pretty thing and they post it on Instagram, there’ll be discovered. And although that might have been true six years ago, you can’t do that anymore if you ever could.
Ronnie Walter:
No. Again, it’s lightening in a bottle. It’s like, “It could sure,” but you can make things happen a lot faster if you get out of your comfort zone, even though a few steps out of your comfort zone will get you further than staying there.
Miriam Schulman:
Beautiful. All right. So this is a great place to wrap up. So if people want to take that first step, I know that you work with artists who want to do this and you help them, you coach them with licensing their art. Tell us what it looks like when people come to work with you.
Ronnie Walter:
Great question. Well, I’m a big fan of journaling. So we start with a journal assignment that they start to unpack the things that they are fearful about or the things that they’ve tried, the things that they are uncomfortable with. And then we hit the ground running with really unpacking a lot of that, and getting down to the basics of what they want to have really basic goal setting, really looking at things, seeing where they can cut the clutter, where they could cut the crap. Where they don’t have to be overwhelmed by things. And we work that, this is peeling an onion down to the place where they either have these dreams that they haven’t been able to say out loud, or they just want to move forward and they’re tired of spinning their wheels, and that’s what we unpack. It’s great. I wish I would have done that early in my career because I spent way too much time worrying, wondering, researching, and all of that and I could have been out of the shoot a lot faster.
Miriam Schulman:
I wish I had a Miriam 20 years ago to help me. And I’m sure you wish you had future Ronnie to help you.
Ronnie Walter:
Totally. Yes. Yes.
Miriam Schulman:
All right. So you can find her at ronniewalter.com. We’ve included links to everything we mentioned in the show notes, schulmanart.com/155. So I’ve linked to the episode with Tara Reed, also Maria Brophy, who represents her husband Drew. I interviewed her. So I’ll link to that in the show notes as well. Everything you can find in the show notes, schulmanart.com/155. And don’t forget if you like this episode, you have to check out the Mastermind. It is my private coaching experience for a professional artists who are ready to take it up to the next level. Yes, I have a Self Study track, but that’s not what the Mastermind is. The Mastermind is by application only. And to see if you qualify, go to schulmanart.com/biz. That’s B-I-Z. Alrighty, Ronnie, do you have any last words for my listeners before we call this podcast complete?
Ronnie Walter:
Our licensing looks very complex, but you do not have to know everything to do something. Once you get the basics down, there’s so much of it that it’s just really practical information. Once you know what you know it, know it. But it’s you moving your work forward. You understanding that you… in order to get something, you have to put yourself out there.
Miriam Schulman:
That’s beautiful. All right, my friend, thank you so much for being with me here today. I’ll see you the same time, same place next week. Stay inspired.
Thank you for listening to The Inspiration Place Podcast. Connect with us on Facebook at facebook.com/schulmanart. On Instagram at Schulmanart. And of course on schulmanart.com.
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