Last Updated on February 21, 2023
Working from home and making money online as a creative person has never been easier so below are 10 ideas for using your artistic skills to start your own creative arts business.
1. Sell Your Calligraphy Products & Designs Online
Calligraphy (the art of handwriting) can be a great business if you are looking to work from home.
Calligraphy is a low-cost business to run and if you can get a following and regular clients that it can be a profitable business.
The range of products that you might consider selling and on which you will provide calligraphy designs are:
- Custom-designed wedding invitation cards
- Corporate event table/conference placement cards
- Signage design for attractions and other businesses looking for a unique design
- Sell your font designs
The great thing about having a calligraphy business is that you can:
- do the calligraphy work from home
- sell your illustrations and products online including through Etsy or via your own website
- You get to use your creativity and artistic skills
2. Sell Your Paintings & Crafts Online
No matter what type of art you paint or create, there are numerous platforms online for selling your paintings. The best platforms include:
- Etsy – is a great place to sell your original paintings and artwork.
- Red Bubble – is a very useful concept for you as an artist if you are interested to make money with a print-on-demand service, for your designs. You can choose your own profit margins and print your designs on everything from t-shirts and caps, to wedding stationery and postcards.
- ArtPal – Maybe not as well known as Etsy but a dedicated platform for selling your own original paintings and other arts and craft products.
- Amazon Art – Depending on where you are based, ‘Amazon Art’ is another option when it comes to selling your original art online.
- Artfinder – is a great online portal both for selling your art and for buying. Artfinder do take quite a hefty percentage for the sale but they do have a worldwide following and many artists worldwide use artfinder.
3. Candle-Making Business
Candlemaking is a sizeable industry and it’s a popular option for creative individuals who sell on arts and crafts sites such as Etsy.
You might be surprised how well you can potentially do with a candle-making business as there is a strong market for handmade candles.
What I love about candle making is the variety of designs it’s possible to come up with,i.e. you can really get creative.
Using soy candle wax can be especially good as these candles tend to burn for a long time and produce less soot than normal.
Here are some resources in case you are interested in candle-making
4. T-Shirts Design Business
There are a couple of decent websites online that really help you to build your own business online, as a t-shirt seller.
If you have your own designs then you can upload the designs and get your t-shirts printed.
In other words, you can use a print-on-demand service to start your own business.
Some examples of companies that offer this type of service include:
- Printful
- Red Bubble (who I mentioned earlier)
- Printify who are my favorites and the ones I normally use. They have bases in the UK, USA, Canada, and a few other countries, from which they print and send out your order. Easy-to-use service whereby you can get the orders delivered straight to your customer.
- Cafe Press also offers print and demand for t-shirts and a range of other products you design. Similar in many respects to ‘Red Bubble’.
5. Handmade Soap Maker
Making and selling soaps might perhaps be a surprise for you on reading this list of home-based arts and crafts ideas, for making money from home.
Much like candle-making though, there is a thriving cottage industry when it comes to soap making and selling handmade soaps.
Soaps that are made with natural and organic substances are increasingly popular and there is a growing market for handmade soaps made of:
- Rosemary
- Citrus fruits
- Lemongrass
- Honey
- Peppermint
You can find some useful resources here to learn more about starting a soap-making business:
- The basics of soap making
- Lovely Greens experience of starting a soap business
- Handmade soap recipes
6. Jewelry Maker
Starting a handmade jewelry business is another way in which a number of people make money.
Instagram is an extremely good social media site when it comes to promoting your online jewelry business.
If you can raise awareness of your jewelry on Instagram, given that it is a highly visual social media site, you can quickly gain a niche following, if your products are good.
Pinterest is also a visual social media/search engine worth considering for marketing your handmade jewelry items.
Creating great visual representations of your jewelry by taking great photos and posting them on your social media platforms is important.
You can use your Smartphone for the photos but make sure you have decent lighting to correctly light the product. A ring light will often be all you need.
Kernowcraft has actually done a good post in using Instagram for a jewelry business and it’s worth reading.
7. Greetings Card Designer
Despite so many of us now using social media online and other ways of wishing others a happy birthday, anniversary, and so on, the greetings card industry is still a significant one business-wise.
There are some great tools out there to make designing cards much easier these days, one such tool being Canva and their Greetings Card design Tool.
If you can find a niche with the greetings cards sector and if you develop a good following, then you can do pretty well but it is admittedly not an easy home-based business idea, in that it is quite competitive.
The good news though is that there definitely are gaps in the market, as I have often found when searching for a specific type of greeting card and finding nothing that suits what I need.
Where do you sell your cards? You can easily use platforms such as:
- Amazon Handmade
- Etsy
- Zazzle
- or through your own website (which can be a great option if you are willing to spend time building up your own website). To build an online store on your own site the plugin WooCommerce can be pretty handy!
8. Teach Arts & Crafts Online
A great business option if you have any kind of skill in a niche within the arts and crafts arena, is to teach online.
You do NOT have to be a technical genius at all these days to teach online these days at all.
There are two main options when it comes to teaching online and these are to teach either:
- in real-time (synchronous such as via Zoom)
- in the student’s own time (asynchronously whereby they log in and do the course)
Real-Time Teaching
You can so easily these days teach to students worldwide and in real-time by using platforms such as Zoom, Skype, and Microsoft teams.
A key benefit of real-time teaching is the chance to build a rapport with the students and to answer be able to directly answer any questions and develop an understanding of how to help them.
Teaching asynchronously
The great benefit of recording lessons and putting them live on a platform such as teachable.com (which is one of the best platforms online for offering your own art courses) is that people can access the lessons 24/7.
Teaching this way, you can sell the same course an infinite number of times. Your arts and crafts courses, in other words, will be passive and scaleable (meaning you make money even when you are doing others things and you can sell the course multiple times but make it only once.
Ideas for arts and crafts lessons online
You can literally teach anything online, whether it be live such as on Zoom, or the student self-studies such as via teachable.com.
Some ideas for courses you can provide and charge for include:
- Drawing for beginners
- Watercolour sketching for Beginners
- Crochet for beginners
- Leather Crafts workshop
- Introduction to Painting Series
9. Wedding Stationery Designer
Not so dissimilar in many respects to starting a greetings card business, in that you might design things on paper and cardboard, and sell them, this is another good option.
If starting a wedding stationery business from home then personally I would spend time designing a dedicated website for wedding stationery that is strongly branded and looks great.
A particularly great thing about wedding stationery is that you can charge a premium because people are willing to pay for a quality product for their wedding day.
Some people have started a business in this sector but I feel there is space for more people. These sites are some useful examples to refer to:
- Olive Weddings (UK)
- Zola (USA)
- Stone Sparrow (Australia)
10. Creativity Coach
Another option for being involved in the arts and crafts business sector is to be a creativity coach.
What on earth does a creativity coach do you might well be asking right now?
Think of it like a life coach but one who focuses on helping others to bring out their creative side.
This can be for business or for people for their personal life (although creative coaches often work with business people, especially regards management training).
Creativity Coaching can include helping people to:
- have more confidence to try new things (and to break down fears and anything blocking them moving forward)
- better manage stress and anxiety so that they can be more creative and productive
- understand how to manage others in respect of bringing out their teams creativity
- be more artistic and understand how to go out doing this, whether it be to learn and be create with music, art, crafts, or in business.
- think outside the box and to have a clear vision and set of goals
This can be quite a profitable business because you can train business people and business executives and charge accordingly.
It can also be a business that you do from home!
Hi. I’m Dr Valeria Lo Iacono, a lady in her 50s living in the UK. I write about the over-50s and 60s lifestyle including on travel, health, food, and fashion.
