Continuing on my journey of trying to illustrate 5 designs/drawings/illustrations a week, I landed on this one today.
I gave myself some prompts, which were:
- Simple
- White background
- Redfish
- Funny
Sometimes during the brainstorming process and trying to come up with ideas it's easier to do so if you work within parameters. It's a lot easier to come up with a bunch of variations of combined items, than to come up with something completely new. So as I continue this journey, I will give myself prompts to work from.
Now, I won't always stick exactly to the prompt. Sometimes I have ideas that bounce around inside my head for up to 6 months before I put it on paper. Sometimes ideas at first seem dumb, then later you realized it's a no brainer.
The concept of this design is every once in a while, you will find a redfish just sleeping in the grass. You can literally reach out and touch them when they are like this. My buddies and I joke that they do it on purpose, kind of like "playing possum." So there you go, a simple concept, a simple illustration.
With doing these everyday, I expect to have several designs just completely flop. It's more about showing up everyday to workout my creative muscle.
What really prompted this entire journey was realizing that I had been selling the same 10 designs to the same 10,000 people for the last 3 years. Sales went down partially for this reason, and also because social media has changed in many ways.
When I first started illustrating a lot of funny fish content, I could post a product with a link on Instagram, and every post was reaching 400,000-1,000,000 non followers every time. At that time, they were first rolling out instagram shop. They were wanting people to get use to using the shop and to go ahead and get their information into shop so that it would be a lot easier for people to buy inside the app from then on. Also, at the time they were going to charge something like 10% of every order to the seller. So they had a bunch of incentives to push tagged product photos.
About a year and a half ago, they decided to allow Shopify and other e-commerce web hosts to integrate and take on the burden of payments and logistics, so Meta doesn't charge a fee anymore. It's all through shopify.
That was a good for logistics, because it was a nightmare juggling orders through Facebook and Shopify, and it was auto filling information that was wrong a lot of times. However, over about a year of rolling out instagram shop, they got a majority of people using it and no longer was making money off of it like they were going to.
So now, it seems like no incentive means no benefit to sellers on the platform.
During that time I was doing illustrations almost daily and they were selling very well, and continued to sell for a long time. When the algorithm changed a certain way- it would only push the most addictive and viral content to non followers. The past 1.5 years I only get pushed to about 10,000 of the same followers.
I am hoping through this series I will reach more non followers with new, engaging content.
Thanks for reading this long rant about this series.
If you would like to purchase products with this design on them you can do so here.
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