Coffee design for NY textile quilting manufacturer
by Christine Kerrick
Ok, so they don’t call it ‘renting’ art, but that’s basically what art licensing is. People license music to everything from stores to commercials to movies. Sports figures license their names and images. And almost anything with art on it means the artist (should have) gotten paid for it.
Here’s how it goes: You make a painting. You have that painting photographed or scanned high-resolution (try to make it about 100MB). You keep or sell that painting. You take your digital image of the painting and sell usage of it to a manufacturer—with a contract—or you get an agent who will do the sales footwork for you.
Agents take a percentage of the profit from your art, whether the user (licensor, usually a manufacturer of journals, flags, mugs, prints, etc.) pays royalties, a flat fee, or both. In my experience, most contracts go for about 2 years, but you can negotiate what you want. Flat fees aren’t as common as they used to be, so you would mostly be making royalties.
I have an agent and he has sold my work in Europe, Australia, and other places. The great part about licensing is that you still own the copyright, or, the right to copy it, basically. I will have a blog about copyrights later.
A great resource for art licensing is the Surtex show in New York City. There are acres and acres of booths of agents, licensing artists, products, publishers hiring illustrators, and even breakout sessions (classes) where people in the biz will educate you on best practices for licensing. It’s a valuable show for making contacts.
What kind of art do they want to see? That varies. There are agents and manufacturers who specialize, and those who carry a wider range of art. Whatever you do, it is helpful to build your portfolio in ‘fours’, or a set of four original pieces that can be broken out into multiple product designs. Many places like full coverage art, not just isolated figures or images. It covers a product better, which looks better on a shelf.
More to come on art licensing!
