My 9 Streams of Income as a Creative Entrepreneur... How To Make Money As An Artist in 2026!

If you were to ask me 10 years ago how I could be making money as an artist in 2026, I would probably be able to come up with maybe two or three options. Today I'm going to be sharing with you the nine different streams of income I had as a part-time artist in 2025 and two more streams that I hope to add in 2026. If you are new here, my name is Sarah. Welcome to my channel. I've been running a small stationary business in my home basement for the past six years now, which is crazy to say. In that time I've had two kids and we've On this YouTube channel, I like sharing snippets of my life, motherhood, my faith, but I also really love sharing this kind of small business content too. So I hope you enjoy. If you like any of this today, please subscribe to my channel. It helps me a lot. I would love to see this channel grow because it is one of my income streams. Times are different. I think the starving artist narrative is long gone. With the rise of social media and all the online ways you can share your work, there are more and more people pursuing their creative passions either on the side or even quitting their full-time jobs to do so. And as someone who's trying to raise a family while also working, it's actually been a really big blessing to our family. I am not trained in the arts. I actually studied sciences my whole life. I have my master's in biomedical communications and then I worked a few years in consulting in the pharma space. But in 2020, I quit my job and launched Sailor Paper. I do calligraphy, lettering, illustration, painting, and I turn my artwork into physical products that I I have a bunch of cards behind me. That is the main thing I do. But as I shared, I have nine different income streams. Many of them are tiny, tiny trickles of income, but they are still income streams and I wanted to share that with you today in hopes to encourage you. There's not one way to do this and for me personally, even looking back and seeing all the different ways that I was able to diversify my income, it's been super encouraging. It just makes me feel like there's a lot of potential, a lot of ways to grow, and I've done my share of experimenting. So if you're ready, let's grab your drink of choice. I'm having an iced honey latte. Grab a pen, a notebook, also another disclaimer and sorry that this introduction is so long. I'm not going to actually share my numbers. A, because I don't want to disclose all my finances to you on the internet, and B, I don't know if it would actually add that much value. I hope what I share you can apply to your context. If you have any further questions, you can email me. Let's jump right in. I am looking at my numbers on my chart. So I'm going to do this in the most natural way. I'm going to do it from biggest to smallest. So my first income stream actually made up 54.7% of my annual income last year, and that is my retail orders. So I sell physical products. I get my products manufactured, they ship it to my home in Calgary, I put it out on my shelves right here, and then I spend most of my time packaging and shipping them out from here. That is direct to consumer. Grace in Toronto might be buying a few bookmarks. Maria from Iowa might be buying a few stickers and some cards. People are going on my website, putting things in their cart, checking it out, and that money is being paid to me through Shopify. I actually started my business on Etsy, which is still the same category of direct-to-consumer, but over the past few years, I changed it to Squarespace and now to Shopify. So Shopify is the biggest income stream for me. This income stream has worked out for me because I do a lot of marketing on Instagram. I have done paid ads, but mostly I do a lot of organic sharing, and I've just grown my audience to a size where I am still able to get new customers through that platform. I also have a lot of returning customers, so many of my customers buy more than once, which is really amazing. I'm honestly so grateful for them. I actually have the best customers. That's how I make most of my money. My second stream of income makes up 20.2% of my entire income, and that is wholesale. So if you're not familiar, wholesale is business to business. So the first income stream was me selling directly to the consumer. This one is me selling to the business, and then the business sells to the consumer. I would actually love my numbers to be flipped. I would love wholesale to make up 50% and direct-to-consumer to make up less. It just hasn't worked out that way so far. Wholesale would just optimize my business so much better. I personally think wholesale is the way to go if you want to scale your business. It's just such a different model of business. If I'm selling a $4 bookmark to Grace, my wholesale client is actually buying them for $2. So all my products are actually 50% of the retail price when I sell to the business. However, they buy in volume. There's a minimum order amount for every order that I take. A wholesaler typically has to spend around $200, whereas there is no minimum order for a regular customer. If you think about the time it takes me to pack 10 different orders of little paper goods for 10 different customers, and the time it would take me to actually just pack up 200 carts from my shelf, adding the envelope, adding the sleeve, just packing it in a big box and shipping it off, it's way more efficient to pack these wholesale orders. And because they're also a business, many of them make multiple orders every season to restock and replenish their supply. So this dream of income actually didn't start at the start of my business. I started off doing retail and then maybe a year and a half or two years into my business, I organically got some wholesale orders from businesses in my local area. And then I got on to FAIR, which is a marketplace for connecting with other retailers. And then it just kind of grew from there. It grows very, very steadily year after year, but again, it's nowhere near my direct-to-consumer segment. That is my goal, to grow in the wholesale department. But it's been challenging and I think the biggest hurdle is myself. I know I'm standing in the way of my own wholesale growth. It just feels so much more natural for me to market to my customers and to connect with the individuals that are buying from my shop than to cold email like all these gift shops and businesses that I might not have even shopped at before. It just feels more of a hurdle for me to do that, even though I know that the payoff is going to be greater. So honestly, like every year, I am striving to grow this piece of the pie, but it's been a struggle. And I think it's going to take some bigger systematic shifts in the way I do work and my outlook on my work, but it's honestly always a top priority. Okay, so moving on, this third stream of income is very surprising to me. This stream only started middle of this year and that is shop makers. Many of you might not be familiar, but shop makers is a chain of stores that are in Canada and their locations are mostly inside big shopping malls. They allow Canadian makers to put their products in their shop for a monthly fee and then you get to keep all of your profit. It's kind of like a consignment model. I don't consider it a wholesale model because they're not buying out my products upfront. I'm actually putting in like thousands of dollars worth of products into their store without them paying me. And in fact, I'm paying them and then I get to keep whatever sells. If it doesn't sell, I actually take back all my product. I am trying to get into more locations, I just haven't heard back. But the locations I have been in have been doing pretty well. I'm paying around four to five hundred dollars per month to be in these locations and in return, I'm given like a two-foot or three-foot shelf or space to put my products. I'm surprised this has done so well because originally, I just wanted to break even and I kind of saw this more as like a marketing stream. As a small business, it's really hard to get your products into big shopping malls. There aren't a lot of like indie stores that usually lease in malls. And also, the demographic of people that shop physically in shopping malls are very different than those that are seeking out like a small independent gift shop or bookstore. So I wanted to reach this new demographic. This income stream made up 15.9% of my income and that is significant. It's very similar to my wholesale number which is why I'm very surprised. I usually go into the mall that's closest to my house around once a month and I'll replenish my stock and then all the locations that are further from me, I just mail my stuff to them and the associates will just set it up for me and that's all part of the monthly fee that I'm paying. It's pretty awesome. I wouldn't say it's completely passive but considering all the labor I usually do for my job, this is pretty passive. And Christmas season was really great. I think that contributed a lot to the percentage of it because malls are packed and people may just need to pick up like a last-minute gift and they might see a Christmas card there. So my Christmas cards did really well there. I think it'll be interesting to see how this number compares to the rest of the year because I imagine it's gonna be a lot lower. Okay so the next few income streams are all 5% or under. They all kind of contributed a little bit. So number four is markets. I'm new to Calgary. I made it a goal this year to just do as many markets as I could during the Christmas season and I'm so glad I did because it really pushed me to connect with my local community. It actually gave me a lot of new customers in Calgary and it was nice also connecting with other small businesses. I did a few night markets which was a really cool vibe. I did some cute little daytime markets. Typically I paid $200 to $400 to have a space at these markets and it didn't cost me much else because I already have a setup that I brought from Toronto. It just requires my time. I actually was more than happy to dedicate these long days to the markets because after having two kids, it is a nice little day off to be able to go stand at a market by myself. I always had a fun drink and a snack. I could just have good conversations and actually connect with my customers. Also being an online business, you never get to see people physically touch your products like before they buy them. So allowing people to shop at my booth was really exciting and just really uplifted my spirits. I hope to do more this year but I will say this income stream does come with a lot of support and logistics. Often I need Alex to help me or my sister to help me. Then someone else needs to watch the kids and so it's a lot of coordination and it's not the easiest thing to like haul everything to the site and bring it back but it was worth it. I feel like I'm talking a lot but the other thing I want to say about markets is that I left a clipboard for people to share their name and their email to be entered into a giveaway but it also signed them up for my newsletter. I think that was really really valuable. I got hundreds of new email subscribers and if you know anything about email marketing, those emails actually do convert to sales. It is like such a powerful tool to not only communicate but to sell. So I just want to encourage you by saying like even if you hustle and stand all day at a market and you don't make many sales, you don't even break even, I think there is so much value that goes beyond just the dollar value of attending these markets. It's important to get your business name out there, to be inspired by other business owners and to connect with your customers. It takes multiple exposures for people to buy from your business. It might just be like a quick hello and then maybe next time you have a conversation with them and then they might place an online order months later. So here is where it gets interesting. My fifth income stream was Instagram and I don't mean Instagram itself paying me but I made money by making Instagram content for different brands. I made two reels for Pampers this year among other products and brands that I worked with but doing those Pampers ads made me really feel like a content creator slash influencer because I will admit it did not feel natural. It felt like it was my job and I had to like go out of my way to like make these reels. I'm very thankful for all the brands I get to work with. This isn't something that I'm like actively pursuing to grow. I applied for maybe a couple of these brand partnerships through third-party websites but most of them actually reached out to me directly. They DM'd me and so I said yes. This made up about 2% of my annual income. So the next stream of income was actually doing photography. It's kind of similar to the Instagram but I didn't have to post the content. I work with a few brands. Every few months they might send me some products and ask me to take some pictures and videos of the products. They don't require me to edit any of it to like package it into a reel or have a voiceover. They just want my raw photos. One brand that I've been working with for years is Robies. They're a Canadian shoe brand. They make these like really cute leather shoes for kids. They asked me to photograph Charlotte wearing the shoes when she was born a few years ago. I've been doing it for them maybe three to four times a year and they just send me a really nice check for the 16 photos that I email to them and I actually love this stream of income because I don't have to post any content onto my accounts. I get to try a lot of really cool products. Products for kids and babies but I'm able to photograph the products without showing my kids faces which is a huge bonus for me. It also exercises my creative juices in a way that I don't get to do in my small business. I don't want to just photograph paper all day. My seventh stream of income is affiliate marketing. I don't do a lot of affiliate marketing but I do have some links that are active. Honestly they're more like referral codes at this point and the one that has contributed the most to this income stream is Shopify. I get paid around $200 every time someone clicks on my Shopify link and they also sign up for a Shopify account. You can imagine I don't get a lot of clicks because not everyone is trying to spend hundreds of dollars a year setting up an e-commerce business but in the world of YouTube some people do click on my links in the description below and these payouts have been such a nice little treat. Okay so my eighth stream of income is YouTube. This channel is very humble. I never set out to do this to make loads of money. I just wanted to document my day-to-day life and you can see that most of my videos are just vlogs and more behind the scenes of my small business but once you hit a certain amount you do get monetized and I do allow ads to run on all my videos. Sometimes I've gotten really nice payouts if a video does really well. This year I didn't post a lot. I didn't make that much money off of YouTube but again it is a really nice surprise getting like an extra hundred dollars in your account randomly. Every year I hope to grow this channel because I enjoy it so much. Like this is so much more enjoyable than all the short form content that creators have to make in order to stay relevant. I just love this long form content. I love watching YouTube videos and I hope you are enjoying this too. So my last and ninth stream of income is income from ministry partnerships. I could have lumped this in with my wholesale but it's basically the same thing. I allow churches and nonprofits and missionaries to buy my products at 50% off so that they can use it towards their mission. Whether it's fundraisers, donor gifts or just like ministry related products that they want to buy. It's just a nice way that I as a stationary shop owner is able to partner with people doing God's work. It's mutually beneficial and I find these people are usually customers to begin with and when I find out that they're buying my products for you know the children's ministry or for their congregation members, I usually offer them the discount and let them know that they can share it with other people as well. If you're in ministry and you want 50% off of all my products, let me know. Alright so those are my nine streams of income for 2025. There are actually three more streams of income that I am considering for 2026 or that I've done in the past. One of them is licensing. Licensing is a whole different world than what I've been doing. It's basically when a licensing company pays for your artwork so that they own the license to it either for a temporary amount of time or for a finite number of products. I actually just signed a contract with a licensing company. They're gonna be using eight of my designs to distribute greeting cards throughout the USA and they distribute to like grocery stores and stuff like that. I have no idea what to expect like am I even gonna be making money from this but I believe they pay out quarterly like they mail you a check like royalties like I signed for a percentage of sales. We'll see how that goes. I'm just very open to trying new things seeing how my business can grow and expand because after six years I still feel very inexperienced and I'm still trying to figure it out. Honestly licensing is something that I didn't want to do from the beginning because I like the idea of controlling everything but I find that as I have less and less time to actually work this is a really nice way to make money without having to continue to do the work over and over again. The other stream is doing custom work. Now when I first started in 2020 I did a lot of custom work. If I had to do this pie chart again it probably would have made up like 75%. I would write out people's vows or Bible verses by hand. I shut this one down. I can make a whole video on this but there are so many reasons I don't do custom work anymore. Okay and last one is digital products. I think this is a great one because it doesn't require you to ship a physical product. I can upload like a printable and as people buy it and download it you can just generate money without having to like take the time to pack something up and ship it. It's something I'm considering. I don't know if it just competes too much with all my other products. I actually do like running a physical product business so if I do something digital it would be something very intentional that kind of complements what I already do. Anyway this has been a very long video. I hope it was helpful. I just wanted to encourage you because again there are so many different ways that you can make money using your creative juices. So if you have a full-time job or if you're a mom that wants to make some money on the side, whatever situation you are in I hope this video inspires you and has given you some ideas for different things that you can pursue. Like I said my streams of income keep changing every year and so I'm very excited to see how my business evolves and grows. Thank you so much for being here. Again if you liked this video please subscribe and I will see you next time. Bye!