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The Successful Artist's Career Guide: Finding Your Way in the Business of Art
Art is one of the best parts of your life...are you ready to make it your living? Whether you are an art student, an aspiring artist or a longtime hobbyist, Margaret Peot offers experienced advice and empowerment for taking that next step. Chapter by chapter. she'll help you map out a personalized route toward the creative life of your dreams.
Get real-world advice on everything from bidding on jobs and promoting yourself to filing taxes and getting health insurance.
Worksheets help you refine your goals, price your work with confidence, write an artist's statement and more.
Interviews with successful artists in a range of professions reveal how they "made it," complete with advice on how you can, too.
In a world where artists are stereotyped as struggling and starving, this upbeat, down-to-earth guide will help you shape your goals, identify opportunities and earn a productive, joyful living with your artwork. Embrace your passion and shape your every day into a work of art!
Get real-world advice on everything from bidding on jobs and promoting yourself to filing taxes and getting health insurance.
Worksheets help you refine your goals, price your work with confidence, write an artist's statement and more.
Interviews with successful artists in a range of professions reveal how they "made it," complete with advice on how you can, too.
In a world where artists are stereotyped as struggling and starving, this upbeat, down-to-earth guide will help you shape your goals, identify opportunities and earn a productive, joyful living with your artwork. Embrace your passion and shape your every day into a work of art!
- GenresArtNonfiction
224 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2012
4 people are currently reading
93 people want to read
About the author
Margaret Peot
17 books23 followersMargaret is thrilled to present her new picture book from Muddy Boots, AT NIGHT. What animals forage by night and sleep by day? This children’s picture book describes the nocturnal lives of nine common animals: foxes, porcupines, raccoons, skunks, opossums, bobcats, owls, mice, and rabbits. Join the adult animals guiding their children through the forest during the dark of night. The book includes information on the common names of the animal’s offspring (i.e. fox:kit).
Margaret's picture book CROW MADE A FRIEND, one of Holiday House's acclaimed I LIKE TO READ series, received a starred Kirkus review and was on the Kirkus Best Books of 2015 list. Her non-fiction kid's book INKBLOT: DRIP, SPLAT AND SQUISH YOUR WAY TO CREATIVITY (Boyds Mills Press, Spring 2011) received a starred review from School Library Journal, a Silver Eureka! medal for non-fiction books for children, and is an Orbis Pictus Recommended Book for 2012.
Her collaborative coloring books with Sourcebooks, LET'S COLOR TOGETHER: A SHAREABLE COLORING BOOK FOR PARENTS AND KIDS, and LET'S COLOR TOGETHER: SECRET WORLDS, are perfect for coloring with a friend. the images are arranged so that two people can color across from one another, an intricate image on one side and a simpler version of the same image on the other. These have found an audience not only with parents and kids who love to color together, but also with elders and kids, and elders and their adult children.
Margaret's COLOR, PUNCH OUT AND PLAY SETS: TEA PARTY, MUSEUM VISIT, and FAIRY HOUSE, with Pomegranate Publishing have been delighting children in North America and Europe.
TEA PARTY features paper teapots, tea cups and saucers and lots of pretty tea treats to punch out and color, and three "stage sets" to color in front of which you can have pretend tea. MUSEUM VISIT has three gorgeous gallery spaces with punch out hooks on the walls, on which you can hang paintings you create, or punch out and color a variety of sculptures, armor or Natural History objects. And finally, FAIRY HOUSE (2018) contains two fairies, their house, furry and feathered friends, and lots of furniture and accessories to punch out and play with in front of three woodland scenes: a pretty garden, a fairy fashion atelier, and a cozy house.
Margaret has also written art making books for adults: STENCIL CRAFT: TECHNIQUES FOR FASHION, ART AND HOME is full of techniques for making fun stuff with stencils (and making the stencils!), ALTERNATIVE ART JOURNALS: EXPLORE INNOVATIVE APPROACHES FOR COLLECTING YOUR CREATIVITY includes unusual journal techniques, such as the Faux Family Album, and the Card Set Journal. THE SUCCESSFUL ARTISTS CAREER GUIDE: FINDING YOUR WAY IN THE BUSINESS OF ART offers practical advice and interviews from visual artists who are successful in a variety of fields.
Her art techniques book, MAKE YOUR MARK: EXPLORE YOUR CREATIVITY AND DISCOVER YOUR INNER ARTIST (Chronicle 2004) has found an audience with education and art therapy practitioners, and was voted one of Library Journal's best books of 2004, one of only four how-to books on the list.
Margaret has taught workshops to children, young adults, and adults in New York public schools, libraries, to girl scouts, at senior centers, and at The Creative Center's Artist in Residency Training in NYC, the Creative Center's Creative Aging Training Conference, Huntsman Cancer Institute in Salt Lake City, and at Lake Placid Center for the Arts.
Margaret has painted costumes for Broadway theater, dance, television and the circus for more than twenty-five years (for such shows as WICKED, THE LION KING, ALADDIN, FROZEN, and most recently MOULIN ROUGE) and has taught costume painting at BYU, Miami University, The USITT South conference, NYU Tisch School of the Arts.
Margaret's picture book CROW MADE A FRIEND, one of Holiday House's acclaimed I LIKE TO READ series, received a starred Kirkus review and was on the Kirkus Best Books of 2015 list. Her non-fiction kid's book INKBLOT: DRIP, SPLAT AND SQUISH YOUR WAY TO CREATIVITY (Boyds Mills Press, Spring 2011) received a starred review from School Library Journal, a Silver Eureka! medal for non-fiction books for children, and is an Orbis Pictus Recommended Book for 2012.
Her collaborative coloring books with Sourcebooks, LET'S COLOR TOGETHER: A SHAREABLE COLORING BOOK FOR PARENTS AND KIDS, and LET'S COLOR TOGETHER: SECRET WORLDS, are perfect for coloring with a friend. the images are arranged so that two people can color across from one another, an intricate image on one side and a simpler version of the same image on the other. These have found an audience not only with parents and kids who love to color together, but also with elders and kids, and elders and their adult children.
Margaret's COLOR, PUNCH OUT AND PLAY SETS: TEA PARTY, MUSEUM VISIT, and FAIRY HOUSE, with Pomegranate Publishing have been delighting children in North America and Europe.
TEA PARTY features paper teapots, tea cups and saucers and lots of pretty tea treats to punch out and color, and three "stage sets" to color in front of which you can have pretend tea. MUSEUM VISIT has three gorgeous gallery spaces with punch out hooks on the walls, on which you can hang paintings you create, or punch out and color a variety of sculptures, armor or Natural History objects. And finally, FAIRY HOUSE (2018) contains two fairies, their house, furry and feathered friends, and lots of furniture and accessories to punch out and play with in front of three woodland scenes: a pretty garden, a fairy fashion atelier, and a cozy house.
Margaret has also written art making books for adults: STENCIL CRAFT: TECHNIQUES FOR FASHION, ART AND HOME is full of techniques for making fun stuff with stencils (and making the stencils!), ALTERNATIVE ART JOURNALS: EXPLORE INNOVATIVE APPROACHES FOR COLLECTING YOUR CREATIVITY includes unusual journal techniques, such as the Faux Family Album, and the Card Set Journal. THE SUCCESSFUL ARTISTS CAREER GUIDE: FINDING YOUR WAY IN THE BUSINESS OF ART offers practical advice and interviews from visual artists who are successful in a variety of fields.
Her art techniques book, MAKE YOUR MARK: EXPLORE YOUR CREATIVITY AND DISCOVER YOUR INNER ARTIST (Chronicle 2004) has found an audience with education and art therapy practitioners, and was voted one of Library Journal's best books of 2004, one of only four how-to books on the list.
Margaret has taught workshops to children, young adults, and adults in New York public schools, libraries, to girl scouts, at senior centers, and at The Creative Center's Artist in Residency Training in NYC, the Creative Center's Creative Aging Training Conference, Huntsman Cancer Institute in Salt Lake City, and at Lake Placid Center for the Arts.
Margaret has painted costumes for Broadway theater, dance, television and the circus for more than twenty-five years (for such shows as WICKED, THE LION KING, ALADDIN, FROZEN, and most recently MOULIN ROUGE) and has taught costume painting at BYU, Miami University, The USITT South conference, NYU Tisch School of the Arts.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
December 10, 2014
Understand that i am coming to this book as a reader from the perspective of someone who decided twenty years ago to pursue a career as an artist, so I recognize that the first two chapters are not aimed at me. Rather, they are aimed at the woman i was at 18 or 20, wondering whether I really wanted to major in theatre instead of something like advertising or accounting or electrical engineering. I think, had I access to a book like this at the time, I would have felt more confident about my choices, less terrified that i'd end up a starving junkie or something, and it would have taken me a lot less time to get where I got. The first two chapters are devoted to a sort of pep talk, confidence-building inspiration, anecdotal advice, things to help assuage the fears of one's family and friends who might be less than thrilled about the prospect of one's artistic career.
For me, the place where this book really takes off and becomes universally important and useful to even mid-career artists like myself is the third chapter, in which the author breaks down exactly how to put a price on your artwork and bid on various kinds of contract jobs--what sorts of variables to consider, how to weigh different contingency factors, and explains contractual terms like a kill fee (what you get paid if they decide they no longer want the piece but you've already begun making it). I'm actually planning to use it as a textbook in one of my graduate classes for a project we do on developing bids, that is how thrilled i was to see this information collected and presented.
Subsequent chapters deal with other practical matters--doing your taxes, securing health insurance, setting up retirement plans, promotion of your work, time management, even how to decide what sort of studio space you might need or want. I wish i could go back in time and hand this book to my 20-year-old self, because I guess i might still have made some of the same mistakes and underbid myself or gone years without insurance, but i wouldn't have had ignorance to blame.
Peppered throughout the book are interviews with working artists in all kinds of disciplines--graphic art, printmaking, decorative ironwork, art therapy, illustration, etc. These are nice little interludes and a fascinating glimpse into the lives of various successful-but-unfamous artists that serve to underscore how one does not need to be the next Pablo Picasso or Prince or Meryl Streep or William Styron in order to make a successful, fulfilling artistic life for oneself. These interviews are--like the first two chapters--perhaps more eye-opening and useful to the early-career artist (particularly a young student who needs to convince her/his parents that majoring in lithography is not an expensive ticket to the garret and starvation), but are nonetheless an interesting read no matter where you are in your own career.
Lest you think my review is nothing more than a cheerleading shill for the book, I do have one primary criticism: I think the publisher did the book a disservice in overdesigning its interior, and in choosing the size of the book. At first glance, i was really drawn to the unique size (8" square), the full-color interior, and the quality of the paper and cover. The more i read through the book though, the more some of the graphic design choices jarred me: images and text randomly oriented at skewed angles, or printed on faux-finish "textured" backgrounds which occasionally obfuscate a word here and there.
The most frustrating element of this is the way in which the numerous worksheets and exercises are treated graphically, printed at odd angles on what is meant to look like a torn-off sheet of spiral-bound paper superimposed on a background. Given that i can honestly imagine this book serving as an invaluable text in art classes, schools, and universities, this layout for the worksheets and the choice to make the book a size difficult to nicely photocopy for educational use shows poor forethought on behalf of the publisher. In places it's as if the book design was meant for a new-age self-help text, not the book which Peot wrote.
Luckily, this criticism in no way diminishes the value of the book itself for the sheer usefulness of information contained within.
For me, the place where this book really takes off and becomes universally important and useful to even mid-career artists like myself is the third chapter, in which the author breaks down exactly how to put a price on your artwork and bid on various kinds of contract jobs--what sorts of variables to consider, how to weigh different contingency factors, and explains contractual terms like a kill fee (what you get paid if they decide they no longer want the piece but you've already begun making it). I'm actually planning to use it as a textbook in one of my graduate classes for a project we do on developing bids, that is how thrilled i was to see this information collected and presented.
Subsequent chapters deal with other practical matters--doing your taxes, securing health insurance, setting up retirement plans, promotion of your work, time management, even how to decide what sort of studio space you might need or want. I wish i could go back in time and hand this book to my 20-year-old self, because I guess i might still have made some of the same mistakes and underbid myself or gone years without insurance, but i wouldn't have had ignorance to blame.
Peppered throughout the book are interviews with working artists in all kinds of disciplines--graphic art, printmaking, decorative ironwork, art therapy, illustration, etc. These are nice little interludes and a fascinating glimpse into the lives of various successful-but-unfamous artists that serve to underscore how one does not need to be the next Pablo Picasso or Prince or Meryl Streep or William Styron in order to make a successful, fulfilling artistic life for oneself. These interviews are--like the first two chapters--perhaps more eye-opening and useful to the early-career artist (particularly a young student who needs to convince her/his parents that majoring in lithography is not an expensive ticket to the garret and starvation), but are nonetheless an interesting read no matter where you are in your own career.
Lest you think my review is nothing more than a cheerleading shill for the book, I do have one primary criticism: I think the publisher did the book a disservice in overdesigning its interior, and in choosing the size of the book. At first glance, i was really drawn to the unique size (8" square), the full-color interior, and the quality of the paper and cover. The more i read through the book though, the more some of the graphic design choices jarred me: images and text randomly oriented at skewed angles, or printed on faux-finish "textured" backgrounds which occasionally obfuscate a word here and there.
The most frustrating element of this is the way in which the numerous worksheets and exercises are treated graphically, printed at odd angles on what is meant to look like a torn-off sheet of spiral-bound paper superimposed on a background. Given that i can honestly imagine this book serving as an invaluable text in art classes, schools, and universities, this layout for the worksheets and the choice to make the book a size difficult to nicely photocopy for educational use shows poor forethought on behalf of the publisher. In places it's as if the book design was meant for a new-age self-help text, not the book which Peot wrote.
Luckily, this criticism in no way diminishes the value of the book itself for the sheer usefulness of information contained within.
February 7, 2017
This was less a guide to business (as suggested by the subtitle) than a self-help book with some practical information placed throughout. There are a lot of worksheets, many of which are focused on finding yourself as an artist, inspirational interviews, and motivational essays, and only pockets of practical advice. I was a little annoyed to find that most of the useful business advice was repeated in the appendix, only in more detail and better organized. This may be exactly what you're looking for, but I was hoping for something more straightforward and less abstract.
September 2, 2017
Great career tips for artists and an inspiring layout. Definitely worth reading.
February 14, 2013
Margaret Peot is a professional costume painter and dyer for the Broadway theater. She has painted the costumes for hundreds of plays, including The Lion King, Wicked, Mary Poppins, and The Little Mermaid. She has carved out an art-making life for herself, and helps other artists craft an ideal life. I found her thought processes in
The Successful Artist's Career Guide: Finding Your Way in the Business of Art
applicable to other creative types, such as writers and musicians. We can all learn to be creative, not only in our art, but in our careers.
July 20, 2014
Very helpful for teens and young adults interested in art careers. I enjoyed the interviews.
July 4, 2015
This book is aimed more at the recent college grad but still had a lot of useful information for the older or more experienced artist.
June 12, 2016
A very informative book, full of ideas on how to get the artistic career going
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews