We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Riley Smith a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Riley, thanks for joining us today. Have you been able to earn a full-time living from your creative work? If so, can you walk us through your journey and how you made it happen? Was it like that from day one? If not, what were some of the major steps and milestones and do you think you could have sped up the process somehow knowing what you know now?

For about 4 – 5 years starting just before the pandemic, I was able to make a living through my creative work, largely through cartoon illustrations for the heavy metal community. This was under the brand name Death Metal Pop Art which I’m working on turning into a more scalable business.

I had been drawing and designing stuff since I was in diapers and even though friends and family constantly discouraged me from pursuing a career in the arts and design, it’s really the only thing I have enough passion for that I could do it for a life-time. Things really started to gain traction when I made my own cartoon design of a fairly famous guitarist, Misha Mansoor. From there, it took off, do illustrations of and for artists such as Matt Heafy of Trivium, Phil Manansala from Of Mice & Men, Angel Vivaldi, Lauren Babic, and many many more. Doing what essentially amounted to fan art of leaders in the metal community was fantastic marketing that I could have done more to focus on. For every mainstream artists I drew that shared the illustration, I received anywhere from 5 – 10 commissions which was a month of work and pay.

The hardest part of this work for me is communication. It can be difficult for me to maintain communication because I have a tendency to get very absorbed in the work I do and I can go days without speaking or interacting with anyone. Finding a way to maintain my communication would be key, so I’ve actually been working ways to automate update communications with clients, customers, and partners.

Riley, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I’m a creative designer, someone who does a variety of different types of design or creative work as a whole project. For example, I’m turning my illustration business into a small brand with products, lessons, subscriptions, and more. This involves illustration, graphic design, web design, automation design, animation, and motion graphics, among other things. Because my skillset is fairly wide, I wouldn’t be considered a master of any one thing but I’m able to create cohesive work across multiple mediums and needs.

As an example of my work, I created, maintain, and work on the website for atmospheric death gaze band Kardashev. I was able to build them a website that replaced several different services, gave them a very DIY style website that fits their brand, and was able to take their guitarist and primary creator to work on the project full time. Additionally, their vocalist is now a prominent YouTube vocal coach who’s able to provide for his family doing something that he’s passionate about. As part of that vocalist’s business, I’ve provided him a website that establishes authority and generates qualified leads for coaching.

The work I did in creating a small commission-based illustration business allowed me to help these two musicians turn their skills and passions into full-time income.

I’m now working on a way to streamline and launch similar businesses for other creators, a productized version of the bespoke work I did so that I can offer more reliable and affective work. When things are bespoke, it can be difficult to get reliable results, but creating a system solves that issue. My enthusiasm for technology let’s me integrate automation to increase effective results with less work. It may seem like a lot, but the goal is to monetize people’s passion in a way that allows them to focus on the part they love without having to ignore less fun parts.

I’m not sure if any of this makes sense out loud, but I would be happy to answer any follow-up questions.

Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?

Many non-creative people have this idea that creative people such as myself only have the dream of being someone like Davinci or Beyonce. There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of creative jobs in this country that many of us would be happy to do. I’ve often been told that I need to grind at a corporate office job until I move to upper management doing something I’m not passionate about just because it works for some people. But I can take that same mentality and grind hard on my creative work, working as a freelancer for different companies, creating my own small businesses, doing commission work, etc to build a portfolio of income streams. Both take effort and discipline, but the idea that one is invalid because it’s creative is insane.

Can you share your view on NFTs? (Note: this is for education/entertainment purposes only, readers should not construe this as advice)

Controversial hot-take, I don’t see a problem with the technology behind NFTs. They are currently mostly used to scam people, but so is the stock market. I’ve read the technical papers behind cryptocurrencies and NFTs, they are a great concept to create verifiable transfers of data in a way that limits duplication. While I don’t think we’ll ever give up the US dollar for something like ether, the technology behind cryptocurrencies is much more resilient to tampering than our current system which is mostly a collection of spreadsheets. When it comes to NFT art, I think it could be an alternative of claiming and proving ownership in a way that doesn’t require our outdated patent and copyright system. It does suck that crypto bros have tarnished the idea by stealing people’s work or making garbage work to scam the desperate.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.rileysmithdesigns.com is my freelancer site, www.deathmetalpopart.com is my illustration business
• Instagram: @deathmetalpopart
• Other: kardavoxacademy.com
  kardashevband.com

Image Credits

Kardashev
Kardavox Academy