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What is the hardest part about starting up a business dealing with the arts?

Where do you begin and what are the first steps?
How do you deal with the financial aspects of the business, do you do it yourself or do you hire someone?
How much time do you usually spend on your medium and how much of that time is used to publicize your work?
How do you publicize/ get your work out to the world?
Do you work any other jobs other than your medium you work with?
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Sally’s Answer

It is hard work, it requires many hours spent marketing yourself and you need to balance this with actually creating art, but the rewards are amazing.

Sally recommends the following next steps:

So that you know which discipline you want to do, you should consider doing a foundation course in art. You then need to consider doing a degree in an arts discipline. This will give you the professional know how to be a professional artist/illustrator/designer. It will help you build up a portfolio of industry relevant work such as real briefs and consider all of the things you need to know to be a professional. It will not teach you how to draw or paint as you should be able to do that by entry level.
Whilst doing your degree (or even earlier if you have confidence in yourself as an artist), start thinking that you ARE a professional artist. I found this was the biggest step for me mentally. Once you do this, it will motivate you to start acting likle a professional artist. Build up an ongoing portfolio of work, keep creating art every day if you can.
In order to market yourself, you need to have a presence on the internet. Consider social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Tumblr, to upload your work to, on a daily basis if you can but dont worry if you cannot. To note, a lot of your time will be spent creating your online presence and building up a target audience for your work. a LOT of time, so one good tip is to upload a photograph of your work on Instagram and copy to Twitter, facebook and Tumblr, this should cut down the time.
Also, create a website for yourself as soon as you have work to upload to it. Only upload good work because your viewers will see all of your work and if some is not as good as others, this could be the art they remember and you dont want that.
Try to fit yourself into a particular market (this is also covered when doing a degree) and design your website to reflect this, so that potential customers will know what it is that you do. Whether book cover designs, book illustrations, portrait painting, landscape painting, editorial work, etc etc. Ask yourself, 'what is it I really want to do' and GO FOR IT! Always stay true to what you want to do, dont lose sight of this as it will show in your work, be absolutely lovely to your potential customers, be clear about your price (they will try to bring your price down. There are websites that will tell you what should be charging; be confident in yourself as an artist) and the most important thing is to ENJOY the experience.
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