Funding the Creative Life: A Look at UpFundMe as Potential Source of Support for Artists

When you consider life as an artist or other form of creative here in our modern world, it seems increasingly evident that we need to take all the opportunities we can find to fund our creativity.

If we truly want to live the creative life — and not just be "burger flippers who create art in our spare time"— it is not enough to simply create art or music or writing and then hope somebody is going to come along and discover our genius and buy it from us.... and somehow that will magically be enough to fund our lives.

Recent design with hints of a "Compass Rose" in the center; commission for client in Spokane, WA

In a Sense, We Have to be Creative About Our Creativity!

Today I was considering how we can use the steem environment more creatively to help fund our creative lives, as part of a greater mix of art, publicity, social media, crowdfunding, and more.

Then I started wondering whether the relatively new UpFundMe tribe and token could be used to help fund parts of an artist's life. Certain supplies, perhaps? Paint? Pieces of creative software?

If you're not familiar with @upfundme, it is the "re-envisioning" of what was once the #upfundme tag that ended up being rather spammy... recreated as a "tribe" with its own steemit-like front end and a free-standing token on Steem-Engine. more or less designed to fund projects through its own form of crowdfunding.

In this case that crowdfunding comes in the form of upvotes from other people staked in the token, contests, and curation rewards you earn from staking your own tokens and supporting other people's content.

"Sunstone," created as commission for 9/9/19 by a client in Georgia"

Crowdfunding: Not Just for Charity

Normally you would think of crowdfunding as something used by a charity, or maybe to fund your car repairs or a hospital bill, or possibly to support a friend who lost their home and possessions in a fire, but I got to thinking *why not use this type of utility as yet another way for artists to generate a small income stream?

For me, supporting my art has always been a question of finding many different sources of support. As I mentioned up top, it's simply not enough — at least for 95% of us creatives — to only create something and then hope people will like it and buy it.

For example, in addition to creating art I have an increasingly active social media profile, I have my blog here in Steemtopia, as well as another blog that is monetized with amazon and Etsy links, I now have a Patreon campaign going, which led me to considering that this kind of decentralized crowdfunding might also be a worthy arrow in my growing quiver of creative funding!

"Prototype" for the Sunstone; not chosen, but still pretty nice, I think...*

A SMALL Supplemental Income Stream

Of course we should be realistic about this.

Most likely we're only talking about a few extra cents a day to start with, perhaps leading to a dollar or two after a campaign has had a few months or a year to establish itself. But as a wise person once pointed out to me, you can actually fill a large bucket with just a slowly dripping faucet. Stated is a little differently, trying to raise $1,000 may sound overwhelming, but that challenge takes on a different nature if you look at it as raising five cents at a time... over, and over, and over..

Anyway, I decided I would give UpFundMe a try, at least for a while. Right now, it is still fairly new and largely undiscovered, so maybe a good opportunity to get in at the ground level.

The Sunstone in early stages. They are not nearly as vibrant with just one layer of paint, and before getting their final finish coat

Whereas being an artist isn't exactly a charity, most artists are starving and you could definitely argue that being an artist or creative is a nonprofit endeavor for most people! So I don't feel too bad about testing this avenue as a potential way to fund creative overhead expenses.

As I said, currently the tribe is quite small, and could definitely use a little more activity. I just hope the founder(?)/principal(?) @taskmanager will see this as an OK way to use the tribe!

Anyway, going to give it a try. There are several links up above and I hope maybe you'll consider using it as well!

Like all other tribes in our little environment, succeeding here depends on building up a balance through buying and/or earning tokens and then staking them so you can curate and "share the wealth" with others as part of the way you build your balance.

I don't have much to spend, but I bought and staked a little over 300 UFM tokens as a start and show of support for the UpFundMe project.

Thanks for reading!

2019.09.12 AS-TXT-019