It occurred to me recently that I’ve been doing illustration work off and on for over 20 years, and that I have stacks of artwork  published once, often in extremely obscure publications, that’s been sitting in a drawer ever since. As a regular user of royalty-free stock image sites, I thought to myself “Self, here’s a great way to earn some passive income for those lean months right after Halloween. You even have most of that stuff scanned into your computer!”

So I set about doing research to find out what’s involved in selling one’s backlog of illustrations online, and as it turns out, the internet isn’t as evolved as we often like to credit it. Oh sure, if you’re a photographer, Flash animator, icon or theme developer, no problem. If you create all your artwork on the computer, you can start selling tomorrow. But if you create traditional illustrations (that is to say, using ink or paint), there’s this weird attitude involved and you find yourself on sites talking about their “exclusive” list of “top notch” illustrators, complete with bullshit application processes and unreasonable licensing/exclusivity terms. There’s no middle ground between the two (at least, none that I’ve been able to find yet).

And honestly, I don’t get it. How are these sell-your-own-creatives stock sites ignoring an entire class of illustration work? And what’s with the attitude on the illustration-only stock sites? What, because it’s “art”? Shouldn’t the creators get to determine how their work is classified? I’ve never stood on ceremony about my own work and have always considered myself an illustrator first, and all the commercial/mercenary implications that go with that title (as opposed to “artist”). If I want to sell old images on the cheap to somebody that could use them, well, I don’t mind saying that I’m a bit miffed to find that I can’t. Or, at least, I can’t without jumping through some serious hoops that my fellow visual designers don’t have to jump through.

Stock sites – get with the program. Some of us draw and paint, and know how to scan at high resolution. Some of us would like to sell a 15-year-old drawing of a vampire to a kid for $20 to use on his college newsletter. Some of us would be happy to give you a percentage of that…

…and hey, got a bead on a stock art site that does what I’m talking about? Leave it in the comments!