Notion for Artists: Managing & Streamlining your Art Business

1. Hello and Welcome!: Managing an art business involves a whirlwind of tasks. From pitching to clients, handling licenses and royalties, to promoting your work, Not to mention the actual creative process of creating art. Imagine having a seamless system that organizes all these aspects, ensuring that each time you embark on a new artistic endeavor, the workflow is effortlessly managed. This way you can invest more time in what truly matters. The joy of creating art, Bulcome to notion for artists, where we'll explore how to make your art journey not just creative but also incredibly efficient by using the productivity a notion. Hey, there I'm Mel, an illustrator and surface pattern designer from Wellington, New Zealand with a decade of experience in this creative industry and a background in software engineering, I found my sweet spot by crafting my own system in notion, it's not just about managing my art business. It seamlessly blends with my personal life, creating a harmonious balance. Now I'm excited to share my insights with you in our notion for artists class notion is your all in one customizable workspace app designed to revolutionize how you organize information, plan pro and navigate life. In this class, I'm thrilled to guide you through harnessing the power of notion to streamline your art business a walkie through my specially crafted template tailored for artists like you, From wrangling art files to maintaining client list and handling licenses and royalties. We'll cover it all. Plus I'll show you how to personalize the template to seamlessly fit the unique rhythm of your own artistic venture. Now before we dive into the nitty gritty of notion for artists, it's helpful to have a basic understanding of the platform. Now if you're completely new to notion, no worries. I recommend checking out my notion for patent class where I walk you through some fundamental concepts. Alternatively, you can explore beginner friendly classes by Ashanke or Ali, both offering fantastic insights into the basics of notion. Then once you've got to the hang of the essentials, you'll be all set to make the most of our notion for artists adventure. If you're ready to take your productivity to the next level, then let's start building your own art hub in notion. 2. Art Hub Overview: So my art hub is made up of a number of databases that help me manage my art and my pattern files, as well as my clients, my licenses and my royalties. As you grow as a business in this creative industry, it's really important to stay on top of all this admin, the management of all your artwork and your licenses, just to stay ahead of it and to free up your time for creating art. In this video, I'm going to take you through my system that I use to manage my art and my licenses, my royalties, all of that stuff. I'm going to show you exactly how I use it. And then you have the template as well. Now, I'm lucky that I have a background in software engineering. I love setting up these sorts of things. I'm a bit of a nerd, it's not overly complicated, and I made it as simple as possible so that anyone can use it. But you have the template to download and then you can set it up to suit your own business. Basically, I'm going to show you how I use it. This is the full system, a little bit of insight into what I'm doing with my work, I guess. And then we'll talk about how to set up the template so that it suits you. This is the Hub page. This is basically just a hub to all the different areas of my art business. We have the art database where if I go in here, you'll see all my art, go to the gallery view. You can see all my patterns, my collections, my greeting cards and so on. And if we go back to my art hub, then we've got the clients as well. This is the core of the business, I guess, or the core of the system. Let's go in here and have a look. I have it set up so I have two views here. I have a list of all my clients that I currently work with or have worked with in the past. And then I also have one here called Dream Clients. So these are all the clients that I want to reach out to and pitch to and hopefully license my work too. When you're researching clients. This is where I will put them in and I'll put all their details such as their submission guidelines, or if I found a contact name. All of that kind of stuff goes in here. And then let's create a new dream client here. I'm going to say it's a greeting card publisher. I would put in their e mail address if I had their phone number, maybe their web address. Then down below, I have links or databases that are linked to contact records. This is every time I contact them. If I create one of these, I can say I sent them an e mail and it populates the date automatically. Then you can see that now it's put that in the template so I have a record of it. I can also add notes down the bottom. Basically, anything I want, I could put in some submission details that I need to stick to. If I'm e mailing them that stuff, I actually categorize them by the sort of client they are, if they're greeting cards or textiles or puzzles. That kind of thing is very useful to have. Then we go over to our clients. Here, let me pick one for you. If I open up this one with spotlight, it has a links to all of the licenses I currently have with them. You can actually see them all down here in the gallery. So this is all the designs that I had licensed with them. And then down the bottom is basically my royalties schedule when I should be getting paid. Also put in there how much I get paid. That's all in there as well. To keep track of, it's really important to keep track of royalties because companies don't often pay when they're meant to. That should be part of the contract. If let's get out of there and go back to the hub, the next one, the wish list here is just basically a quick link to my dream clients, which you already saw. The licenses, all the licenses that I've ever had all current. I've got ones that are up for renewal. I've got a calendar to show any that are coming up in the next month that are due for renewal. And then I've got a view here that just shows every since I've ever done it has the category and the location, and the timelines at the start and end date of the license. Which is important to know so that you don't double up on licensing with another client. And you can keep track of any renewals coming up so that you could e mail them and say, oh look, your license is coming up for renewal, Would you like to renew it for another two years or whatever? We go back to the art hub. I also keep track of my royalties. I do that by company name, and then obviously I just keep populating them as I know that they are due. Then I set a reminder to tell me when it is due so that I can chase them up if it becomes overdue. I find that really handy. When I first started out, I didn't have any system in place for keeping track of royalties. And of course, companies didn't pay me, so I would have to chase them. Now I'm on top of it. I can have a good idea of when I'm meant to be getting paid and when they're meant to be sending reports to me. If it does become overdue, I can quickly chase them up for those royalties. If we go back to my art hub, I have also got these sections here. I've got any work that I'm working on at the moment, I've got some collections here in progress. I've also got my licenses that are expiring and my royalties that are due. So these are all the things that I need to be aware of at this point in time. And so I find them useful to have on that Hub page. So when I come in here in the morning, I can see exactly what I need to be working on and doing or chasing up. So in the next lesson, I'm going to show you how to install the template. And then we are going to talk about how you can set it up to meet your business needs. See the. 3. Installing the Notion Template: Okay to duplicate the template and copy it over to your own workspace, all you need to do is click on the link in the description, and that will open up the art hub databases in your browser. You need to then click on the duplicate link over here, which will copy it over to your own workspace. If you've got multiple workspaces, you will have this option here to select the one that you want to put it into. If you already did my pattern notion database class. Then make sure you select the workspace that has that database in it. And then I want to set the art hub as a favorite to put it up the top there. And in the next lesson, we're going to link up the pattern database if you already have one. So if you don't have that, you can skip the next lesson and go on to lesson five, where I will give you an overview of how the client's database works. See. 4. Integrating your Pattern Database: This lesson is for those who have taken my previous Notion class on how to manage a pattern collection and patterns. What we're going to do is make your pattern database, the art database in the art hub. There's a few things we need to do to get that set up correctly. Now if you didn't do my previous notion, don't worry, you can just skip this lesson altogether and just go on to the next one. The first thing we need to do is locate the art database in the art hub over here. Go to Art Hub databases and expand that where it says Art here. We can expand that as well. I want you to click on the three dots here and then select Delete. And then you can say delete permanently. And you may need to go back to your content like that. And then go to your Patterns database and click on those three dots. And then rename it to Art. Now we need to update some of the links. Click on the Art Hub databases, and then let's scroll down to the directory and you will see this art database here. Just open that up at the moment, it's pointing to a database that we just deleted. So we just want to re, link this to your pattern, which is now your art database. To do that, what we need to do is click on these three dots over here. Go to Source, then locate your new art database. And then you need to do that for each of these. The next thing we need to do is update the buttons on the page. Click on the art hub page here, We just need to update this new art button. Click on the little spanner here, and then in here where it says Add page to Art, select that and then select your new Art database, And then click Done. Then let's click on that Art button. And we are going to add a couple more properties to this page. The first one is click on the Ad Property and we look for a Select property. This is going to be called Category and we want some options here. One is just art patterns and maybe greeting greeting card. This is basically the three areas that I create, art and license. I also do children's book illustration, but I don't manage that in here. This is purely for my licensing art. Those are the three that I do. You might have some others that you might want to add that's in there now. Then another property we want to add is a relation property. To link it to our licenses database, let's click on a property and then type in and then locate licenses. We want to leave the limit as no limit, and then we want to change the show on licenses to On. And then just click a relation. Then we're going to do the same for the royalties database. Let's create another relation property. This time, click on royalties, change the show on royalties to On, and then add relation. Let's just type in test here, and this is just going to be our test record. Another thing we need to do is actually update the filters on these views. When you reconnect it to a different database, loses all the filters, we need to put them back in. This is quite easy to do, just over here on this first view, click on filter. This is filtered by category and we want to say these are art. Let's go to the patterns. Let's type in filter category and then pattern. Then greeting cards go to filter category. And greeting cards then for the license run, go to filter licenses. In here we're just going to say is empty basically. It's just going to show any that don't have a license. Then the last one, now the spoon flower one is only if you have the spoonflower property on your art record. If I go into this test one here, I don't have a property here. This was from my original pattern database. Just add a property here. This is only if you want to track what designs you have on spoonflour, which can be quite handy for a lot of you. I just add a checkbox, let's call it spoonflower, then go out and then let's put the filter on. All we need to do is add filter spoon flour and then checked, then let's hide that. In that way you can see what designs are on spoonflower and easily track them. There's one more thing we need to do that is link up our new art database to our licenses database. Just click on licenses over here. Let's go into the license template. Let's just this template and then then in here at the moment, it's pointing to what it's related to the old art database. To fix that, click on Edit Property, click on Relation, and then type in Relation. Again, this just gives you the option to re, link it to a database. And then you can click on the Art. Then you can click on a Relation, and that will update it. We also have to do the same for the Royal Sheet database. I'm just going to go back to the Art hub. Click on Royalties, then click on the upside down triangle. Then click on it. This template. Then in here, click on the six dots, Edit property. Go in here and type in relation, then click on Art, then add relation. All right, so that's it for linking up your, your pattern now art database with the art hub. In the next lesson I'm going to show you how to add your own personal touch to your database to make it yours. So that you can then add views that are specific to your business. You can add covers and icons and different ways to display things on the Hub page just to make it something that's going to work for you. What I have might not work for you, you might want to adjust things around. I'm just going to give you a few tips on how to do that. See you there. 5. Making it your Own: Okay, in this lesson, I'm going to show you a few things you can do to make the template more suited to you. So basically, you can add views that suit your business. You can change the look and feel of it, You can add buttons, you can move things around, you could add new titles and all sorts of things. But basically, I'm going to show you a few little things that you can do and then you can do what you like with it to make it meet your needs. I'm just on my hard page in the template. One thing that you might want to do first is change the covers on these quick links. Let's go into the art One, all you need to do is hover mouse over that cover. You can click on Change cover. You have the choice of picking just from the default gallery. You can upload a file. You can link to, say, a file on a website or on your Dropbox, maybe, I'm not sure if that will work. And then you can also select one from Unsplash, which is a royalty free stock image library on the web. Typically, I have customized mine and it has my own artwork on there. I recommend doing that. Pick thing that represents the category for art. Say I'm just going to pick this design here. And then when I go back to my hub and it pops it in there, I would recommend customizing each of these. You could also change the, the hub cover as well. You can also remove that if you don't want that on there. I personally like it. You can create your own one, you can go to town with it. Basically, another thing you might want to do is add another quick link to, say, another database that you might already have. For those who did my collection notion database class, you might want to add your collection quick link here. Let's do that now. All I need to do is click on New here, then let's call this Collections. And then we want to add a cover. I'm just going to upload another pattern. Then go to your pattern collection database. Click on the three dots you want to copy the link. Then just select that and then paste it. And you can see it's pasted the link on the title there. Then go back to your art hub and let's test that out there. It has opened up into a collections page. The link is working, then all you need to do, I would probably turn on Full Width and then click underneath Forward and then type in link view of database, and then select your collections in collections. Then obviously you can change this to suit yourself however you want. You can remove the title, hide the title. You can even put notes and text on here as well. You might want to put some information about stuff I don't know. You do whatever you like, basically. You can also change the properties that you see. You might want to hide some to hide one, you can just click on it and then hide it in view. Basically, you can set that up however you like. If we go back to the hub, we've got that there and we've got the link to go straight through. Another thing that you could do is to add another button. To add a button, we could just click this plus sign here, type in button. Then we want to click on at page two. Then select Licenses. And then select license template. Basically that is saying create a new record or page in the licenses database and use the license template. Then we need one more step. Open page and then select Page, and then click on New Page Added. So that basically says you've created the page or record. And then where you want to open it up so that you can enter in the rest of the information. Click Done. We haven't put a label on this. Let's go back in by clicking on the Spanner, the Cog or whatever it is, and then type in new license. Then we could also add an icon. Click on the smiley face. I'm just going to pick a random. Icon. Let's pick an apple. And then click. Done then to move this, because I want to put it beside this one here. If you hover your mouse over the icon there that has the six dots on it, you get the little hand just click on there and then drag. And then if I go all the way to the side, you can see it gets the line there to say it's going to snap into the side bit. Then this is the difficult part. It can be a bit tricky. You can actually grab these and move them around and then smooth this one out. This is going to be tricky one, there we go. Just to space them out. Space them out nicely. Let's just bring this one in a little bit. Okay, let's just test this out. So click on New license, I'm just going to say license. And the category can be fabric, say client is client B, the currency is US dollar. I am getting $1,000 for it. The location is United States as well. Then let's put in the timeline of 1 November, first of November. And then we want to click on End Date. And in here I'm going to go to the end of November 2025. It's two years long. And let's do a reminder, the two weeks before as well. I'm going to leave that as is. Then if we go into our licenses database, you should see that there. Another thing you might want to do is add reference numbers in my database. I have a reference number that is actually the number that agency has so that I can quickly search for it in the database and see if it's licensed already. But if you wanted to add your own unique one, there's a couple of ways you can do this. I'm just going into the art database. And then let's open up this test one here and then add property. You could simply just add a text box or a number box if you just want a peer number, let's go text, just type an ID. That way you can then type in the ID that's say your agent had and maybe it was 123 or maybe it was. This is the format my agent uses. You could have a field like that. I'm not going to use that, I'm going to delete that. If I click on the side here and select Delete Property, that will go another way is to automatically generate one notion has an inbuilt ID number with each record you can add that. Which is cool. If you hit at a property, then ID, this one here, then you can actually have a prefix. Maybe you want to have art the number. It will just accumulate every time you create a new record. Let's add that. You can see it's added a unique ID there. You can't change it, it's set in stone. But then if I created a, another one, it will generate the next number. Let's just delete that. That's a really nice way of keeping track of things as well. You could use that number to add to your file name in your filing system. Wherever you keep your files, say in Dropbox or on your computer. That just makes it easier to find. You can just search for that ID number. I find that quite handy to have. I'm just going to delete that. Another thing you could do is grouping views or grouping the records in views so that you can see them better. You can also add calculations like say you wanted to know how many clients you had that were fabric clients or maybe stationary clients, whatever categories you have. So let's go into the client's database. Let me just create a couple of records here. Names one client 12, and let's give them three different categories. Just so you can see, what you could do is go into, let's create another view. Actually click on the title here and then click Duplicate. Let's say by category. And then go down here to Group. And then click on Category. Then I also like to hide empty groups. It'll just hide any that don't have a category assigned. Then you've got each in the category, and obviously you'd have more clients in here. But say if I created another one in here. The nice thing about this is it automates the category as well. So if I was to create another one in here, automatically know that it's going to be a pattern one, let's say this one's five. You can also then have these calculations. You could just say count all basically it's just going to tell you how many clients you have in that category notion goes way, way further than this. If you want to do some complex calculations, say if you're using it for finance and stuff like that, it can do some really cool things. But this, let's just keep it really simple. Another thing you can do, say let's go into our, You wanted to create a template that every time you create a new record, say you have different processes. May start with a moodboard and then you do some sketching, or you want to collect some resources you could create down the bottom here, a few sections that you might want to populate with information. If I go forward, let's say heading to, let's say resources, then let's do another one, heading to the Moodboard. Then what you could do is every time you create a new art record in here, you could have each of these populate and then they like little prompts to go and help you with the process of creating that artwork. Everyone works differently. My pattern database, I have a heap of prompts and different areas. Let's go into my pattern one pattern collections. If I create a new pattern collection, you can see here, it gives me all these different areas of research that I do before I even start creating my padding collection. To set that up, you would go, let's go back to that one over here on the right where it says, at the moment there's no templates. If I just create new template. Then down here, say put a heading, say resources, then he moodboard and then put whatever you like. Then when you go back out back in here, and we didn't give that a name, let's go back in. Let's give this a name called art template and then go back out. Now if I click in here and then set that as the default, we can do it for all views in the art database or just on the illustrations view. I'm just going to select all for this. Now when I create it, it will use that template and populate those titles. I can now start my process of researching for that art piece. I find that very useful, especially with my pattern collections. I use it all the time to create the story behind it, the colors, the movie board, all that kind of stuff. I highly recommend setting that up to suit your business. Another thing you might want to do on the Hub page is to add some other views that you want here for information that you want to see. At a quick glance, when you open up your Hub, if you've got your padding collection database attached, you might want to add another view of collections in progress. What I might do is duplicate this title, Click on the six dots and then duplicate, and let's say Collins in progress. And then I'm just going to click and drag it to the side of that one. It's going to create two columns. And then we want to move this art one up underneath the Art in Progress, and that will snap it into that column. Then over here in this column, if I do forward and we want to do a linked view of a database, basically, it's just going to create another view, but it's going to have all that data in there of your pattern collection database. If I click on linked view of database and then go to padding collections and it's put the view in there. I can actually then filter it. Click on Filter. I can click on the Status and say, let's show me ones that I am planning and that are in progress. Then we can also remove some of these columns that we probably don't need, just click on the title and then hide in View. Then I'm going to get rid of some of these other ones. I really just want the title. Then I can click on that filter just to hide those filters. And we can also remove this title by clicking on the three dots and then hiding the title. Now I can see what I'm doing at the moment. Collect, she put an S in there for collections. My license is in my royalties. That's another way you can add a linked view to your page. I just like things on this page that I need when I open it up in the morning just to remind me what I am doing and what I need to work on. That is pretty much, If you do have any questions, do pop them in the discussions area or do flick me an e mail because I do not get the notifications when you put them in the discussions area. At the moment for some reason they have a glitch in the system, I would probably e mail me if you can go to town with it. Make it your own. Make it pretty, Yeah, enjoy. 6. Walkthrough: Okay, in this lesson, I'm just going to walk you through quickly how you can create each of the elements in your art hub and have them all linked up together. This is just a quick walk through to help you get started with it. The first thing I want to do is maybe create a piece of art. I'm working on something. I'm just going to click on New Art and I'm going to call this Lion greeting Card. I'm going to assign the greeting card category. That's all I need to do for now. If I was doing a pattern, I might also add down here that it's a hero or coordinate, or link it to a pattern collection. But for this one, it's just going to be a greeting card. If I click out of there and say I've now finished my greeting card and someone wants to license it. First off, let's just go back in here and click on the greeting card and change the status to done. And then upload the image of the greeting card in here. Okay, so that one is now, say I now have gotten a license, I'm going to go back over to my art hub. Firstly, I need to make sure I have the client in here. So I'm going to click on to Client. Let's say, let's just call this guy Greeting Card Client. This is the name of the category. We could put some e mail and other type of information in here, but we can leave that for the moment. Then if I go back to my art tab, I'm going to create a license for this greeting card. Then I'm going to click on a new license. Let's just call this greeting category is greeting the piece of artwork. You can put artwork in here if you've got pieces getting licensed on the same contract. You can also put your actual design here if you want. You don't have to because you've already got it linked. But we'll put that one there. I'm going to put a currency of US dollar. I'm going to say I'm getting 500 and it's going to be a worldwide license. Let's say the timeline starts today and runs four. We need an end date, two years. Let's add on two years. I'll leave that as is. And I'm going to put a red date of scope to 2025, maybe a month before, say around there. This one also gives me royalties. I'm going to put 5% actually, I'm going to go back to this remind and turn on the remind on that day. You can also put the remind on the time line, but I actually prefer to have a set date that I set myself, which is why I've got this. But you don't need to. You could use just the timeline date and then maybe set a reminder for a week before. That's pretty much all I need there for my license. I'm just going to jump out of there because I am getting royalties for it. I'm going to jump into the royalties database and create new royalty record. Let's say line greeting card. Link it to the, again, the client. Let's say it's due six months from today, 123456. I'm going to say I get it six monthly. We want to put six in the recur unit and months in the recur unit, and then it automatically populates the date there for you. That is all we need to do there. Now we have the piece of artwork that is in my greeting cards folio here. It is linked to a license here, and it's also linked to the royalties here. So I can be reminded of when it's due. Basically, that's how it all works and hangs together. I hope that helps. And have fun creating your art hub. 7. Conclusion: Congratulations, you have successfully crafted your personalized art management system in Notion and completed this class. Kudos to you. Throughout our time together, you have gained the skills to import and set up a notion template, tailor it to suit your artistic journey, And create a dynamic workspace to efficiently handle your art licenses, royalties, and client interactions. Now with a streamlined system in place, you can invest more of your time in the pure joy of creating art. I'm eagerly anticipating seeing how you've uniquely shaped your art. So be sure to share your project in the project section here on skill share. For more insightful tutorials, check out my Youtube channel at Mel Armstrong. And if you want to stay in the loop with my artistic endeavors, follow me on Instagram at Mel Armstrong Design. Stay inspired, stay creative, and until our creative pass. Cross again. See you later.