Well, I've been here a year and thought I should report back on what happened with the cafepress store and all that.

My cafepress store is still up and running, I've made maybe $20 to date.  Not too successful... but!  In February, I discovered the wonderful world of microstock photography.  It's where someone sells their pictures (or graphics, in my case) and gets anywhere from a quarter to $30 or so for each image sold.  Doesn't sound like a lot, but it can add up quick.  (Also if you consider that the average royalties an artist gets on selling an album is around 17 cents.... mine's a much better deal).

Microstock photography is like this... if someone wants a picture of pool balls on a pool table, they're probably not going to hire a photographer to set up the lights and do an all day photoshoot.  They're more likely to come to one of the microstock photography websites and find a picture that's close enough to what they want (or maybe exactly) and pay $20 or something for it.  And part of that money goes to whoever took the picture.

I've made around $400 to date, which I consider to be a decent little part time residual income.  On most of the sites you get a payout once you hit $75 or so, and that pays for new tutorials and tools.  My portfolio is growing slowly but surely, as is my monthly income.  I'm not quite at the point where I get a $75 payout every month, but it's my goal to be doing that by the time Feb rolls around and I've been on the sites for a year.  I've had some freelance work coming in so I haven't done a lot of new images lately, but I'm pleased with my success so far.

More importantly than the $400 is that I'm building both my skills and my portfolio of images.  I'm doing 3D illustrations, 3D animations and 2D vector illustrations (like clipart) and I can look back and see the stuff I did 9 months ago and see where I could improve on it, so I must be learning.  :)

If you'd like to see my images, here's one of my sites that's doing well for me and my gallery of images there: http://www.dreamstime.com/resp554174

Ironically, my most popular image to date (by far) is a sheet of loose leaf paper.  It's done in what's called "vector" format which just means that it can be used at any size, from a postage stamp to a billboard and still look just like I created it.  I did it on a whim and have had a lot of success from it.  You just never know!