How to Make a Living With Your Art

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Tim Packer  – Tim Packer Art Academy

 

Podcast Overview:

00:00 Teaching Artists to Earn Income
07:56 “Regret, Art, and Helping Others”
12:25 Art Worlds: Villages and Markets
16:39 90s Limited Edition Print Boom
22:11 “Keys to Successful Art Sales”
30:03 “From Artist to Police Officer”
35:30 “Art, Auctions, and Breakthroughs”
39:44 “Keys to a Thriving Art Career”
43:29 “Creating Art You Truly Love”
52:39 “When to Pursue Art Full-Time”
54:13 “Turning Point in Career Success”
01:03:10 Artistic Process and Experimentation
01:04:04 Breaking Free from Comfort Zones
01:11:18 “Art, Critics, and Accessibility”
01:15:44 Art vs Commerce Priorities

Podcast Transcription:

Tim Packer [00:00:00]:
I mean, my dream when I. Because I quit my job and walked away from my pension as a police officer when I was 40 to give this another try. My goal was if I could ever just make as much as what I would have made had I stayed and gone on pension, then it’ll be a wash, right? Well, I far surpass that. But while I was in there, you know, just kind of and watching the sales go up and I was mentally crunching the numbers because this was November, and I thought, holy. Know what? I’m going to make over a quarter million dollars this year. As an artist.

James Kademan [00:00:34]:
You have found Authentic Business Adventures, the business program that brings you the struggle stories and triumphant successes of business owners across the land. Downloadable audio episodes can be found in the podcast link fund@drawincustomers.com we are locally underwritten by the bank of Sun Prairie Calls On Call, Extraordinary Answering Service, as well as the Bold Business Book. And today we’re welcoming preparing to learn from Tim Packer of Tim Packer Art Academy. I’m excited we get to talk about art, Tim. So how are you feeling today, Tim?

Tim Packer [00:01:04]:
I’m feeling great. I’m excited to be here and thanks for having me on the podcast.

James Kademan [00:01:08]:
Yeah, I’m excited because I don’t know if you know this or not, but I majored in graphic design.

Tim Packer [00:01:13]:
Oh, me too.

James Kademan [00:01:14]:
Way back when. I don’t do anything with it now. And I just got back from Italy and it was interesting because I’m like, wait a second, I’ve actually painted and drawn this cathedral.

Tim Packer [00:01:27]:
Yeah.

James Kademan [00:01:28]:
And I just never knew where it was.

Tim Packer [00:01:30]:
Oh, this is going to be a lot of fun then, because there’s going to be a lot of context on your end, and I’m sure you’re going to have a lot of questions as well, which is cool. Yeah.

James Kademan [00:01:37]:
So let’s start with the foundation. What is Tim Packer Art Academy?

Tim Packer [00:01:41]:
Okay. It’s my online art academy. And there’s a lot of, like, recorded courses where people pay just for a certain course. I can get my color and composition course or see how I paint the subjects that I paint, or I have, like, whole suites of programs on there. And then I also have, like, a mastermind program. I call it the Hungry Artist Community. And that’s where they get all of my courses. Plus, every week I do a live zoom call from the students, basically from around the world.

Tim Packer [00:02:11]:
But I’ll critique their paintings, I’ll answer any questions they have about art or the business of being an artist, and I’ll give them coaching Advice.

James Kademan [00:02:20]:
So is the idea, I guess most of your students, are they looking to do art just as a hobby or are they looking to do it as a professional?

Tim Packer [00:02:27]:
Yeah, that’s my niche is like I’ve been, I am a very successful artist. I’ve had a really successful career as an, as an artist, as a self publisher, kind of ran my own gallery. But what I really want to do now is my new mission in life is sharing the lessons and the knowledge that I’ve acquired over 25 years of being a full time professional artist with other people who share that dream, where their dream is they want to be able to actually make a livable income from their art and that’s a huge void. I mean the universities and colleges are failing them just miserably. And also most of the common wisdom that’s out there is actually just plain wrong that I found in my experience. And so I, I mean not only was I successful, but I ended up mentoring a young artist back in 2017. She was a, just a daughter of a friend of mine that I golfed with who was, she was taking landscape architecture but she really liked to paint and she did it as a hobby. And I got to know her first of all, we did a small print job for her of a painting she’d done for her grandfather and she wanted to do prints for like neighbors on the cottage road.

Tim Packer [00:03:39]:
And over her last couple years of school I got to know her and she would always be picking my brains about art. And then after she graduated I was golfing with her dad and he said, well yeah, Brooke spoke to us last night and I said oh, how is she? And he says well she doesn’t want to be a landscape architect. Apparently after a four year university program, she wants to be an artist. And he wasn’t happy and he wasn’t happy with me and he was just, you know, if you could have had a thought bubble above his, it was it’s all your fault. Oh no. And because every time we got together she would like. Cause I would, she would meet at social functions, at the club and she golfed a few times with me and her dad, but she was always picking my brains about art and about being an artist. And she knew too like my background.

Tim Packer [00:04:25]:
I, I grew up wanting to be an artist. I took graphic design like I just found out you did as well. And then by the time I was 21, realized I’m just not talented enough to make a living as an artist. The Toronto police force was hiring and that was an 18 year career that I did as a Toronto police officer before I discovered the whole idea, the growth mindset. So if you’re hope, I guess I should let your listeners know too, if they’re hoping for a quick story of how I went from being a kid who liked to draw to where I am now. It’s not there. But anyway, she knew my story and so she knew that I knew. And by the time I met her, I was a very successful artist.

Tim Packer [00:05:02]:
So I said to her, I said to her dad, I said, listen, she’s, she’s just graduated, she’s young, she’s living at home, she doesn’t have any debt. If there’s ever a time to take a chance on this, it’s now and then. And I already had my YouTube channel that, that I was doing which was all directed at just free content for helping artists who want to make a living from their art. And I said if she wants to, if she’s willing and wants me to mentor her, I’d be willing to mentor her over the next couple of years as long as she’s willing to have all of our sessions filmed and have it go up on YouTube. So we did that in 2017-2019 and now she is a worldwide superstar. She’s got over a million followers on social media. She’s living in Vienna right now. Her work sells around the world.

Tim Packer [00:05:52]:
Her work sells for much more than mine. She’s got much, you know, and most artists was a recent study is that most artists in North America who are full time artists who are have make less than $10,000 a year in their net income. And she did 30,000 in that first year that I was mentoring her. Now I don’t know what she’s at, but it’s a lot. And so that kind of reinforced to me that, okay, I can help people. And I knew that I wasn’t gifted, right. I was not the most talented, most naturally talented person in any class that I took. I was always kind of maybe just above the middle.

Tim Packer [00:06:31]:
And then in 20, 20, 2019, I had, I contracted graves disease. I almost died twice. I was kind of lying in the gurney with my wife, not really knowing if I was going to survive the next 10 or 15 minutes. And that was kind of a life changing moment for me. For in a couple ways, the first thing, the great thing about that, again, I’m fine now, I’m healthy, healthier than I’ve ever been. But you know, you think what a lot of emotions might run through your head when you’re lying there Thinking, I don’t know if I’m going to be here in five or 10 minutes. And for me it wasn’t fear, it wasn’t terror, it wasn’t regret, it was gratitude. I just really, you know, I just, I just, I can vividly remember both those times just thinking, hey, like, whatever is up there, whoever’s up there, if this is it, okay, I’m really not ready to go.

Tim Packer [00:07:24]:
But if it is, thank you so much for allowing me to live the life that I led. I got to achieve the dreams that I had as a child and way beyond my wildest dreams. And then over the course of that year while I was sick and the other thing that was really cool is at the time I thought, I have no regrets. There’s a lot of people I know. Gary Vaynerchuk talks all the time. He says, go visit old people. You’ll see what poison regret can be for not trying the thing that you wanted to try. And I realized I didn’t have any regrets.

Tim Packer [00:07:56]:
But over the course of that year, I realized there was one regret that I did still sort of have. And so, I mean, I’d been doing my YouTube channel at that point for about seven years, but it had been just a passion project, no intent to monetize. My money was being made just off cranking out paintings, selling them to collectors, doing my limit edition prints, all that kind of stuff. But the regret that I had was that I really hadn’t helped as many artists as I had hoped. You know, I thought if I just put the YouTube channel up there, I’ll get millions of followers and I’ll help all these artists. And that didn’t happen. You know, I think that time I had about 5,000 YouTube followers. And then I just really decided, over the course of that year, I just kind of, you know, realized that what I really wanted to focus the next session of my life on if I got healthy again, was really sharing everything that I’d learned and helping change other artists lives like I’d been able to do with Brooke.

Tim Packer [00:08:47]:
And so in 2020, that’s when we launched the Tim Packer Art Academy. And that’s now the main focus of my business. I still, I still get in the studio and paint. I was actually painting this morning and so I made good money there. We still do limited reproductions of my work that we sell across North America and that’s going good. But my main focus right now is on, on the academy, on dealing with the students and growing the academy and then filming more and more courses and then putting out YouTube content as well, which, which is we found is our most effective way of me actually kind of getting known by people and, and using that to drive them to the art academy, if that’s something they’re interested in.

James Kademan [00:09:27]:
That is cool. So, man, Tim, you shared a huge story there. So let me ask you a few questions.

Tim Packer [00:09:32]:
Yes.

James Kademan [00:09:34]:
The dad of the daughter, when you go golfing with them now, are you. Do you have a little thought bubble.

Tim Packer [00:09:39]:
That’S I’m a rock star in their word, in their world. And it was so funny. Every time we’d end for about that first year, every time we’d end up at like a. It could be a golf event and the dinner afterwards, you know, after a few drinks, he would always pigeonhole me and he’s like, are you sure? Are you sure she should be doing this? And then after the first year, I remember at, at, at the end of her first year that I was talking with Brooke. I mean, her name’s Brooke Cormier, by the way. And so she’s, she’s on instagram@brooke cormier.com but anyways, if your listeners want to check her out again, like I say, she’s, she’s just killing it. But after the first year, one of our sessions, I was asking her, so is your dad on board yet? Right. And she said, well, I’m pretty sure because at the Christmas dinner he spent.

Tim Packer [00:10:25]:
He dominated the entire Christmas dinner with the big extended family, just bragging about her and bragging about her success. And so now when I see them, her mom especially, she’s like, there’s not a time goes by when I don’t see them where she doesn’t pull me aside and just say thank you. Because I can’t imagine as a parent there’s anything you want more than your child achieving their dreams. Right, Right. And they was a. He was afraid she was going to end up starving at a Garrett. I mean, I guess he’s probably still a little ticked off at me because she’s moved to Vienna. She’s living in Vienna now and they’re from the Toronto area in Canada.

Tim Packer [00:10:59]:
But she’s just living, living life on her terms. And, and now with the art academy, I’ve actually had a number of other students that have had similar type success and a lot of them who are kind of on their way. So, you know. Yeah, it’s been very exciting.

James Kademan [00:11:14]:
That is incredible. Tell me. So I have to apologize because I don’t know the art world at all. I mean, you Go to a coffee shop, you see some random paintings and stuff like that. There are definitely art galleries and stuff like that. But I have to admit I haven’t been to one of those of any where there’s local artists or something like that. I guess, like I said, it was in Italy recently. But then you’re looking at historical old paintings.

James Kademan [00:11:39]:
You’re not looking at something that was painted last year or even five years ago. You’re looking at hundreds of years ago. So what is the art world like now for someone that’s, let’s say, less than 100 years old?

Tim Packer [00:11:52]:
That’s a great question. And that’s something that is part of the key reason why I think so many artists are starving and failing. Because there’s no one art world. There’s like a bunch of different art villages. And you know that because you and I both went through the one art village, which is graphic design, where the idea is you are going to be a hired gun creating visual products for a client. Right? Whether that’s whether. I mean, I went through graphic design before computers, so it was all done by hand. But.

Tim Packer [00:12:25]:
But you are basically, you’re there working for an ad agency or you’re working for a client, you’re working freelance, but you’re doing stuff specifically mainly to do with marketing, business, package design, whatever. That’s one art village. The other art village is the village of publicly funded galleries and most or a lot of universities, which is dominated by postmodernism. That’s the whole idea that, you know, what’s key is what the artist felt, right? That’s the world of meat dresses, invisible art exhibits, installations where it’s just a teenager’s bed made up with empty cigarette butts around in an ashtrays, whatever that world. There’s the blue chip art gallery, which is the, you know, Sotheby’s, the auction houses where paintings are being sold for millions of dollars. And then there’s the world of commercial sales, which is, I think, where most artists, when we start out, is ideally where we want to end up, I think. And that is the village where you get to go into your studio every day, paint the work that you love, and real people buy your work to hang in their homes or to hang in their offices. And enough people love your work that you can generate enough money to make a good living, or in my case, a very good living, and actually, you know, start building wealth.

Tim Packer [00:13:42]:
But that’s the village that I’m in. And the problem is there’s very little out there for artists that want to succeed in that village in terms of, well, how do we go about that? What are the rules in that village? Who are the gatekeepers? What type of art kind of, you know, is popular in that village? And they end up often. What happens, they come, they take a fine art degree where it’s teaching postmodernism and everything else, and then they go out and they start doing art festivals. Well, there’s no art critics at art festivals. There’s real people looking for work that they want to hang on their walls. And the thing is that the average person and studies have borne this out over the last 75 years, despite the art intelligentsia trying to push postmodernism down people’s throats, as this is what you should appreciate. The vast majority of people still appreciate everything that was important and valued in art since the Enlightenment. Right.

Tim Packer [00:14:39]:
So the ability to draw, painting techniques, composition, light and shadow, beauty. Right. I mean, Picasso kind of did us all a disservice when he did Demoiselle Avignon, which was those prostitutes, it was like, oh, art could be ugly. And all of a sudden, now we’ve got to the point where, if you’re talking about museums and critics, art has to be ugly. Art shouldn’t be beautiful. Right? And then you see that a lot if you go into, like, the publicly funded galleries. And the thing is, like, they’re not my village. I don’t care what those people think.

Tim Packer [00:15:14]:
And I don’t care about critics. I don’t care about museum creators. I care about real people who value beauty, craft, expertise, all of those kinds of things, and who love my work and are willing to pay me a lot of money for my work. And so that’s the village within the art world that I. I’ve been very successful in pretty much every aspect of it. And then I. I really feel a responsibility to kind of share that because I know so many artists out there that would just love to have the life that I live, but they have no idea how to get there. So, yeah, that’s.

James Kademan [00:15:52]:
Yeah, it’s interesting because you think of any art, whether it’s dance or painting even. I’m thinking of people that do pinstriping on cars and stuff like that. There’s. There’s an artist mentality and you can be really good at that. But to know the business of it, yes, that’s a whole different game.

Tim Packer [00:16:09]:
And we’re not typically known for our business acumen. Right. So I’m a bit of a unicorn. I’m a bit of a unicorn in that no, but I like, I run my own. Like I was with Millpond Press, which is one of the biggest artists fine art publishers. When I my initially broke out with my, my style of work that became very popular, they were publishing me. And I realized after the first year, like they did $100,000 in sales of my work and I got about $5,000 commission. And I was like, well, I’m, I’m not happy with that.

Tim Packer [00:16:39]:
And I understood the model too, because my dad was a head pressman at a, one of the top printing companies in Toronto and they used to do a lot of the stuff for Bateman and Trisha Romance and, and Ken Danby and all these big names. But they were doing print runs of like 25, 35,000, 35,000 in a limited edition run and selling the prints, paper prints for 5, 6, 7, $800. So getting 5% of retail on that was actually pretty good. Like Bateman made millions of dollars. But what happened is in the 90s there was one big, there was a real time when people were buying limited edition prints almost as investment, right? It’s like, oh, Robert Bateman’s come out with have you seen this gray wolf? And you just couldn’t get them because it was a really cutthroat business where the publishers were saying, okay, if you want Bateman, you got to buy 20 prints for a gallery or you’re not getting his latest. So they would all sell out. And then of course the galleries were telling people, well, this, there’s only like 10 prints available, they’re selling out. And the prices would actually go up.

Tim Packer [00:17:45]:
But people were buying them as investments. And then there was a huge crash in the 90s and all of a sudden everybody tried to unload their limited edition prints that they’d spent 500, 600, $700 on. And they were just stacked under their beds and they were getting $50 for them because everybody else was trying to unload their prints. And so then people realized, okay, these are not an investment, these are just decor. And then people said, well, if it’s going to be limited edition, I want it really limited. And so for me, by the time they picked me up, they were doing 100 prints on canvas of one edition. Now, 5% of 30,000 sales is a lot of money. 5% of only 100 is not very much.

Tim Packer [00:18:28]:
And in the old days, you probably know this from your, from your graphic design, like offset litho was the way to go. Well, that was several million dollars worth of equipment. Ten or 15 skilled tradespeople getting paid a lot of money to be able to produce a limited edition print run. Well, right around I got my first G clay printer in around 2005. At that point, all of a sudden, everything was going to giclee printing, digital, better quality printing. And you could go out and set up from like the whole thing, from the camera to the computer to the software to the printer for $25,000 instead.

James Kademan [00:19:06]:
Of some big Heidelberg press.

Tim Packer [00:19:08]:
Exactly right. My dad used to. My dad passed away earlier this year, but he used to come over to my house in my gallery all the time, and he just could not believe the quality of the prints. And he was the head pressman at the top fine art printer in Canada. And he said nothing that ever came off his Heidelberg 5 color could touch what I could do on the printer that I had in the front room at my house. So I started self publishing. And, you know, like I say, that first year I spent 25 grand in equipment. We did 50,000 in sales that first year.

Tim Packer [00:19:41]:
So made the money back on the equipment plus into profit. And there have been times when we were really heavily focusing on pushing the prints. And I was in a number of galleries at that time across Canada and the U.S. that were also marketing my prints. But there was a number of years where I generated over $150,000 a year just off the sale of my prints and compared to $5,000 when I was being run through the big publishers. Right. So dang. All right, so I’m a business guy, which is not usual for artists.

Tim Packer [00:20:14]:
No, that’s.

James Kademan [00:20:15]:
That’s incredible. Tell me a story about the selling of your prints. I’m gonna compare it. An artist’s print, like, hey, this is a Tim Packer print. Or just like, hey, this is a print of, let’s say, trees and leaves. And I like trees and leaves. So I’m going to chase after that. How many people are going after the name of an artist versus just, I like this particular picture?

Tim Packer [00:20:38]:
Well, I think it’s a little bit of both. Because in this village, what. Let’s talk about what’s great art, first of all, in this village. And it’s very different than what’s great art and those other villages I talked about. And in the village of commercial sales, we judge great art by not by what the artist felt, not by how many hours it took them, not even by their name. We judge great art by the impact it has on the viewer. And the impact that we want is people to see the work and go, oh, my gosh, I love this work, you know, and they, if it’s a festival, you want them to go, honey, come over here, look at this. We have to have this piece of work, right? We, you want, you want to, you want to garner that biblical emotion of coveting right? Where they see it and they just go, I want it where, where they make poor decisions or difficult decisions in order to acquire it.

Tim Packer [00:21:33]:
Right. Where they spend money they really shouldn’t spend on it just because they have to have it, or where. I mean, every show I’ve ever done, whether it’s a gallery show, I used to do a studio open house every year before we moved up to where we are now, where I would invite all my clients to come to my house for a day. And, and it was a big sale of my work. And I would always have, you know, several people say, you know, well, we’d love to come to your show, but we’re just not in a position where, you know, we can afford to spend a thousand or several thousand dollars on a print or several thousand dollars on a painting. And we feel bad. We’re just going to come, drink your wine and look at your work and it’s like, fine, come. I don’t care, just come.

Tim Packer [00:22:11]:
Because I know inevitably at least one of those couples at a certain point are going to be over in the corner having a conversation that’s very uncomfortable and they’re trying to decide how badly they really want to go on that vacation to Florida or, or wherever, or maybe we should get this painting instead, right? And so that’s, it’s, it’s the, the number one key to becoming a successful artist is to be, develop the skills, the knowledge, the experience, creativity to consistently create work that at least enough of the public, enough certain percentage feels that way about your work. And once you can do that, then it’s easy. And so for me, it’s like, yeah, there’s a lot of, I sell a lot of prints because a lot of people love my work, but you know, they can’t afford, you know, $2,000 for a small original, maybe $17,000 for a large painting, but they can get a big 3 foot by 4 foot print of mine for like $1200, which you can’t really tell the difference from an original because of the quality of the printing unless you get right up close and look at it. And so for them, it’s kind of like those kind of prints. It’s kind of like fine furniture, right? It’s like fine decor. It’s not really an. It’s not an investment. Although, you know, there is the chance that some limited editions may go up in price.

Tim Packer [00:23:34]:
But I look at it like, you know, it’s like. It’s like buying a fine piece of furniture. You’re buying it because you want that impact in your life, in your home. You want to walk in every day. You want to feel what it makes you feel. Might it turn into an antique? You know, in the case of a piece of furniture, maybe, but that’s not why you’re buying it. But then with my originals, people are buying them as investments. My work has continually gone up dramatically in price over the last 25 years.

Tim Packer [00:24:01]:
And so they know if they buy an original, that is actually, that’s both investing in kind of like your home and your. Your surroundings, but it’s also going to appreciate and value. So it’s kind of like I do have a big following of people who. But it’s mainly because they love my work, right? And the more. It’s just like in music, right? You know, the, the. The more people that love your work, the more popular you become. The bigger venues you show in, the more they’re willing to pay for tickets and the more they’ll buy your CDs.

James Kademan [00:24:33]:
Buyer crowds, crowds.

Tim Packer [00:24:35]:
But it all comes first of all from being able to create the work that has that. That emotional reaction from at least enough people, right? And then once you get that, so. And in my art academy, the. The main focus for students coming in is developing the skills, the concepts, the pushing their creativity, gaining experience so that they can find their own unique voice that does that, which is. That’s the number one thing. And then it’s like, okay, how do we leverage that and how do we scale the income so that, you know, it’s not, you know, $30,000 a year, it’s 50, and then it’s 100 or even like, I’ve done really since 2005, I guess I’ve done over $200,000 a year in earnings. As an artist.

James Kademan [00:25:24]:
As an artist, that’s incredible.

Tim Packer [00:25:26]:
And it’s actually changed. And like, initially it was mainly just on my originals, and then it was the originals and prints. And then it’s been focused more on. And then it was dealing mainly selling through commercial galleries. But then I realized the same sort of thing that happened with the publishers, and I love my galleries and the gallery hall did a great job. But when I got involved in social media, which was mainly to grow my YouTube channel so that I could have more impact on artists, it ended up really just Growing my popularity as an artist and I was getting all kinds of people responded to my post saying where can we buy your work? Or where can I buy this painting? And I would just refer them to the gallery, whichever one it was. And I realized after like about a year of this, it’s like I’m giving them 40 to 50% because they’re supposed to be doing the marketing, but I’m doing all the marketing. And so I grabbed.

Tim Packer [00:26:15]:
So that’s like, okay, we should look at E commerce. So then we looked at again building, building an E commerce platform online and gradually focusing more and more on direct to clients to. Now I’m only in two galleries and those are, those are two of the very first galleries that I was with and that they, they bet on me. Before I was a hot commodity. So I really feel loyal. It’s like, okay, now that I’m doing very well, they’re one of only two galleries you can go to to get my work. The rest of it, we all do on, we do online. And then now the focus has been more on the art academy.

Tim Packer [00:26:49]:
So it’s kind of like each one of those takes away from the other. So now like I’ve been painting, we’re, we’re doing an online sale in a couple weeks which is mainly of my limited edition prints but also I like to have some original. So I kind of put my head down and been painting for the last two weeks. But other than that I haven’t painted since April because all of the other. Well, I’ve got my book, my book’s coming out in November too. Right. So that’s kind of like each of those things takes away from the other. But I’m just so, I’m curious like when I see a new opportunity, this like, oh well, maybe, maybe I could self publish, right.

Tim Packer [00:27:30]:
Maybe I could sell on my own. That takes more time away. Sometimes I look back to the days there were. There was about a seven year period where I just, all I did was go into my studio every day and paint for five or six hours. Six, five or six days a week. And I could not, and I could not keep up with the demand for my galleries. And, and that was my life, you know, and it was very easy. And oh my God, I could be so selfish.

Tim Packer [00:27:58]:
And then I had, well, the whole getting into the teaching thing. I had a, I had a show in Toronto, one of the upscale, one of the top galleries in Toronto. And this was back in about 2014. And it was like when, I’m sure when you Were in art college taking graphic design. This is what you dreamed of. So I had a solo show that was opening that night. The gallery was opening at 7 o’ clock and at 5 o’ clock they closed the gallery so that we could have an opening, right? And so then they got everything set up for, for, for the opening of the gallery. I was in the front window of the gallery, which is right, right on Yorkville street, which is like, you know, Fifth Avenue of New York kind of thing.

Tim Packer [00:28:40]:
I was in the gallery window painting. And like around 6:30, people started lining up at the gallery. And by the time they opened the doors, it was lined up down the street. The doors opened, people came in. There was, they had someone there playing live music. There was waiters walking around with trays of wine and red dots were going up on the paintings. And I just, I, you know, I, I was just kind of overcome. It’s like, oh my God, this is it.

Tim Packer [00:29:08]:
This not only was the dream, this is so far beyond the dream. I mean, my dream when I, because I quit my job and walked away from my pension as a police officer when I was 40 to give this another try. My goal was if I could ever just make as much as what I would have made had I stayed and gone on pension, then it’ll be a wash, right? Well, I far surpass that. But while I was in there, you know, just kind of, and watching the sales go up, and I was mentally crunching the numbers because this was November, and I thought, holy, you know what? I’m going to make over a quarter million dollars this year as an artist. And it just blew my mind. But very quickly another feeling came over me that it was almost uncomfortable. And I didn’t even at the time know what it was, but it basically was responsibility. It was that, like I said, I was not special.

Tim Packer [00:30:03]:
When I gave up on the dream of being an artist to join the police force, everybody said that’s probably a good idea, right? You know, when I quit my job and walked away from my pension, people thought I was crazy. And as I said, every group of artists I was ever among, there was always people who were much more naturally talented me at that time. But I realized I know what I did to get here. And I pretty much guarantee every young artist who dreams of that type of moment and that type of life, they’d be willing to do the work to get there if they just knew what to do, like. And I realized, I know what they need to do. So that’s what started me the next day I actually went down to vistech, which is the big photography video store here in Toronto. It’s like a huge kind of, you know, tech warehouse thing. And I just went in and talked to the guys.

Tim Packer [00:30:55]:
That’s where I bought my printing equipment. So I knew their experts were really good. I just said, I want to start producing high quality YouTube videos. What do I need? Now? This was pre smartphones, unfortunately. So I spent $25,000 on equipment to start my YouTube channel. But that was my whole thing. It was like, okay, I’m going to start giving back because I want to share kind of what I’d learned. And then I just realized, like I said when I got sick, I just realized if I really want to have the most impact possible, I need to turn this into an actual business.

Tim Packer [00:31:25]:
That’s where I can dedicate most of my time on it. And then I also learned, I mean, you probably know this as well, that, you know, people value what they pay for. So people pay for a course or, or pay for a program, they’re much more likely to actually take the course and then put it into action. And so all of that just convinced me that, okay, now I want to spend most of my focus on the teaching side. And that’s kind of where we’ve been for the last four years. And we just passed this year, this summer, we just passed a half million dollars in sales of my online courses. And we’re going to hit 600,000 probably later this month. So, I mean, nice.

James Kademan [00:32:00]:
Congratulations.

Tim Packer [00:32:01]:
It’s going well.

James Kademan [00:32:03]:
That’s awesome. Tell me a story about the getting into galleries.

Tim Packer [00:32:08]:
Yep.

James Kademan [00:32:08]:
How tough is that?

Tim Packer [00:32:11]:
That is very, very tough. And what galleries want. So again, we’re talking about commercial galleries. So commercial gallery is a gallery where they make their money by actually selling artists work and they pay the artist commissions and that’s how they make the work. I also really probably want to point out here, just in case there’s any artists watching, there’s another thing called vanity galleries, and they are something to be avoided at all costs. I used to get all these emails. It’s like, oh, I won’t say the name because I don’t want to get sued, but we’re a gallery in Chelsea in New York, and we love your work and we’d love to give you a show and it’s just going to cost you $5,000, right? And basically what you’re doing, they’re a gallery that makes their money by charging artists so that the artist can say, I had a show at this gallery. They don’t bring any people into the gallery.

Tim Packer [00:33:01]:
But for a gallery to be an actual bonafide gallery, they will never ask an artist to pay to show there. They are only going to show artists that they know that their clients will buy. And so they know they’re going to make money off you or they feel very confident about that. So then the question becomes, well, how do you become one of those artists.

James Kademan [00:33:20]:
That’S it’s a chicken egg scenario.

Tim Packer [00:33:23]:
And so for me, I can tell you what happened after I kind of developed the same sort of work that, that I do now. I sent a package out to about 20 galleries in the southern Ontario area near Toronto of you know, I’m an artist, I’m looking for representation. Here’s There was like printed stuff. There was a cd. That was the way back then. It was before websites. And I’d be interested, you know, in speaking about showing in your gallery. Nothing crickets.

Tim Packer [00:33:49]:
But at the same time I was doing the art festival circuit and those are the art festivals. Initially it was like it was, you know, it was the Binder Twine festival where it’s like it’s farmers and everything, a little bit of arts and crafts and you’re spending a hundred dollars to kind of get your, your booth and then gradually kind of moving up. And that’s what I suggest anyone start. I’ll start at the lowest level and keep your prices low. And as you get, as your work gets better, as you get more sales, you start moving up and up. But I was doing at that time I was doing probably about 14 art festivals a summer and legitimate art festivals. But where I was spend spending three to five hundred doll my space. I had my tent set up and I would do three, maybe $4,000 on a good weekend in sales.

Tim Packer [00:34:38]:
And then when my this I did the very first piece that fall that was in the voice of the way that I paint now, which is I’m known for, is the sun kind of coming through the trees. I did my first painting that, that you could look at now and go yeah, that stands up to everything I’ve done since. And that was back in 2004 and I was at a festival and literally five minutes after the gates open, a couple bought that painting. And. And at that time I was all over the map because I was trying everything right. So that’s another thing I’ll get into later with artists. Don’t pick a niche, don’t until you’re doing the work that people love. But anyways, that painting just like sold right away.

Tim Packer [00:35:19]:
And then I could have sold it 20 times in the next hour. Everybody came in and just like, oh my God. Oh, it’s sold. Oh. And then they just leave. They wouldn’t even look at the work that I had. Right. They were so disappointed.

Tim Packer [00:35:30]:
So I finally, like this couple said, you know, can we leave it here and come back? Because we still, we just got here and this, we want that one, but we’re going to walk around. So I took it down and wrapped it up so no one else would see it so that people would look at my other work. But after that I went home and I was going into a charity fundraising auction for the Burlington Art center here, just in, in Toronto. And, and so I submitted two paintings in this new style there as well. And at the time I was already in a couple local galleries and both those pieces that I submitted sold for more than double of what my galleries were charging for my work. And so that made me think, okay, I think this is something. And I also, I loved that painting more than anything I’d done. And I was in, I, I loved the process of painting it more than anything I’d ever done before for.

Tim Packer [00:36:18]:
So then one of my local gallery owners who, who’d seen this work really convinced me to do. There’s a big show in Toronto. It was the biggest art festival. It’s called the Toronto Indoor Art Expo. But now we’re talking about $5,000 for your booth space for a booth for a four day festival. And he was really hot to trot on my new work too. And he’s like, you got to get this out there. So I signed up for the festival.

Tim Packer [00:36:42]:
You know, it’s like, okay, cross, cross my fingers. I put my head down for two months and just cranked out a ton of work in this new style. And it was still evolving at the time too, but it was all kind of like, kind of similar work cohesive. And when I, and I had enough paintings to fill my booth twice because he said, you’re gonna sell like hotcakes. So it’s like, okay, I want to replace it. And I had a big booth anyways. The show opened at 11 o’ clock on Thursday morning. By noon I’d made back my $5,000 booth fee.

Tim Packer [00:37:14]:
By the time my wife got down there for the opening night at 5 o’, clock, I was at 10,000 in sales. And we did 18,000 in sales on the opening day. And I was back to my car every hour to get more work. I ended up doing $28,000 in sales. Over the course of the weekend, and only because I’d kind of run out of all the a quality stuff. I was going back on the Sunday, I went back digging through my basement for works that I wasn’t embarrassed of that I could still put up there. But I also had, at the end of that art festival, the business cards of 10 gallery owners who said, would you please consider showing with us? So that’s a long answer to the question. The way you get into commercial galleries is to demonstrate to them that you have an audience out there that will buy your work or that people love your work enough to buy it.

Tim Packer [00:38:05]:
And so the art festival route is a great way. Social media is another great way. Like Brooke. Well, that the artist that I talked about, she’s not in any galleries because she can’t keep up with the demand from her collectors. She just sells directly. But if she wanted to get into a gallery, she would have galleries just begging to have her, right? Because she brings all of that. She brings her whole following. If she was to have.

Tim Packer [00:38:29]:
She’s only ever had one gallery show in her life, and that was in. I ran my own gallery for about four years before COVID hit and we decided, okay, let’s. Let’s just shut this down. But it was all. It was only a gallery of my work, and it was very successful. And she’s the only artist that I ever had another show of. But I actually said to her, okay, it’s time to repay me. And by that time, she had a couple hundred thousand followers, right? So it’s like, okay, I want you to promote your show at my gallery, right? And I also took a commission off her work, but it was mainly for me to get my gallery on the map more.

Tim Packer [00:39:03]:
But the way that you get into galleries, a gallery is not very likely to invest in the potential of someone as an artist. It’s like, you first of all need to spend the time to create work that garners that type of a connection and response from the public. And then you need to be able to demonstrate to the gallery that, yes, it’s a real thing. And then you beat them off with a stick. Like, I was in 13 galleries. But I probably, over the course of the time that I was really, really active, paid painting and doing social media, really just promoting my work. I would get 10 dozen requests a year from galleries wanting to carry my work. And it’s like, no, you can only.

Tim Packer [00:39:44]:
You can only service so many galleries, right? And especially at that time, they also wanted. They were selling my prints, but they also Expected a certain amount of originals a year and it’s like there’s only so much I could paint, but that’s the thing. So I really recommend for artists between social media and doing art festivals, because the other thing about, about both of those things is that’s also how you can gauge the public’s response to your work. Because you need to get three things to have a successful career. You need to love the process of creating the work that you create, whatever that process is of doing it. You need to love and be proud of the work that you can stand up to, up and say, yes, this is what I do. But as importantly, and the thing that most artists don’t consider is you need to have enough of the public love your work that they are going to create a demand that you are not going to be able to keep up to, which just keeps causing the prices to go up and up. And so it’s like, well, you’re not just going to fall on, this is my style, I’m going to do it.

Tim Packer [00:40:49]:
It’s an evolutionary process, right? It took me five years of painting full time to develop what eventually became my voice. But by being out there and doing the art festivals, like I could gauge what do I love in terms of the process, what do I love in terms of the finished work. But I was getting every couple of weeks feedback from the public about what they loved. And so it’s like, okay, well wherever that lined up with what I love doing, it’s like, okay, I should maybe dig deep here and then see where that leads, right? And so by doing that, it’s that constant kind of monitoring those three things, it’s kind of guideposts of guiding you. This is kind of this, this ties into what I really love to do, but which also seems to have found an audience that is really connecting with it. And most importantly, they don’t just say I love it, they get out their wallets, right? So that’s the important part, that’s the important and that’s it. There’s, I should say too though, a lot of people say, well, I don’t want to sell my art. It’s like, that’s fine.

Tim Packer [00:41:45]:
Like then it’s a hobby and then it’s great and then you don’t need to worry about any of this stuff. But for me, the reason I left the police force was that I, I realized that what I really loved in more than anything else was painting. And there was a, there was about a 10 year period where I didn’t paint at All. And then I just realized, okay, the. I want to spend my life being able to go in my studio and paint every day. I can either wait for retirement, which would have happened around now, I’ve been doing this now full time for 25 years. Or it’s like, well, I was already married to my wife, who had a very good job but was not rich. Because, you know, the options are marry someone who’s wealthy, who’s going to support you in just going into your studio painting, win the lottery, or figure out a way that you can actually make a living by going in and doing what you love to do.

Tim Packer [00:42:43]:
And then you not only will be able to go in and paint every day, you’ll be required to. I mean, there were times of, you know, I. Sometimes you get a bit of a spell where it’s like, okay, I’m burned out. Maybe I need a day or two off. You know, my wife would go like, it’s noon on this. Like, because I would paint. When I left the police force, we had two young boys at home, so I was their main caregiver. During Monday to Friday, my wife had a very good job with one of the banks.

Tim Packer [00:43:09]:
And so she would be gone all day at work, but on the weekends, those were days that I especially. Those were the days that I could get in there and paint for six hours. And, you know, I can remember having coffee, you know, on a Saturday morning, kind of watching TV or whatever, and it’s like 11 o’. Clock. And my wife would be like, hey, get in there and paint. Like, you know, work. Yeah. So it’s not.

Tim Packer [00:43:29]:
Not even just that you get to do it, but it becomes a requirement. And then you got your galleries emailing you saying, oh, well, we’ve just, you know, we’ve sold four pieces this week and we’ve only got two left. When can we get some more? And that’s why it’s so important that you love what you’re doing. Because I did have a couple times where I kind of fell upon a certain technique, style, kind of process where, wow, the public really went crazy over it, but I didn’t love it. And it’s like, well, I already had a job that I was good at. I didn’t trade that to let this turn into a job. And if you don’t love it, you’re not going to want to go into the studio and just create the volume of work that’s necessary to feed. As my wife used to say, get in there and feed the wood chipper.

Tim Packer [00:44:17]:
That’s what she used to call the galleries, right. Because as fast as I could sell, as fast as I could send them out, they would sell them. And it’s like, get in there. It’s, you know, it’s like, I think Bill Burr talks about, you know, the Jackson 5 and they’re with their dad saying, get in there and raise. You know, it was, it’s the same kind of thing. So it’s got to be careful what you wish for. But, but yeah, it’s that, that was kind of my life now then. And like I say now it’s, it’s more focused on the teaching and we just, I mean, I’m living my dream life.

Tim Packer [00:44:48]:
We just moved into our dream home. I’m up just north of Toronto. So we’re on a, one of Canada’s top golf courses in a golf community on Georgian Bay, Kabul Beach. So in the summer I golf a lot. But now that we’re, that’s winding down because I’ve been back in the studio for the last couple of weeks. But I mean, typically in the summer, you know, I might work a dozen or 16 hours a week and mainly it’s on the art academy. And then in the wintertime that’s when I really get into painting, creating more courses. All right, all that kind of stuff.

Tim Packer [00:45:18]:
But yeah, it’s, it’s been a very good life.

James Kademan [00:45:23]:
That is incredible. Tell me a story about the number of people percentage wise that say, like, yes, I’m going to make a living doing this and how many of them actually do, regardless of the level of living that they’re making?

Tim Packer [00:45:37]:
Less. Well, less than 10%. Okay. In a recent study, what was it? Recent study, 20% of artists made less than $10,000 a year and half of them made less than 5. So the vast majority, if they were depending on. And these are people who considered themselves full time artists now, they probably had part time jobs or they had spouses who were kind of paying the bills, but the vast majority don’t. And it’s kind of like becoming a professional athlete or professional singer. Right.

Tim Packer [00:46:10]:
Like, you know, you can become, you can become very good, but there’s a difference between that and making a living or being Taylor Swift. Right. Where you know, I think, I think last year one of every 16 songs downloaded on the Internet was a Taylor Swift song.

James Kademan [00:46:27]:
Oh my God. Surreal statistics.

Tim Packer [00:46:29]:
Yeah, but, but you don’t have to be quite that good. But there is the thing called the Pareto effect, right. Which is that a small percentage of people responsible for the majority of outcomes doesn’t matter what you look at, whether it’s authors, whether it’s PhDs in terms of papers they write, whatever. And that it can be sometimes referred to as the 80, 20 was more often. It’s. It’s kind of like the square root. So it’d be like, you know, if you go to an art festival and there’s a hundred artists showing there, those top 10 artists, their total sales are going to be equal to the other 90. Sure.

Tim Packer [00:47:02]:
And it’s not a curve. It kind of is a flat line and then it goes up.

James Kademan [00:47:07]:
Hockey stick.

Tim Packer [00:47:07]:
Yeah. Yeah. So. And I’m a Canadian. Right. So it’s like, yeah, you got to get off the. Off the blade, onto the shaft. But the reason most artists don’t get to make a living, it’s not because they’re lazy.

Tim Packer [00:47:22]:
It’s not because they’re not trying hard enough. It’s because they don’t know what it is they should be doing. Because they’re often they’re confused about, well, this, which village they’re in and what actually do they need to do to succeed there. It’s because I believe if someone has a passion for art, and so by passion, it’s not just loving the thing. My wife gets mad at me, but I’m going to do this again, too. I use her as an example for golf. Like, she golfs about 90 rounds a year and she’s still a 25 handicap because she just really enjoys going out there playing. Okay, golf, where she’s pretty much a bogey golfer.

Tim Packer [00:47:57]:
Right. For it to be a passion, you not only need to love doing the thing, you have to have an overwhelming burning desire to master everything about it. And you need to be willing to do the work to actually achieve that. And if you have that, as long as you’ve got a work ethic and you’ve got a willingness to learn, but you’ve got a plan in terms of, okay, where do I focus that effort? I believe 100% that anyone can actually reach the point where they can become a successful artist. And the main reason is, first of all, most artists don’t know what they need to do. Also, the majority of them just aren’t willing to work hard enough. Most of them will give up. Most your competition going to give up.

Tim Packer [00:48:38]:
Right. But if you’re willing to do it and you’ve got that burning desire and you’ve got that passion, it totally is, I say, not only doable. The thing that actually got me to quit my job as a police officer and to get Back into art. I read an article by Harley Brown. It was an interview with Harley Brown. He’s a fairly well known Canadian artist and he used to have a monthly column in the International Artist magazine where. But they were asking him about success and talent. And he said, talent is a myth.

Tim Packer [00:49:06]:
It’s talent’s just your skills, knowledge, experience and creativity, they can all be improved upon. And he said, if you have the desire to willing to do the work, I guarantee you can be successful. And he said, I said, not 98% sure, 100%. And at the time, I was an artist who was not painting because I’d given up on the dream because I decided I wasn’t talented enough. And I thought my initial reaction was to heck with you, Harley Brown. I bet you’re one of those gifted people, you know, they all say that, but they all say it was just hard work. But the rest of us know there was some pixie dust that got sprinkled on you at birth and that’s why you’re successful. And it really hurt because I realized, you know, I gave up on my dream like 15 years ago and it kind of put it aside.

Tim Packer [00:49:55]:
And what he’s saying is like, well, maybe if I’d stuck with it, I could be living my dream life now instead of. I was doing a job I liked. I was very good at being a police officer. I enjoyed the job, but I didn’t love it. And a little voice in the back of my head said, well, what if he’s right? What if he is right? Like, I’m only 35 maybe. So I, I decided, I don’t believe, I don’t. I’m not fully bought into this whole growth mindset kind of thing. But I’m going to live my life.

Tim Packer [00:50:24]:
For years though, I believe it. And so that meant for me a few things that meant. And I’d heard that, you know, you need to paint at least three times a week if you want to improve. Because it’s just like going to the gym, you know, you can’t go once a month and work out for three hours and expect to get any result. It’s that cumulative kind of effect. So I started scheduling my painting time first. I also started looking at what are the things I’m not good at. I sucked at composition, the way in which we arrange the shapes on a painting to create a visual dance for the viewer’s eye.

Tim Packer [00:50:53]:
So I dug deep into kind of learning that just anything that I knew that was a weakness, that up until then, even when I painted on My vacation, you know, I’d avoid certain things. I dove into them to kind of make them my strengths. And within a year I had gotten a lot better and I was now getting work into juried shows. I won an award, people. All of a sudden I was starting to. Every year I’d have like an open house, just friends and family, and they would come and buy my work. And we went from. I remember in 1997, I was having success as kind of a.

Tim Packer [00:51:26]:
As a side hustle, kind of as a hobbyist artist. And you know, I’d won some awards, I’d been in some prestigious shows, I was getting commissions. I was doing a lot of high realism portraits at the time. And my wife said to me, like, I’m so proud of you, this is great, but we have two young kids and they’re going to be going to university and please don’t ever come to me and tell me you want to quit your job to paint full time. Because that wasn’t the deal. When we got married, she didn’t even know about my art background, right? I was just a police officer. And then by 1999, I just had, I’d just been elected to the Canadian Society of Painters and Watercolor. I was elected a senior signature member of the Canadian Institute of Portrait Artists.

Tim Packer [00:52:07]:
I just gotten into the biggest juried show Canada had ever held, the Millennium show by the Federation of Canadian Artists. And I had about 15 portrait commissions waiting to do. We just had a studio open house where I sold all kinds of work. And then my wife said to me after the show, you know, after everybody left and we were cleaning up, she’s like, okay, you need to sit down and we need to talk. And I thought, oh no, right, because when you see that in the movies, it never ends up good. Right?

James Kademan [00:52:36]:
Yeah, we need to talk is not a good thing that you want to hear.

Tim Packer [00:52:39]:
But anyways, what she said, we need to talk. Not about if you leave the police force to paint full time, but when you leave the police force to paint full time. This was in October of 1999. And it’s like, well, there’s a new millennium starting in two months, right? But then she said something that was really important. And I also think that has been really key to my success. So my wife was a banker, so I’m the dreamer, she’s the down to earth practical one, right? And she said, I, I believe that this is maybe what we should be doing, but not so that you can be fulfilled. She said, I’m more concerned about the long term economic well being of our family. And I think we might be better served by you pursuing art full time based on what I’d already shown her over the last previous five years when I got serious about it.

Tim Packer [00:53:26]:
And so then she said like, so I’m okay with you quitting your job and starting as a full time artist in 2000 January 1, as long as you’ll commit to me now, if it ever becomes clear this is not in our best long term interest, you’ll put on a suit and go back and get a regular job. And at that time I was a detective in the Commercial Crime unit, our fraud squad. So I was investigating frauds over $2 million. I’d had the month long computer crime course at the RCMP college in Ottawa. So I had a set of skills that was in really high demand in the corporate world. We were losing probably five people a year from my office that were quitting and cashing in their pension to go work in the private sector. So I knew that I had that to fall back on. Luckily I didn’t have to, but it was close.

Tim Packer [00:54:13]:
The first I probably had about a two year grace period and then by year three it was kind of like, okay, I’m still struggling here, I’m making $20,000 a year. There was always a little bit of progress but you know, there were a number of times where I thought, oh, we’re going to have the talk soon. And then I’d have like four sales of work. But then once that, that show at the Toronto Art Expo where I did 28000 in the weekend, I can still remember driving home that the opening night where I did 18000 sales and I just said she was driving because I’d had a couple drinkies. As you can imagine, right after five years this happens. I said, remember this night, Remember this moment, this was the, this was the day that our lives changed. And, and like she said to me, always the practical one, you can’t be so sure of that. And I said no, after what we saw today, like we’re, we’re never ever going to even have the conversation about was it a good idea for me to quit the police force? And we’re certainly never going to have the conversation about gee, maybe now it’s time to talk about getting another job.

Tim Packer [00:55:20]:
And that literally was like I say that after that show I ended up picking up like three galleries that, that I decided to go with and then I continued doing festivals for a number of years and then my earnings just went from like the year before that was about 25,000. And then that year I think I did 40. And then the next year it was like 60 and then 80. And then I just kept going up because as you get as more and more people see the work and they all have that reaction and you can’t keep up with the demand. The only way to slow down the, the, the, the sales is raise the prices. Raise the prices. So I really didn’t do anything different business wise to go from like $35,000 a year up until I hit like $150,000 a year other than just raising the price as the demand kept going up. And then we got into scaling with the limited edition prints.

Tim Packer [00:56:13]:
Right. And, and so then that was a big thing. And then we started selling online and now the art academy. Now I got my book coming out. So. Yeah, because I did realize at a certain point, you know, the painting is great, but it’s a hamster wheel. As soon as you stop running on that wheel, you know, the tap of money shuts off. And so pretty early on I got into the whole kind of self publishing.

Tim Packer [00:56:40]:
And then just as technology is making everything so more every, everything is kind of like what printing was, right? Where you needed to have a huge investment of cash and expertise to be able to do the things that would scale your work, well, now you can do them yourself. And so it’s the same even with the publishing. Like we’re self publishing this through Amazon, Kindle, right? It’s of course that’s, that’s a whole other six months of my life spent first of all writing and rewriting and rewriting and then learning about that. But I also find I’m a, I’m a voracious learner too. So when I see something new that it’s like, oh, well, maybe look into it, see if it makes sense. And then it’s like, yeah, let’s do that. And I guess I just say the other reason too, why I, I mean some days I look back and I think, oh, maybe I should have just stayed just painting in my studio every day and not having to worry about any of all this other stuff. But my son started working for me part time when he was in college.

Tim Packer [00:57:37]:
College, so doing I taught him how to do the printing and the publishing. So now he was in his summers. He would spend the whole summer printing and creating inventory so that I, I didn’t have to do that and I could paint. And then when he graduated university, and then he was also helping with social media, filming and editing. Videos and kind of taking the photos and doing the posts and all that kind of stuff. And, and so that was just part time. And then when he left, when he finished university, I asked him, I said like, you know, if you want, you know, do whatever you want, but if you want to kind of work in the business, then I’ll work to creating an evergreen business here that you’re going to be able to carry on with long after I’m gone. And so that was when we really got heavily into the self publishing and then now with the Art Academy because even though I do the, I have my mastermind that where we do the weekly calls, 80% of the income comes off people just purchasing the courses that I don’t have to do anything with.

Tim Packer [00:58:41]:
Right. It’s just the recorded courses. And then now we’ve got the book coming out. So I feel that that’s what keeps me going in terms of, okay, how many different revenue streams can we create that are going to be evergreen, that aren’t going to require me to keep running on the hamster wheel so that he’s going to be able to, to continue with this business long after I’m gone?

James Kademan [00:59:02]:
Sure. Tell me a story about the Art Academy. You essentially systematized becoming a professional artist.

Tim Packer [00:59:10]:
Yep.

James Kademan [00:59:11]:
How difficult was it to just sit down and say like, okay, how do you become a professional artist?

Tim Packer [00:59:17]:
It was pretty easy actually because I knew the steps, which I mean, I guess that helps with me being, being a fraud investigator. Right. Is kind of like examining a lot of stuff and data. And when I, when I looked at becoming a full time artist, that was the first thing I did was I studied the careers of successful artists and studied like what had they done, what was the path, what were the commonalities? And what I found was it’s really no different than, you know, any of the, pretty much anything else. But even some of the creative stuff is like the very first thing is you need to master the skills and the concepts. Right. You need to master drawing, you need to master composition, you need to master light and shadow, you need to master color theory, perspective, positive and negative shapes. So, so like that’s the way I structured the course.

Tim Packer [01:00:08]:
The whole, whole part of my teaching, the first part of it is really about first of all equipping them with the, the skills and the knowledge in terms of creating art that you can now take. And now then the next stage is like what, what separates all the artists that are really successful is they have a unique voice. Right. It’s the same as music Right. I mean, I love watching American Idol. I love watching the Voice. But there are a ton of artists that get up there that they sing. They’re technically perfect.

Tim Packer [01:00:37]:
But it’s like, yeah, you sound like they have five people like that every season on there. But then you’ll hear someone that. It’s like, oh, my God. Like, I would know that voice as soon as I heard it. So then it was like, okay, once you’ve developed all the skills, what’s the process by which you then go on this journey to find your own unique voice? And I’ve systematized that, and I’ll tell it to your viewers, too. And it’s actually the same as what people do in music, right? If you want to become a successful musician, have a band, whatever, you don’t just go in your room and start trying to write music and figure out how you play this thing called the guitar. Right? You learn the skills, but then you play the music of a ton of other people, and you learn how to play, you know, rock and roll and country and all of this kind of stuff, and you’re. And then you’re listening to.

Tim Packer [01:01:26]:
But what do I really love doing? And then once you’ve mastered the ability to kind of, you know, all of these influences, then you go, okay, well, let me see what I can do. And that’s what I tell my artists to do, is look for. Look for work that just reaches out and makes you just go, oh, my God, look at this. Right? Just stops in your track. Well, an artist that does that kind of work, that’s someone you want to use as an influence. And so then what you want to do is examine them very, very closely. It’s like, what’s the filter that they use to translate the real world to their art? Right? So, like, an easy one I say to people is Vincent van Gogh, because everybody knows that he took the real world, but he put it on canvas just in strokes of individual color, broken color, to create a representation of the. That was his filter.

Tim Packer [01:02:15]:
So it’s like what I suggest people do. Okay, first of all, you’ve. You’ve mentally kind of figured out that’s the filter. Now go try and do that. If you’re really just starting out, there’s nothing wrong with copying an artist painting as long as you know that there for copyright reasons, you’re only allowed to do it for learning purposes or for enjoyment. Right. You can’t sell it. You can’t post it.

Tim Packer [01:02:37]:
You can’t. Can’t do anything with it. It just basically stays in your home, you can give it to your mom, whatever. But then what you need to do is find your own subject matter that you want to paint and then try to replicate that process and those techniques so that you can create as though Vincent van Gogh was painting this painting, right? And then once you’ve learned all that you need to learn there and what you. What you’re doing is you’re learning a bunch of different techniques. You’re. You’re really pushing your creativity and trying to see the world in a different way. You’re really broadening your experiences.

Tim Packer [01:03:10]:
Once you’ve. And you’re learning about what you like to do and what. What you like in terms of the outcome, then go do it with another influence and another one, and another one and another one. And then once you’ve done it with a bunch of influences, and hopefully influences that are very different, then you just go into pure process mode, where it’s like, okay, now I’ve added all of this extra tools to my artistic belt. Now I’m going to go in the studio and just paint something I want to paint, but I’m going to draw on all of this stuff, and I’m going to play the what if game. What if I started it like this artist, but then what if I came in and did this and what if I did that? And when you’re in process mode, the most important thing to understand is because you’re doing something you don’t know how to do, you’re very likely to fail. You’re going to create a lot of paintings that don’t work out. And this is also where a lot of artists get in trouble, right? Because they say, well, I’m going to try something new.

Tim Packer [01:04:04]:
And they go and they try, and it doesn’t work out. So they kind of scurry back to their comfort zone. Then they see something else, oh, I’m going to try this. And it doesn’t work out, they scurry back to their comfort zone. Now, just the thought of trying something new, that gets the lizard brain kind of going, right? Because now you’re experiencing the fear of failure. All of a sudden, the amygdala kicks in, you get stressed, you get a panic, and so what do they do? They stay in their comfort zone for the rest of their life, and they never go grow. So the key to understand is when you’re in process mode, the very first thing you do is recognize I’m in process mode. And the first thing I do is give permission for this painting to fail.

Tim Packer [01:04:43]:
That The. The intent here is not to create a finished painting. The intent is to try the thing, whatever it is, and then learn from that. And that way, when you create the worst painting you’ve ever created in your life, that was a successful day. You did the thing. Because here’s the other thing about painting. It’s not just knowing about what to do, it’s knowing about what not to do. And when you have a painting that you know the worst.

Tim Packer [01:05:11]:
I always said to my students, I would rather have a spectacular failure than a mediocre success like as a painting. And. And they said, what do you mean by that? I said, well, I would rather have a painting that was on its way to becoming what I thought this might be one of the best paintings I’ve ever done. And then I take it into the ditch. I would rather have that than just have a painting go really well and go, yeah, that’s another good version of what I do. And they were like, why? I said, well, because they didn’t learn anything in the one that just went well. But I know at the very least what not to do next time. But then here’s the whole key about that process mode, too.

Tim Packer [01:05:45]:
That’s where breakthroughs happen. So you’re gonna have, you know, and that’s also why I recommend you, you master all the skills and the concepts first. Because if you do that, you’re still going to be creating a lot of work that’s sellable because you’ve. You’ve mastered the skills, you’ve mastered concepts, you’ve. You’ve got a good composition. If you’re just in there in process mode, pushing paint around, you could just be creating bad paintings for the next 50 years. Right? But. But when you’re in process mode, that’s where all of a sudden you create a painting, which was, for me, that one called Forest Window, where it was like, oh, my God, I think this is something special.

Tim Packer [01:06:23]:
And then you revert back into product mode. So product mode is where we just stick with the skills, the. The mediums, the techniques, the things that we’re competent and confident in. And if you stick with those, whatever the bar is for a good painting for you, you should hit it every time. But if you just stick there, that bar won’t move in 20 years, 30 years, you just might get a little faster at producing it. And so that’s why it’s so important to go into process mode. And then the other mode is practice mode. That’s like life drawing.

Tim Packer [01:06:53]:
You know, it’s like doing the Daily sketchbook. It’s just doing. Doing color swatch drills to mix color. There’s no intent for a painting. You’re just doing drills to kind of nail a skill. But you constantly go through all three of these different modes of painting. And if you’re doing that and you’re gauging your reaction to how much you love doing this, how much you love the painting and how much the public loves it, then when you hit that, now we have business solutions and problems. And until you hit that, there’s a lot of artists.

Tim Packer [01:07:25]:
They’re like, it breaks my heart because I see all these people out there selling artist marketing programs, how to market your art, how you know, it’s like until you hit that place, you don’t have a marketing problem, you have an art problem. And there’s no amount of business solutions that are going to fix an art problem. So my whole teaching is, first of all, let’s solve the art problem. Let’s find out whatever your voice is going to be. Let’s get you there. I’ve had one of my students, she found it in a year and she took off even more than Brooke. Her name’s Emily Valentine and she’s just killing. It took me five years of doing that, Find my voice.

Tim Packer [01:08:02]:
But then once you’ve got that, now actually we can use business solutions to scale your earnings again. Whether it’s going through galleries, whether it’s publishing, all kinds of things. Right. But yeah, so that’s how I structured the academy was first of all, let’s deal on from the very beginning. And I structured it too, in an order that I love. I think it’s. Ferris talks about dominoes, you know, like, what’s the biggest domino, if you knocked it over right now, would have the biggest impact on everything you do now and going forward. So that’s how I structured my course with like the biggest dominoes.

Tim Packer [01:08:36]:
I mean, the first one is mindset. Second one is understanding the art world and the different villages. Then it’s drawing, composition, kind of, and then eventually going in process. And then, okay, now it’s selling your work. Then it’s, you know, all that kind of stuff. So I just. And I looked at every artist that I. That I know that’s successful and even historical.

Tim Packer [01:08:56]:
That’s the path that they took. So I just figured that, yeah, that is cool.

James Kademan [01:09:03]:
It systematize everything. And it’s so interesting to hear someone that I’m trying to think when my. I’m trying to think what professor said this because we were in graphic Design. The students that I was with were in graphic design at the time. There were other students that were going for fine art, and they looked down on the graphic design people. And I had one of my professors that was like, these people are dumb because they’re going to school for fine art with the hopes that they’re going to be able to sell their fine art.

Tim Packer [01:09:34]:
Yep.

James Kademan [01:09:34]:
And they’re looking down at us because we’re in essentially art that we’re just saying, yeah, we’re going to help people sell stuff, so we’re going to get paid for it.

Tim Packer [01:09:40]:
But not only that, in I don’t know what it’s like down the US but our like. So we have our most famous group of ours called the Group of Seven, that kind of. They were like our impressionists. And they are the most famous artists in Canada. It was around the 1900s. And they were all graphic designers initially. Because in graphic design, it was all about skill, Right. It wasn’t about what you feel.

Tim Packer [01:10:07]:
Right. It was, first of all, you need to draw, you need to understand color, you need to understand design. All of the things that go into creating great art. In the village of commercial sales, because the average person still appreciates that. They might go to a museum or a public gallery and politely nod at a banana duct tape to the wall. But when it comes to buying art, they’re going to hang in their house. They’re buying art that makes them feel something they want to feel. And for the majority of people, it’s all of those things I talked.

Tim Packer [01:10:40]:
It’s all of the stuff that was important in art up until the 1950s. And for most people, that’s still what’s important when they’re. It kills me. You see, people say, I don’t know anything about art, but I know what I like. And I’m thinking, how have we let these Poindexters take over art like that? Right? There’s no other thing where we let people tell us what we should like. Right. If you’re a restaurant critic and you’re pushing food that no one likes, you’re not going to be a restaurant critic very long. Because the whole idea critics, it never was to tell us what we should like.

Tim Packer [01:11:18]:
It was to be someone who could vet all of the stuff out there and based on what we like, say, well, you’ll probably like this, right? That’s what music critics do. That’s what restaurant critics do. What do art critics do? No, they tell you what you should like, and it’s like we let them take over I mean, there’s a whole lot of reasons why that art was traditionally only for the, you know, the people with a lot of money. And then once all this nonsense started happening in the 50s and 60s, the average person just said, well, I don’t know, so turn their backs on it. Politicians just handed over the keys to all the grants and funding and all that. Looks like they’re university professors. I guess they know what they’re talking about. Right? But, but, yeah, but for the average public and for the average artist, I don’t think most people that end up going to take a fine art degree or graphic design is because you fell in love with drawing, you fell in love with painting and you thought, what’s the only way I can make a living that that takes advantage of that thing I love? And so the great message out there for artists is if you just want to create work that shows mastery of skills, mastery of concepts and, and create beautiful work that people just really want to enjoy and make their homes better and, and you know, it just engages them in a way that they love, there is definitely a place and that’s where the majority of commerce that goes on in art goes on fair.

James Kademan [01:12:41]:
I love it. Tim, where can people find you?

Tim Packer [01:12:45]:
Okay, so my art Academy is at www.timpackerartacademy.com and if they go there, they can also. Right on the homepage we’ve got. So I’ve got my new book coming out, you Can Sell youl Art, which is a step by step guide to creating a livable income from your art. If they go to the Timpaker Art Academy website, they can also give us their email and we’ll send them five chapters for the book absolutely free. So the book has 38 chapters. It covers everything that I talked about from kind of just thinking I like art and I’d like to make a living. What are some of the things you need to know right up to the end of. To getting to the point where you can make a decent living.

Tim Packer [01:13:25]:
And I’ve taken. They’re not the first five chapters. It’s the five chapters that I think would have the most impact if that’s all someone read. So even within the five chapters that they can get for free, there’s information there that I guarantee is going to clarify some of this murkiness about, you know, what’s involved in making a living for an artist and what should I be focusing on.

James Kademan [01:13:48]:
Nice. I love it. Tim, thank you so much for being on the show.

Tim Packer [01:13:51]:
My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

James Kademan [01:13:53]:
This has Been Authentic Business Adventures, the business program that brings you the struggle stories and triumphant successes of business owners across the land. My name is James Kademan and Authentic Business Adventures is brought to you by Calls On Call, offering call answering and receptionist services for service businesses across the country. On the web https://callsoncall.com and of course, the Bold Business book, a book for the entrepreneur in all of us, available wherever fine books are sold. If you’re listening or watching this on the web, if you could do us a huge favor, give it a big old thumbs up, subscribe and of course, share it with your entrepreneurial friends and those friends that deep down inside, you know, have that little artist brain that’s got to get out because there’s a lot of us. Yeah. Maybe they’re stuck in that job. That little 9 to 5 thing that they always think of the movie up in the Air and I can’t think of the actor’s name. There’s George Clooney and this other guy.

James Kademan [01:14:44]:
And George Clooney asked the question of the guy, how much did they offer you to give up on your dreams?

Tim Packer [01:14:50]:
Yeah.

James Kademan [01:14:51]:
And the guy went to school to be a chef or something like that. The guy’s like $30,000.

Tim Packer [01:14:58]:
Well, the thing too about with art is it’s like most of us get that desire kind of figurative or, you know, metaphorically beat out of us.

James Kademan [01:15:11]:
Yes. Put that under the rug.

Tim Packer [01:15:13]:
It’s like, you can’t make a living as an artist. You can’t do this, you can’t. And then we end up, you know, it’s like, well, maybe I’ll be an architect. I’ll do landscape architecture, I’ll be a graphic designer. I’ll do something where it at least has something to do with that. But the thought, like, when I was a kid, I didn’t even know what I do now was a thing I didn’t think. Like, I didn’t think you could go into your studio, just paint work that you wanted to paint and make a very good living from that. Right.

Tim Packer [01:15:44]:
No one was teaching us that like the fine art people, because they were not concerned about sales. Right. They were concerned about how you feel. And what is, you know, how is this expressing, you know, late, you know, the angst against, you know, late, late stage capitalism and criticizing society and kind of all of the, this kind of stuff that was going in the, you know, for the academic kind of thing. But they weren’t teaching them to say, well, you know, like to be able to create great work that people are going to want to buy and hang in their homes. That was not the thing. But the thing is that is, that is the majority of commerce that goes on with art. And that is the thing that all of us, when we started out as kids, I think it’s like if you said, of all those villages I suggested, which one would you like to be in? And I think most of them would be, well, yeah, what that guy’s doing.

Tim Packer [01:16:32]:
I want to be able to go in my studio and paint work and have an army of people love my work, pay me money and then treat almost like rock stars.

James Kademan [01:16:42]:
Doesn’t sound terrible. Sounds like a pretty sweet life.

Tim Packer [01:16:45]:
I’ve been out. I remember I went to a Matchbox 20 concert. One of my favorite bands I like to listen to when I’m painting. And I went there with my wife and my son, sister in law and a bunch of friends and. And so we were in, in the line and you know, we’re going to refill our water bottles and there was a woman there then she, she didn’t figure out where the button was to press. And I was like, oh, yeah, you just need to press this button. And she turned around, she said, thank you. And then she went, oh, my God, are you Tim Packer? You know, it doesn’t happen all the time, but it happens often enough.

Tim Packer [01:17:13]:
And of course I was just like, oh, I love this. And my wife just hates that, right? Because she’s like, he’s got a big enough head as it is. And so she was like, oh my God, can I give you a hug? I love your work. Can I follow you on YouTube and all that kind of stuff? And I went back and my wife was like, don’t even say, right? But it is kind, it is kind of cool, right?

James Kademan [01:17:32]:
They don’t do that with bankers, do they?

Tim Packer [01:17:33]:
No, they don’t.

James Kademan [01:17:35]:
That’s awesome, Tim. Thank you so much for being on the show. Let’s see here. Past episodes can be found morning, noon and night. The podcast link found at: DrawInCustomers.com Thank you for joining us. We will see you next week. I want you to stay awesome and if you do nothing else, enjoy your business.