Rogers - I just love to make things: learn the secrets to making money while staying passionate about your art and craft

If you want to paint, craft, illustrate, or design, and make it lucrative and exciting, then this is the book for you.

I was reading today that for every person on our planet, there are fifty birds. Wow! I would love to meet my fifty birds. They are all out there, and we dont even know which ones are ours. Work with me here on this metaphor. Im going somewhere with it.

If you think of the life of your career as having fifty birds, what would they be? Lets let them equal fifty meaningful events or highlights in your career. They are out there, but like your birds, you just dont know what they are yet. You wont know until you reach the end of your life and look back; but in the meantime, they will happen.

Can you picture it? Can you see a long timeline of your life and those dots and burststhose fifty eventsstrung along the line? This book is going to help you find some of those birds. Its going to help you create magical moments in your career. Think of yourself as an explorer, as an adventurer. Rise to the challenge.

In this book, Ive distilled all Ive learned from more than three decades as an artist, agent, and teacher, to make your journey to creative success as easy and smooth as possible. Youll discover how to stay in touch with your creative passion, get great at your work, and deal with the psychological hurdles that we all face. Youll learn how to find opportunities that, like the birds, are out there just waiting for you. Ill show you the hottest markets (the ones buying the most art), what kind of work art directors buy, and how to get the gig.

Youll meet some of the top art directors in the business. Theyll share what they look for and where they find artists to work with. Ill help you match your own unique skill set and creative style with the right creative career. Then youll put all this together in your own customized game plan. Get ready to dive in and enjoy!

Big Red, 36" 72" (91 183 cm), 1989. Oil paint on canvas.

Im going to tell you about my creative life story in a nutshell for two reasons. One, I want you to see how one thing leads to the next. And two, I want to give you a little history on creative opportunities and how its gotten so much better for the creative person. It really has.

I always wanted to be an artist. There were basically five careers for girls when I was a kid: teacher, nurse, beautician, secretary, and housewife. To say I wanted to make a living as an artist was like saying, I want to be the Pope. Welcome to the 1960s.

Art and creativity were valued in our house; my mother had studied with Stuart Davis at the New School in New York and worked in an ad agency writing copy in the 40s. In the 60s, from humble beginnings on our dining room table, she created an international business called Smokenders.

Im the third generation of female entrepreneurs. My maternal grandmother had a chic clothing shop in the 30s and sustained it throughout the height of the Great Depression by holding a weekly raffle for her loyal customers, the wealthy coal mine owners wives in Pennsylvania. My mother, as a young girl, would go around weekly and collect 25 cents from each lady. The winner won a stylish, extravagant dress worth $2.50 that Grandma Lillian had bought wholesale from New York City on her regular trips to the garment district.

Lesson learned: Creativity can help you survive any obstacle.

Being from an entrepreneurial family, I was exposed to a business mentality. How to find creative solutions to problems, how to think outside the box, how to focus intensely on your goal. My father often said, To be great at business, you have to eat and sleep the business. The term workaholic hadnt been invented yet, obviously!

While my peers were going off to schools to major in English and history, I went to art school in northern California in the early 70s. It was a dream come trueart school and palm trees.

After graduation, it was off to rural New Jersey to teach middle school art. I was dying to have my own classroom to teach art to kids. It was primarily a factory town, and I gave those kids my heart and soul. I asked the phone company to donate old colored phone wire for jewelry projects. Teachers donated their old lipsticks and eye shadow for my students to use to draw portraitsanything that would make a good experience for these kids who didnt have that much.

My principalbless himlet me do anything I wanted. I wrote a grant for a Super 8 camera to do animation with the kids and didnt get it. He said, You know what? I can find the money for you to do this. So, I got a little movie camera, a tripod, a couple of rolls of film, a little hand splicer, and I taught my kids animation through claymation and stop-motion paintings. It was fantastic. We showed the final work to the entire school.