Have you ever thought about designing a calendar and then sat down to sketch the first page but realized you don’t know where to start or are afraid it just won’t work? So you close your iPad and go get a snack? You’re not alone!
Twelve paintings plus a cover feels like a mountain, especially when you are fitting art around a job, kids, and everything else that fills a week. Almost every artist I know has a calendar idea sitting in a folder somewhere, waiting for “next year”.
So I want to tell you about Elena.
In this post you’ll see exactly how one artist turned calendars into a top selling product, what she learned the first round, and what she is doing differently this year.
meet the artist
Elena of pintalustika is an urban sketcher and illustrator. She’s originally from Spain, but she has lived in Washington DC and New York and loves to paint the places she lives and visits. Painting watercolor, on location, sitting on a rock in the wind when necessary (and probably answering lots of questions from curious passers-by).
Here is the part to focus on if you are reading this while doubting whether you have the time: she is not a full-time artist. She has a full-time job in museum data analytics and user research, and two little kids. She picked painting back up in 2021 after a dry spell.
Her Etsy shop is now past 1,000 sales.
starting small on purpose
Elena started by painting custom house portraits, and only after doing about 10 of those did she let herself buy a scanner to scan her watercolors. Then she bought a professional printer for her art prints.
When she moved back to Spain though, shipping across borders got expensive and complicated, she moved everything to print on demand.
Then came calendars (see them in her shop here).
year one: two calendars, one printer test
She didn’t start with a big launch. She started with two calendars: one of Nordic houses, one of Washington DC, just to see what would happen. In the beginning, she sold them on Etsy and in local markets to get a feel for what worked best.
This is where I see so many artists go wrong! They want to do it all the first year. They’ve got 10 ideas for 10 calendars, so they start 10 different plans and finish exactly none of them. Elena did the right thing by starting small and simple and knowing that she could grow her calendar portfolio in the following years if she wanted to.
the hard part is finishing
Her story illustrates what I see so often: the hard part of a calendar is not talent, it’s finishing. Most artists never get to “done”, not because they couldn’t paint twelve pieces, but because twelve is the number where a project stops being a rabbit hole and starts being a commitment. BUT Elena finished. That alone put her in a very small group: artists who are actually willing to start and finish 12 illustrations in a series.
year two: the new york surprise
Year two she added two more: New York (where she had also lived) and northern lights, because she is in love with Nordic places.
Now here’s the realization she had that I really want you to take a moment to digest: she expected New York to be the winner because everybody loves it, so everybody searches for it right?
It lost to Washington DC.
“There’s higher demand for New York because people love the city, but there are so many calendars about New York. It’s very hard to compete. However with DC, I got so many sales in Maryland, Virginia, and the DC area.”
go one niche level down
That is my entire calendar theme strategy in one paragraph, discovered by an artist looking at her own sales data: don’t go big, go quiet and strategic and you’ll make more sales.
The biggest theme is not the best theme. The best theme is the one where real people are searching and not many artists are waiting. New York has enormous demand and a waterfall of competition. DC has less demand and far fewer calendars, so her work actually got seen by the people in Maryland and Virginia who wanted exactly that.
Your first instinct will be to go big (mine was too, my first calendar concept was as broad as it gets: botanicals). Try to go just one niche level down. You could be the only artist in your entire city making a calendar of your city or the only pickleball nerd making a pickleball calendar.
what three years of one calendar actually looks like
This is her third year selling the Nordic Houses calendar. Same paintings, third selling season, and she sold 300+ calendars.
“It’s definitely a very good investment. Even if they are twelve handmade watercolor paintings.”
Twelve handmade watercolor paintings. All of which she made by setting her theme and sticking to it for each painting, an investment worth making in her (and your) business!
That’s the thing about a calendar that no single art print can do for you. A print is one sale at a time, forever. A calendar is twelve pieces of work that turn into a product with a season, a deadline, and built-in urgency (aka you have to buy before the season ends).
Calendars check all the POD boxes: low saturation, high price, seasonal demand. That combination is rare in POD, and it is exactly why calendars keep showing up as a top seller for artists in The Studio.
year three: more calendars, not fewer
When I asked her whether calendars were worth it and what her forecast was, she didn’t hesitate:
“I’m definitely doing more calendars this year.”
She’s already chosen her topic, Spain, and she is excited to get started, knowing that the calendars will sell. I want to be clear here: nobody paid her to say that. She’s a data analyst. She said it because her own numbers told her to.
take the next step
Elena is not doing this full time. She’s doing it around a job and two small children, a few hours at a time, and calendars have become one of her best products anyway.
If you’ve been circling a calendar idea for a couple of years now, this is a good year to actually make the thing. Calendar season starts earlier than most people think, and the work you do in August is what sells in December.
Learn about my free calendar bootcamp below, where I’ll take you through all the steps so you don’t have to wonder what the schedule is!
Head to Elena’s shop to grab one of her gorgeous calendars or art prints, and head to her Instagram to thank her for letting me share her story here on the blog.
FREE CALENDAR BOOTCAMP
- Choose a theme people are actually searching for
- Set up your pages, sizes, and files correctly the first time
- Get your calendar listed and selling before the December rush
