How to Sell Your AI Art on Redbubble
If you are looking for ways to make money off of your AI art, a Redbubble shop is one of the best places to start. Redbubble is a popular print-on-demand service where you can sell your art with no upfront cost, making it easy for anyone to start a Redbubble side hustle.
Will this cashflow idea work for you? Simply follow the steps below, and you can have a Redbubble shop up and running in no time. Zero art skills required!
Slightly creepy sunflower, generated by Jasper Art
#1 - Generate Your AI Art
First, use an AI image generator like Midjourney or DALL-E 2 to generate 100 designs. Why one hundred? Well, if you are serious about making money from your Redbubble shop, you will need a large inventory. Redbubble takes the majority of the profit when they sell a product with one of your designs. So you will need to sell a LOT of designs to make this a worthwhile side hustle.
If you have a gaming computer with high processing power, then you can generate AI art for free using Stable Diffusion. Otherwise, I recommend using Canva’s text-to-image app or Jasper Art to generate your designs. Whereas Midjourney and Dall-E 2 limit the amount of images you can generate based on your subscription, Canva and Jasper offer unlimited photos. This is extremely helpful for setting up your Redbubble shop, so that you can have a large inventory from the beginning.
Stickers are the bestselling product on Redbubble, so try to keep this in mind when generating your designs. The majority of your AI-generated art should look good on stickers.
#2 - Upscale Your AI-Generated Art
Unfortunately, AI art generators produce small, low resolution images. For example, images generated by Jasper Art are only 512x512 pixels! Other art generators like Midjourney offer upscaling options, but the images are still low resolution.
Before uploading any designs to Redbubble, you will need to make sure your art is high quality. I use ImgLarger, an AI tool that increases image size and resolution, to upscale my images 4x. However, there are many different apps you can use.
#3 - Format Your AI Art
Here comes the not-so-fun part (in my opinion). All of your art will need to be formatted for Redbubble. This is tricky, because Redbubble has a lot of different product sizes and shapes.
As a general rule of thumb, your images should be a minimum of 2000x2000 pixels. However, this size is still not large enough to be used on many Redbubble products, such as backpacks and clothing items. The larger your image, the better! If you want your image to be large enough for every product, Redbubble recommends a minimum of 7632x6480 pixels. For more info, visit the Redbubble image dimension guidelines.
Size is not the only thing that matters! Shape is also a big factor in how your design will sell. For example, since round stickers are more popular than square, many of your designs should be round. Meanwhile, greeting cards, phone cases, laptop skins, etc. are all rectangular. So it’s also helpful crop some of your designs to a 2:3 or 3:2 aspect ratio.
I use Canva to format each of my AI images for Redbubble. With Canva, I can drag the art into a circle frame or a 2000x3000 pixel greeting card format. Whatever the necessary format or size, Canva has it covered. If you don’t have a Canva account yet, you can set up an account here with my affiliate link.
Canva’s circle frame comes in super handy!
Remember, when you upload a design to Redbubble, you will be able to edit how the design will appear on each individual product. This will help you avoid formatting issues as well.
#4 - Set Up Your Redbubble Shop
If you don’t already have a Redbubble shop, go to Redbubble.com and create a seller account. Make sure to fill out your profile picture, bio, and shop banner.
Once your shop is up and running, you can go ahead and upload all of your beautiful AI art! For each piece, include a title, description, and as many tags as you can think of. You want to make your designs as easy to find as possible to increase your chances of making sales.
#5 - Promote Your Redbubble Shop on Social Media
If you don’t already have a social media account where you are posting your AI art, I recommend starting one. Promoting your Redbubble shop on social media will help you gain more customers and drive traffic to your Redbubble profile.
Instagram is my top pick for promoting a Redbubble shop, but you can use the social media of your choosing. Post your Redbubble designs daily.
It may take several weeks (or even months) for your Redbubble shop to gain traction and start making sales. But once your Redbubble shop is running and your initial inventory is uploaded, maintaining your shop takes very little work! I recommend regularly adding new artwork, but you can slow the pace to just a few designs a week. (And remember to post them on social media, of course.)
Overall, it’s a very low-investment side hustle. And generating AI art is one of the most fun ways I can think of to make money! Good luck starting a Redbubble shop of your own :)
