2nd 4x4 Project

For this second 4x4 project, I decided to branch out from Society6 and take a look into other digital platforms that promote and market artist’s work. Patreon is a website similar to Kickstarter that involves crowdfunding, and allows artists to accept donations from patrons in exchange for monthly or weekly content depending on the number of patrons and the amount they pay monthly.

About
Sakimi-chan (Yue) is a Canadian concept artist. There is actually not much known about her except information provided from her deviant art and Patreon, but her internet presence is extremely well established and she's one of the most popular digital artists out there.
Website: https://www.patreon.com/sakimichan

Marketing
Sakimi-chan’s work mostly consists of fan-art, or work from other franchises. Selling work using the content of these franchises without a doubt involves a ton of research on their copyrights and policies on distributing such work, especially considering Sakimi-chan uploads pieces once or twice a week on top of maintaining Patreon. And she must do a good job, because doing the math:

Sakimi-chan makes roughly $518,277 a year.

Pricing
Since Sakimi-chan’s prints, tutorials, resources, and other Patreon rewards are mass distributed, they are are in the average price range for digital prints ($10-$50). However, a unique nature of Patreon allows patrons to pay whatever they want for certain ‘tiered’ rewards. Of course the higher a patron pays the more material they gain access to from the artist, and for popular artists such as Sakimi-chan this is an absurdly good system to gain profit from.

Presentation, Themes, and Aesthetic
Since Sakimi-chan is a fan artist, her work is heavily influenced by pop culture, primarily from America and Japan. Her personal work is chiefly character design and concepts, but are purely for the sake of practice or speed paints - she makes most of her living off of fan-based work and making her techniques and tutorials on sale to the public.