it's miss rushka!

Getting ready to add to the ENOMEL pin line with 3 new tasty designs.

OH MAN. I’ve got some really bad news for you.

I do not make ANY money from cosplay. None. Not even a little bit.

I’ve never been hired by a company to represent a character. I’ve never been hired to make a costume for someone else. I’ve never been paid for an appearance of any type. I’ve sure as hell never been paid for a photoshoot; if anything, I sometimes pay photographers to point their camera at me instead of literally any other cosplayer.

Cosplayers are a dime a dozen, and EVEN IF you get to the point where conventions and big-name photographers want to work with you, almost no one is willing to put money behind it. Why would they? If I start asking for compensation, most events would just laugh and move on to the next candidate, because they either don’t have the budget or they want to spend it on someone WAY more famous than me. Most events and businesses can’t tell the difference between a costume I spent hundreds of hours on vs something that came from Taobao. Most of the time, all they want is a pretty face.

Big ad agencies, the ones with money, don’t usually start caring about you until you have hundreds of thousands of followers, and the goal post is constantly moving. As of writing this (March 2 2017 for posterity) I have ~15k followers on my largest social media account. That’s practically nothing compared to people who make their living off of social media. I know this because my husband does.

I have no personal income whatsoever; I am 100% financially supported by my husband. I’m a starving artist who doesn’t have to starve because someone else pays for all my meals. As embarrassing as that is to admit, I DO NOT want to misrepresent my personal finances AT ALL. My ability to participate in cosplay the way that I do is the result of my financial security, not the source of it.

To be fair, there’s a lot that I *could* be doing differently to monetize my work. Patreon, streaming, selling prints, selling merch, and taking commissions are all options. None of them are particularly lucrative– I have many friends who DO support themselves through cosplay, and almost all of them are struggling to pay their bills.

If you wanna make money in cosplay, be outrageously beautiful and sell lewd photos of your body. That’s it, that’s the magic formula. I’m not gonna moralize on this topic: do it if you want to and don’t do it if you don’t want to. I personally don’t want to.

If you want to live like I do, marry well.

1. Vincent van Gogh was born on March 30, 1853, in Holland. He was named after his grandfather and his stillborn brother who died one year before Van Gogh was born.

2. Van Gogh was 27 years old when he painted his first piece.

3. When Van Gogh first began painting, he used peasants as models. He would later paint flowers, landscapes and himself, mostly because he was too poor to pay the models.

4. Van Gogh suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy, a chronic neurological condition characterized by recurrent, unprovoked seizures.

5. In a short period of ten years, Van Gogh made approximately 900 paintings.

6. During one of his seizures, Van Gogh attempted to attack his friend Paul Gauguin with an open razor. This ultimately resulted in Vincent cutting off a piece of his own ear – but not the whole ear as is often rumored.

7. Van Gogh created his most famous work The Starry Night while staying in an asylum in Saint-Remy-de-Provence, France.

8. Vincent Van Gogh visually depicted turbulence, an incredibly complex (and still unsolved) mathematical principle in several paintings during a particularly chaotic time in his life.

9. Vincent shot himself in a wheatfield in Auvers, France, but did not die until 2 days later at the age of 37. His brother Theo, at his side when he died, said that Vincent’s last words were “La tristesse durera toujours” which means “the sadness will last forever.”

10. Vincent only sold one painting during his lifetime and only became famous after his death.

Happy Birthday, Vincent van Gogh.

From the TED-Ed Lesson The unexpected math behind Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” - Natalya St. Clair

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