The Ball Chair – A 1960's Retro Classic Furniture

This is a continuation on the subject from the post “A CG Stock Contributor, my first stumbling steps…” I wrote earlier today.

The Ball Chair is a favorite piece of furniture in my world. I actually love and adore most furniture designed from that era, but the Ball Chair is like a classic icon for me that represent everything of the retro futuristic feeling I’m such a fanboy of.

The Ball Chair was originally designed by the furniture designer Eero Aarnio in the 1960’s and is considered a classic of industrial design these days. And rightfully so in my opionion.

I had modeled a Ball Chair for my personal enjoyment in LightWave 3D, and decided I should submit a render of it to iStockphoto. This was my third addition to my stock portfolio at iStock.

I submitted my Ball Chair rendering to iStock around August of 2007 and got it approved a few days later, and it almost immediately took of in sales. From having sold an image now and then, I almost overnight started selling several images a day.

This made me see the possibilities in working with micro stock. Thanks to this submission I quickly got my first payout from iStock and with the increased volume of sales it didn’t take long until I reached the first magical limit of 250 sold images, so I could apply to be an exclusive iStockphoto contributor. Being exclusive and having reached the contributor bronze level I got better royalties per sold image as well.

With the popularity of this image I ended up submitting it rendered from two other angles as well.

This really did it for me, I realized that with understanding of what kind of images that works, one can actually make some decent income from micro stock. Now, that’s of course easier said than done, it takes both quite some volume of quality images in the portfolio as well as lot’s of trial and errors to find out and learn what kind of images that works. But now I felt I was on the right track anyway, and decided I wanted to pursue this and take it up a notch.

At this time I was engaged in other projects as well, so it was not until 2008 I started to seriously look into submitting more regularly and to start thinking of suitable subjects that can work. The three images (Dry Martini, Futuristic City, Ball Chair) was my entire portfolio until the end of 2007 and things had started doing quite well from a sales perspective in relation to the few images I had.

I’ll post about the 2008 progress and images in some coming posts.