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It sucks being poor. Especially in ConDem Britain. But Vada has a higher-than-average number of readers with creative hobbies – we know because you’ve told us (and so has Facebook!).
As creatives, we often find ourselves poorer than almost everybody else – even though we’re meant to be the ideas guys. Well enough is enough. It’s time to scratch that noggin and see just how easy it is to make money and use your talents as a creative individual.
Bus-stop performance art
You can set yourself up as a roving mini-theatre and regale innocent commuters with monologues about the painful banalities of wage-slavery. Keep a hat to catch those pennies, yeah?
Pimping your poetry
Get yourself a furry purple hat, a cane and some hungry poets eager to impress. Set yourselves up in some squalid, pokey little flat on a council estate and hire your poets out for one-to-one sessions with literature-starved punters.
Going the whole hog (say, a nice, hands-on workshop) can be £20 and you can give a bit of oral (quick and dirty readings) for £10. A quick hand job (custom poetry dashed off as the clock ticks) can be £5.
For the more … unique customers, you can satisfy their particular tastes with something more bespoke (multiple partners in a steamy poetry slam, poems that – shock horror – don’t even rhyme!).
Banksy-style interior design
Painting walls and buildings has worked for graffiti artists and those wishing to leave interesting memorials all over the world, from Britain to Brazil. But why not turn things on their heads and do the spray-painting inside, instead? Sod Changing Rooms – do it the guerilla way!
Rush-hour tube cinema
Take your laptop, your short films and a bunch of your mates. Partition off part of a tube carriage with blankets, newspaper or whatever you can get your hands on, and set up a mobile rush-hour cinema.
Ask for £1 for each person who comes to see your films, and then you can flog copies of the DVD afterwards for £2. A bargain, right? You just might have to watch out for commuter rage. And Boris Johnson.
Posh busking
Have you ever seen an opera singer busking outside Harvey Nick’s? Well you soon will do, baby!
Imagine middle class white girls in huge ballgowns, singing librettos with a full band behind her, sipping tea from a Hendrick’s gin tea cup. Perhaps a sign that reads ‘suggested minimum donation: £5’ will help part the up-market shoppers from their money.
What would you do?
And there you have it. Five simple ways to earn some cash by being creative.
Note that we’re not endorsing, promoting or encouraging – we’re just suggesting you might like to think outside the box. (But seriously, don’t get yourselves in trouble for busking or taking over coaches on the Tube.)
Why don’t you come up with some of your own ideas and share them with us here?
