She Refuses to Use AI in Her Work. She's Still Sold Over 14,000 Illustration Collections.

Who: Yuliya Derbisheva
What: Watercolor and vector digital illustrations, and handwritten fonts
Format: Software & digital product · Worldwide
Started: January 2016
Audience: About 10,000 monthly site visits via Pinterest alone, API-tracked
Payers: Not tracked individually across platforms – 14,000+ collections and 1,000+ fonts sold via Creative Market alone; Shutterstock separately reports 120,940+ licensed downloads (subscriptions and extended licenses included). Sells across 10+ platforms total.
Promotion budget: Up to ~$100/month
Income: Main income
Status: Active and growing
Channels: Her own newsletter (just getting started), text social media, video platforms, search & AI traffic, other

What worked: Diversifying across many sales channels early on – Creative Market, her own site, Pinterest, YouTube Shorts, SEO – instead of relying on one platform
The result: 14,000+ collections sold on Creative Market alone (120,940+ downloads on Shutterstock) since 2016; her work has turned up on Lay's chip bags and H&M Home textiles
The catch: Migrating to a website-builder platform in 2022 cost her both time and money – SEO never worked properly there, forcing heavier reliance on social media

It began in 2015 in Volgograd, Russia, where Yuliya ran an offline business publishing magazines – she's a professional manager by training. Her publishing house handled advertising campaigns for several clients around the city, one of them a popular café. In conversation with the owner about wall decor, Yuliya mentioned she'd attended art school as a child and later studied interior design. The owner asked her to hand-draw the posters herself instead of using printed ones. The idea captivated her, and she agreed.

Nearly sleepless nights of gathering references and drawing followed, and by the end of it she knew this was what she wanted to do. She used the fee to buy online watercolor and mixed-media courses, spent about five months on them, and kept practicing – mostly botanical illustrations – posting the results to Instagram.

A couple of months later, she learned that illustrations could be sold on stock platforms. She spent about a month researching before submitting her work for the Shutterstock exam in January 2016, and passed on her first attempt. That summer, sitting in a café on Corfu with her husband, her first serious payout came through on PayPal – the moment she decided this was what she'd be doing for years to come. From there, she deliberately spread across every viable channel: a Creative Market shop in 2017, her own site in 2022, and in 2023 a second Creative Market shop for hand-lettered fonts, TD Fonts, run with her husband.

These days, she doesn't think of herself as a stock artist – on marketplaces like Creative Market, Etsy, and Envato, and now her own site, she sells ready-to-use digital asset collections that help designers and businesses create things quickly.

Her first sales came with no active effort on her part – what she calls the golden age of stock platform growth, when good illustrations sold themselves. Her first custom order, she believes, came through Etsy: a buyer messaged asking for a custom design based on her illustrations. Unusual commissions followed – logos, watercolor illustrations for lamps, packaging, tableware. She says none of her clients come with simple requests; each one pushes her to learn something new.

Yuliya uses different channels depending on what she's trying to drive traffic to. Pinterest works well for her website and Creative Market shop, alongside social posts, stories, and short-form video on YouTube. She'd like to post Reels more often, but doesn't have the time, and it's hard to hand off – the content requires real depth of understanding, not just entertainment value. She's currently deep in SEO work after migrating her site to WordPress about a month ago, with early results already showing, though she treats it as a long game.

It's hard to put an exact number on each channel's contribution, since marketplaces don't provide detailed stats and can even skew them. But she's confident every acquisition channel works, so her goal is to stay as active as possible across as many platforms as possible – cross-posting alone already beats relying on a single traffic source.

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Her biggest mistake was choosing a website-builder platform back in 2022 – that's where she lost both money and time. It promised a fast, simple way to build a site, but SEO never worked the way she needed it to, pushing her to rely on social media instead. She's not willing to live on social media, so she's since rebuilt on WordPress.

She and her husband make every illustration and font entirely by hand, without AI – a deliberate choice, since she believes the point of graphic art is to convey emotion and energy that AI doesn't have. She's watched AI reshape the market: social media is flooded with low-quality AI generations, making it genuinely hard for buyers to find work that's actually good, and platform algorithms keep pushing creators toward constant new uploads – a pace that leads to real burnout. She's glad to see a growing trend toward supporting handmade work, with some stock platforms now restricting AI-generated content.

Running a creative business, in Yuliya's words, is a series of ups and downs, because the outcome depends not just on you but on the companies you sell through – they change an algorithm, roll out a new site version, reshuffle a database, and none of it is something you control. She's watched successful projects like DesignCuts and TheHungryJPEG shut down over decisions that turned out to be mistakes. Diversifying, rather than putting everything into one platform, is what keeps a creative business from being left with nothing. It's exactly why she's now actively building her own website – there, more of it is actually in her hands.

Her customers are designers, crafters, and businesses of every size who need graphics and fonts for their products, websites, and marketing materials. She's come across her own work in unexpected places around the world – on bags of Lay's chips, on H&M Home textiles, even on wrapping paper in a small shop in the center of Florence.

Her illustrations and graphics also turn up regularly in mobile apps, and her Procreate brushes have been used to create artwork for several well-known video games.

Yuliya expects social media, positioned the right way, to stay a promising channel – though she's careful not to over-polish the content, since imperfection is on-trend right now. She also expects SEO to stay relevant, as long as the content is genuinely expert-level and answers what buyers are actually searching for. Email is the newest piece: her previous platform made it hard to build a subscriber list properly, so she hasn't sent newsletters often – but every one she has sent has performed well, and she's planning to invest more seriously in both SEO and her email list this year.

In an era of sterile digital perfection, we create trend-forward digital assets and handwritten fonts that bring human warmth, soul, and a distinct tactile vibe back into design.

Website: yuliaderbisheva.com

Instagram: derbisheva_art