You don’t need loads of cash to be a great creative – and we can prove it

Applications are currently open for It’s Nice That’s Ones to Watch – a talent showcase championing the next generation of creatives. To mark the occasion, we’re publishing a series of articles exploring what it means to be a creative starting out today. In this piece, we share tips and resources for making creative work on a budget...

As a creative starting out in the industry, we all know it can get very expensive. It can be a major barrier to entry for many creatives, stifling their ideas and confidence. But it doesn’t have to be pricey to make good ideas come to life.

The “starving artist” is a classic trope, but no one should have to skip dinner to make art. Scroll through Instagram and you’d think being a brilliant creative requires expensive equipment, a sun-drenched studio, and a hefty loan from Daddy. But plenty of artists and designers are still breaking boundaries with little more than grit, talent, and a cramped corner to work in.

Throughout human history, artists have found clever ways to create without going broke. Vincent van Gogh was known for painting over old canvases, and Jean-Michel Basquiat skipped the canvas altogether, choosing to paint on doors, windows, refrigerator parts, and discarded wood he found on the street. This resourcefulness later became a signature part of his aesthetic, inspiring a new era of DIY artists eager to express themselves with found material. Even Michelangelo wasn’t above using leftovers – he carved David from a massive block of marble that had been sitting around, rejected for 40 years by richer clients. Not bad for a piece of scrap.

This make-it-work attitude is still going strong, with plenty of young creatives today finding innovative ways to keep making their art on a budget. Take Gints Zilbalodis, the 31-year-old animation director behind Flow, which recently took home the Oscar for Best Animated Feature. He pulled it off with a small team, a tight budget, and a whole lot of ingenuity. Gints first taught himself 3D animation using Autodesk Maya, then switched to Blender in 2019 using early beta and alpha versions of the free software. While still in his early 20s, he made his first feature film, Away, entirely on his own, which gave him the confidence to take on Flow next. He put together a proof-of-concept teaser featuring the film’s animal characters, then started production when the funding came through and he found his first technical team.

After five-and-a-half years of learning, experimenting, and pushing through challenges, Flow finally made its big screen debut in March 2025 – and went on to earn around $36 million at the box office. Gints’ story proves it’s not about using the most expensive tools – it’s about vision, creativity, and having the guts to push through. “With a smaller budget there are limitations, but that can also lead to creative solutions,” he says. “I think that it’s very exciting that independent animation is being recognised which will allow more films like this to be made.”

Animation is one of those mediums that can be surprisingly cheap to produce, especially if you’re willing to get experimental. London-based animator Sofia Negri created her animated documentary The Skatebook using a combination of archival live action footage and hand-drawn elements from her sketchbook. Thanks to her community of helping hands, she managed to finish the production in just 90 days. She tells us, “I couldn’t really pay a team to help me, so all I can do is really give a shoutout to those who helped me to colour in all the thousands of pages that make up the film.”

Using found footage is a fantastic way to tell animated stories with little to no budget. London-based animator Lucy Ellis creates experimental films using “scrap” material from “old history books, conspiracy theory magazines, [and] obsolete educational software”. Other animators are turning to mixed media for its speed and affordability. Callista Lim prints out live-action frames and then draws, stitches, and collages directly onto each one by hand. Once scanned back into her computer and assembled using free video editing software, the results are strikingly original and full of texture.

Analogue is the way to go for many other resourceful creatives, including photographer Molly Matalon who makes stunning work with “a crappy little point-and-shoot from 2004”. For her, limiting her kit to a cheap camera she can bring everywhere isn’t just about saving money – it’s freeing. She tells It’s Nice That, “There’s something beautiful and nostalgic to me about the colours and quality. The files are tiny and awful, you have barely any creative control over your picture, and for me that’s incredibly liberating.”

Just because something’s made on a tight budget doesn’t mean it has to look cheap. Glasgow-based illustrator Ines Gradot uses marker pens and a Risograph printer to imitate the effect of pricey watercolours, and Austin-based artist Montrel Beverly creates elaborate sculptures from pipe cleaners. And in the world of graphic design, 25-year-old designer Katrina Romulo has built an impressive portfolio of polished branding projects from her own bedroom studio, often using free fonts and textures. These projects go to show that it’s not about the tools you have that matters – it’s what you do with them.

“I learned how to be scrappy and pull off beautiful projects with a tiny, tiny budget,” Katrina reveals in a recent Youtube video about being laid off from her 9 to 5. The LA-based designer now finds most of her clients through Instagram. She urges, “One piece of advice I would give to anyone who wants to go freelance is to just put your work out there, especially on social media.”

Singapore-based Aurelia Beatrice is another young designer finding her audience through social media. From her home studio, she’s creating everything from playful brand assets and packaging to handmade zines and stickers – work that looks like it came out of a top agency. She shares it all on Instagram, where her following’s steadily growing. “Came up with nothing, still don’t drop a dime on mockups,” she told us when we asked about her tips for saving money as a designer. “No budget, no mockup, no excuse. Just create. Creativity isn’t in your wallet, it’s in your grind.”

Another designer who’s fearlessly forging his own path is Mumbai-born, Brooklyn-based designer Dev Valladares. From creating his own “dancing type” using a generative AI model to making experimental animations with Stable Diffusion, he playfully pushes the boundaries of conventional graphic design through innovative and affordable tools. “It’s never about having the fanciest tools or the biggest budget. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s the counter-intuitive truth that too much freedom – too many options – can be its own kind of trap,” he tells It’s Nice That. “More knobs, more permutations, and suddenly you’re stuck in the infinite.” Dev believes that constraints actually open up more possibilities. “They shape the sandbox,” he says. “And inside that box, with just one tool and the spark of your spirit, you can enter a kind of flow. Imagination comes alive when there are fewer knobs to turn. That’s when you can really start to play. The question I try to ask is: ‘What’s the most impossibly beautiful thing I can make with just this? How far can I push this tool until even I’m surprised by what I’ve just made?’”

Twin sisters Abigail and Chloe Baldwin are another great example of creatives making the most of what they have. Growing up in a quiet coastal town with no industry connections and little money, they went from graphic design students to running their own thriving studio, Buttercrumble. They told Creative Lives in Progress: “There are few career paths in seaside towns, but we had the itch to make a living together through our art. Our upbringing instilled a healthy work ethic within us and the lack of opportunity made us hungry. We had the grit to roll up our sleeves and create our own luck.”

Having the right mindset is key, but there are also plenty of practical ways to “hack” creativity into being more affordable. Below, we’ve rounded up our favorite free (and dirt-cheap) resources for designing, illustrating, and making.