I build guitars for a living. That is the first thing to know, because it explains everything after it.

I have spent over ten years at a bench, working wood by hand. It is slow. You measure twice because there is no undo on a piece of mahogany. That was the whole shape of my creative life until 2020, when I started teaching myself design at night. Graphic manipulation first, then whatever came next. In 2023 I found AI image tools, and something clicked that has not unclicked since.

I want to be honest about how it started, because it was not serious at all. I typed haikus into a prompt box to see what the machine would do with them. I fed it emotions and watched how it read them back to me. There was a pull to it, the kind a slot machine has. Throw a few words in and see what falls out. I still do it. It was never really about the picture at the end. It was about the small back and forth with the tool.

That could have stayed a toy. What moved it was a Halloween animation I built in After Effects in 2024. One hundred and eighty frames, put together by hand. I taught myself the software to do it, and by the end I had a workflow that was mine. Nobody teaches themselves motion graphics at night by accident. When I watched it play back the whole way through for the first time, what I felt was not that the machine had made something cool. It was that I had sat down, learned the tools, and built the thing myself. I love the craft of it from step one to step one hundred. The trial and error that I think most artists and designers know. That is the part I fell for, and it is the part no prompt box hands you for free.

Here is the part nobody tells you about. The middle is long and quiet.

For a long stretch, the only feedback I got was people telling me I do not make anything. That the machine does all the work and I contribute nothing. I made peace with that noise a while ago. The harder loneliness was self-inflicted, and I would do it again. I do not make lowest common denominator work. No ragebait. No chasing a trend I already know will pull numbers, because it is not me. So I took the slower, quieter road on purpose, with no proof it would ever pay off, and for a long time it felt like no one would care about what I made except me.

The silence broke in a way I did not expect. Kris Kashtanova (@icreatelife), AI Evangelist at Adobe and Firefly Boards Creativity and someone I had admired for a while, started sharing some of my posts. I do not even remember the exact pieces. What I remember is what it did to me. It was not applause from strangers. It was someone whose taste I respected putting her own name next to my work. That gets past the wall you build against empty compliments, because you cannot wave it off. Someone qualified to judge looked and decided it was worth passing along.

What I did with that is the part I am proud of. I did not just post more. I changed what I posted. I started sharing my process instead of only sharing things to look at. I started trying to teach what I had figured out. You do not do that from a place of doubt. You do it once some part of you has quietly accepted that you know something worth handing to the next person.

Fast forward to 2026 and I am building a website. glennwilliams.net. I put it together with Claude Design and prompted the HTML myself. I worked out the embeds and the social feeds, and I did not start from a template. I am trying to make something that actually feels like me. That matters more than it sounds, and I think it is the luthier in me. You do not build a guitar from a kit and call it yours. I could not stomach a template either. But the bigger thing is the ownership. Every platform I have posted on for years, I was a tenant on someone else's land, subject to their rules and their algorithm. glennwilliams.net is mine. It is not a handle on a site that can change the deal on me tomorrow. Loading it live for the first time was the moment this started to feel like a real side income and a brand I could build, not just a pile of posts.

Now for the thing I actually want you to take from this, if you are out there making good work for free credits.

The credits feel like being picked. A real company hands you their tool for nothing and it feels like validation, like you made it into the room. I understand the pull. I was there. But a comped subscription is a company valuing its own product. It is not the same as a company valuing you. I did not talk my way out of that trap through nerve. What got me out was companies deciding, on their own, to put a paycheck behind my work. Once a serious company agreed my output was worth real money, I could not unsee it. That first paycheck reset what I was willing to accept from everyone after it. I went from taking free credits to negotiating for my time.

So that is the whole argument, and it is simpler than it sounds. Do the work. Show the process, not just the result. Get good enough that someone decides for themselves to pay you. And when that first real offer lands, believe it, and do not ever let your floor drop back down.

There is a cost, and I will name it so this does not read like a clean win. When the thing you did at midnight for love becomes income, you have to document it. I have to remember to record what I am doing while I am doing it. Something small is lost in that even as something bigger is gained. But I still cover the things I actually do. I want to show the craft. That has not changed since the first haiku.

People ask where this is going, since I am still full time at the bench. The honest answer is not the one they expect. I am not trying to escape guitars. I want this income to help put my daughter through school before long, and to build a better life for my wife and me. Someday I would like it to be a form of retirement, a 401K plus a creative job I can do from home because I spent years building a presence online.

And there is one more thing, which I have mostly kept to myself. I hope to move into a design role at PRS one day. I already make things there with my hands. Everything I taught myself, the AI work and the design and the animation and the website, has quietly been me building a second craft in the exact place I already work. The dream is not to leave. It is to bring the new craft home to the old one, and stand in the same halls doing both.

If you are working for credits right now, share the behind the scenes. Show how you do it. And start asking for more, because the first time someone pays you what you are worth, you will understand what you have been giving away.

Glenn Williams is a luthier at PRS Guitars and an Adobe Firefly Ambassador who documents the craft behind AI image and animation work at @GlennHasABeard. He publishes The Render and creates the Stor-AI Time series adapting world folktales through AI-generated video.