Cataloging and Promoting Your Art
You can create the most wonderful art in the world, but if you don't put it out there in the world, no one will know or care about it except you. I don't know ANY artists who relish the business side of art, but ignore it, and you may as well stash all those great paintings under your bed.
Having a routine that is as simple as possible, but ORGANIZED and CONSISTENT, will minimize the amount of time you have to spend taking care of business. Here's what I do:
Having a routine that is as simple as possible, but ORGANIZED and CONSISTENT, will minimize the amount of time you have to spend taking care of business. Here's what I do:
CATALOGING
PHOTOGRAPH YOUR WORK As soon as I finish a piece I intend to keep and/or sell, I photograph it. Use a good digital camera set to highest quality. I have a Canon PowerShot SX40HS, and its viewfinder has a setting with parallel lines vertically and horizontally that help me get the painting image squared up before taking the picture. I like taking my photos outside in open shade (under my back porch roof works for me) - Here in Arizona, full sun can blow out the color and highlights, and the usually intense clear blue sky can give the painting a too cool color cast. Under the porch roof, I get the benefit of natural light without that blue cast. Don't get your feet or other objects in the photo, and be on the lookout for any cast shadows. You want the lighting as even as possible. Take three or four shots and bracket the exposures. One of those will be just right. When you've finished any cropping or other minor adjustments to color or value, SAVE the image at the largest size possible. You can always make copies and reduce the file size, but once you've made the image small, you can't make it larger again without a compromise in quality. These photos are the record of your work. They're also what you will use in any printed material you give out, on your website (you DO have a website, don't you?), and for entering juried competitive art shows. If you don't feel you can take these photos yourself, take a group of paintings to a professional photographer. Many specialize in this service, and will give you the images on a CD or a flash drive. |
FILE A COPY OF THE ART WORK PHOTO
You can print a hard copy, and file it in a notebook or letter file along with pertinent information about it, but I use my computer as my filing cabinet, and I back up my computer data several different ways, every week. I can't emphasize this enough. Hard drives will eventually fail. Do your backups regularly and in more than one place. You can set up your filing system in your computer's Documents Folder any way that makes sense to you. There are also some software programs you can buy for cataloging works of art. I have current work files organized by series/genre and within those categories by originals and prints. I also have an ARCHIVE file, where one copy of every thing I've done goes, by decade. Once the image goes in this file, it does not come out or change. I can make a copy if I need to, and rename the copy in any way I want, but the original archived image stays in the archive file. The key to this system is in consistently naming your files. This is the format I use: year created_medium_image size_title. |
PROMOTING and SELLING YOUR ART
SELLING AND SHOWING
Only you can decide how much time, effort and money you want to spend on promoting yourself as an artist, and in selling your work. Selling venues include everything from opening your home studio to buyers and/or selling from your website or doing annual or semi-annual open studio shows. In many areas, these open studio tours are often organized into a weekend event where many artists take part. Alternatively, you can decide to be a gypsy for awhile, and travel around to art festivals where you set up a booth for selling your work, or you can get your work into commercial galleries and have them do the selling for you (for a commission of course).
As for showing your work, you don't have to be in a gallery to do that - think creatively! Joining an artist guild and participating in their shows gets your work seen by the public. You can also approach banks, restaurants or other businesses and ask about a temporary display in their building. If your community has an arts council, there are often opportunities for exhibiting work through them, and through other non-profit groups too. Think global (your website can be seen by anyone who can find it - more on that later), but act local. Start in your own community and expand from there.
ADVERTISING
Advertising is another way to promote your work, but you can spend a lot of money and see very little result. There's a reason big companies keep those ads in front of our eyes over and over and over, but most artists' pockets aren't deep enough to fund an ad campaign like that indefinitely. So again, think creatively. Is anything you're doing in your work newsworthy? Do you paint animals? Can you think of something you might do at your local animal shelter (perhaps a paint-out and sale with some percentage of sales going to the shelter?) Give work away to groups to use for their fund-raisers, but ask to be listed in the program as a donor. Be skeptical of companies trying to sell you an expensive full color page or two in a coffee table book that supposedly goes to "art collectors". My guess is that most of those are collecting dust somewhere.
Your website is a form of advertising, and the cost can range from free (a static page that is included with your internet service provider, a simple site through Google, Yahoo, etc. to a more complex paid for site with your own domain name (hint: if you buy your own domain name, use your own name if possible, as in JohnDoeArt.com). Facebook and other social media sites are another way to promote your work for no cost. You need a website whether simple or complex. These days, even a gallery you've contacted with the hope they might take your work will want to go to your website to see what you do rather than to have to look through a portfolio you've dropped off, or even a CD you've mailed. So, get your website built (yourself or have someone do it for you), and then tell people where to find it.
Your website address (URL) should be on every piece of printed material you give out - business cards, flyers, show invitations, articles about your work, press releases, EVERYTHING. With the thousands of artists on the web, the chances of someone typing in "acrylic landscape paintings" and having your site show up in even the first five pages of results is, in February 2014, about one in 1,510,000. Yes you can pay for a higher result, and many do, but the simplest way to get people to go visit your site is to give them the website address.
SELLING AND SHOWING
Only you can decide how much time, effort and money you want to spend on promoting yourself as an artist, and in selling your work. Selling venues include everything from opening your home studio to buyers and/or selling from your website or doing annual or semi-annual open studio shows. In many areas, these open studio tours are often organized into a weekend event where many artists take part. Alternatively, you can decide to be a gypsy for awhile, and travel around to art festivals where you set up a booth for selling your work, or you can get your work into commercial galleries and have them do the selling for you (for a commission of course).
As for showing your work, you don't have to be in a gallery to do that - think creatively! Joining an artist guild and participating in their shows gets your work seen by the public. You can also approach banks, restaurants or other businesses and ask about a temporary display in their building. If your community has an arts council, there are often opportunities for exhibiting work through them, and through other non-profit groups too. Think global (your website can be seen by anyone who can find it - more on that later), but act local. Start in your own community and expand from there.
ADVERTISING
Advertising is another way to promote your work, but you can spend a lot of money and see very little result. There's a reason big companies keep those ads in front of our eyes over and over and over, but most artists' pockets aren't deep enough to fund an ad campaign like that indefinitely. So again, think creatively. Is anything you're doing in your work newsworthy? Do you paint animals? Can you think of something you might do at your local animal shelter (perhaps a paint-out and sale with some percentage of sales going to the shelter?) Give work away to groups to use for their fund-raisers, but ask to be listed in the program as a donor. Be skeptical of companies trying to sell you an expensive full color page or two in a coffee table book that supposedly goes to "art collectors". My guess is that most of those are collecting dust somewhere.
Your website is a form of advertising, and the cost can range from free (a static page that is included with your internet service provider, a simple site through Google, Yahoo, etc. to a more complex paid for site with your own domain name (hint: if you buy your own domain name, use your own name if possible, as in JohnDoeArt.com). Facebook and other social media sites are another way to promote your work for no cost. You need a website whether simple or complex. These days, even a gallery you've contacted with the hope they might take your work will want to go to your website to see what you do rather than to have to look through a portfolio you've dropped off, or even a CD you've mailed. So, get your website built (yourself or have someone do it for you), and then tell people where to find it.
Your website address (URL) should be on every piece of printed material you give out - business cards, flyers, show invitations, articles about your work, press releases, EVERYTHING. With the thousands of artists on the web, the chances of someone typing in "acrylic landscape paintings" and having your site show up in even the first five pages of results is, in February 2014, about one in 1,510,000. Yes you can pay for a higher result, and many do, but the simplest way to get people to go visit your site is to give them the website address.