Many artists who are just starting out become frustrated and impatient when their art is not selling. They start to believe their art is not good enough or they are not creating the style of art people are interested in purchasing.
If you are interested in discovering what types of paintings sell best on Etsy you can view it at Top Selling Art — Etsy. Here is a study I came across that I wanted to share with you. Even though this study was taken in , it still holds value for artists today.
Art Business Today took a survey in to find out what the top 10 best selling art subject matter for Paintings in the UK were. As you look at this list, I am sure most of you can say that you create art that fits into one of these art theme categories.
Even though most art falls into one of these most popular art subjects, some artists find it challenging to find art buyers for their creations. Popular art or art in demand will be more valuable, but even good paintings will sell if they are priced correctly, and they are marketed properly.
Not everyone can afford to invest in an original painting, but many people want to display art in their homes. This is why prints sell better than the original artwork. Limited-edition giclee prints sell better than open-ended edition prints because they are more valuable than open-ended edition prints. When an artist puts a limit on how many prints will be produced, the edition becomes more valuable to the buyer.
However, open-ended edition prints allow the artists to earn money from an original painting no matter how many sell. High ticked items are harder for artists to sell when they are just starting.
They have to build name recognition before their higher-priced original paintings sell. While you are building name recognition, you might want to consider selling prints to generate an income from your artwork.
Marketing strategies are what determines if an artist or their paintings are known as popular art. The definition of marketing is the process and activity of making people aware of a product or service that offers value for customers. Your last painting might have sold, but if you never shared an image of your art on social media, your website, in newsletters, or wrote blog posts about it, nobody will know it exists.
Therefore nobody will purchase it. One of the main reasons a piece of art does not sell is because the right person has not seen it yet. There is a target audience for every style of art. As a selling artist, you have to find where your target audience is and find a way to let them know that you have original artwork for sale. There are some art marketing strategies at the bottom of this post to help make your art more popular.
It would be a boring world if everyone ate vanilla ice cream, dressed the same, drove the same vehicle, listened to the same music, watched the same television show and had the same art on their walls.
Yes, there are going to be artists that will draw or paint the same subjects you do, but no one will be able to replicate your style. I have two shots of popular waterfalls here in southern Utah. Both images are well composed and have composition techniques like triangles, leading lines, and varying brightness to carry the audience through the image. They are some of my favorite images I have taken. Along with this, the two waterfalls are very popular hikes here in Utah. In fact one has become so popular it is being considered to be permitted.
They should be easy sales but they are not. This caused me to scratch my head and ask why? After much consideration the best thing I can come up with is that they are images that can be easily re-created. Most people that come to these locations have a shot that looks like mine. Not nearly as good, but good enough for them to say they don't need to purchase that image.
The unfortunate part about this dilemma is there is no way to figure this out except to print your shots and see if they sell or not. If you think your image might be this, print it small and only one and see if it moves. I have a shot that I love of a little arch here by my home. I think I have the only photograph of it that is a fine art print.
It looks cool, but it is neither stellar beyond reason nor is it recognizable. Because of this it has sat in my bin of prints now for a few months. I watch people flip past it and pay little attention to it. These are your darling that you must kill. Print them once to see if they sell, but if they don't.
Move onto the next image and let them sit as a digital file on your web site to show off your work, but don't let them clutter your store front. This is truly one of the saddest realities of landscape photography. If the image has snow in it beyond snow capped peaks the image is less likely to sell at a gallery or an art show.
I ask this question to people who run big galleries and they all agree. Some of the best images are made in winter, but people don't like putting cold looking things into their home. They prefer warm images to grace their view as they walk around.
I would not put these images into your regular line up of images unless they had an amazing turn out on social media. There are always exceptions. These don't even cover wildlife, which I have no idea how to sell as I have never done that before. I was shocked. Nice article. Thank you,. Later in this post, I am going to talk about some art marketing strategies that will help you to grow your online art business but before I do that I want to talk about writing down your goals.
If you would like to achieve something, you must first know what it is you would like to achieve. Because goals are so important I have created a video course, workbook and planners to help you with your art marketing goals. In order for you to sell your art online, you will need to learn how to find who your target audience is, know where to find them and learn how to promote your artwork to them. You can easily see with the list above how much goes into online art marketing.
Becoming familiar with each of the categories and implementing well-designed strategies will help you to grow your art business larger than you could have ever imagined. I am going to give you a brief overview of each of these categories as well as some action steps to help get you started.
According to Neil Patel SEO is the process of optimizing your online content so that a search engine likes to show it as a top result for searches of a certain keyword. For example, if you paint horses, you will want to rank in the top results for horse painting, horse paintings, horse paintings for sale, original horse paintings, etc.
The content on your site and the content on your blogs should focus on those keywords and any other keywords that relate to horse paintings. Besides knowing what keywords you would like to have your site ranking for you will also want to make sure your site is structured in a way that search engines understand.
You do not have to know what kind of art sells best to generate more traffic to your artist blog. If you find it easier to learn by watching videos you might be interested in the WordPress SEO Basics online video course. Like I have said earlier, the content you create will be the fuel that drives traffic to your artist blog and art listings.
With so many blog posts, videos, images and social posts being uploaded every day, you have no choice but to deliver the greatest content out there.
Alyson Stanfield is a notable example of an artist coach who built a successful business with the help of online marketing. Alyson has mastered the art of content marketing and you can see her all over social media, her blog and podcasts.
She is consistently delivering valuable content that attracts her target audience on multiple mediums. I encourage you to go visit Alyson at Art Biz Coach. However, the gains of selling more smaller paintings might be equal to the gains of selling fewer larger paintings. Many commercially successful artists straddle the line by painting in a variety of sizes to appeal to a wider audience. In general, it's easier to sell a smaller work for the reasons explained above. A lower-priced and smaller painting might appeal more to an impulse buyer or someone who's a bit intimidated and hesitant to commit to a larger work.
But since smaller paintings are also generally priced lower, working on a smaller scale is not necessarily more lucrative in the end. Some artists who work on a smaller scale intentionally create paintings that are related thematically or stylistically to one another, since this encourages customers to buy more than one and arrange groups of paintings instead of stand-alones.
Another ancillary benefit of working on a smaller scale is that the paintings will take up less storage space if they don't sell right away. In general, since they cost more in materials and might take more time, most artists ask more for larger pieces. But sometimes, size doesn't count the most. The time, skill, and talent that goes into any painting should also play a part in its pricing.
Some savvy artists wait to gauge a painting's effect on the audience before they give it a price tag. If viewers react very strongly to a certain piece, perhaps that should affect its price more than simply the size of its canvas. Brick-and-mortar galleries used to be the gatekeepers of the art world: If you couldn't get into a gallery, you couldn't really sell. But today, with the internet and so many other more casual venues, galleries no longer have the same influence.
Not only that, but most galleries now conduct a large percentage of their sales online or via mobile apps. Etsy, DeviantArt, and Zazzle are just a few of the sites that facilitate sales for artists and help cut out the middle man.
There have been no reputable studies conducted on this subject, there are some interesting random anecdotes:. I am pleased to announce that in a recent exhibition with my art group, I managed to achieve another sale. I sell less in this way than on eBay, but the difference in achievable price makes the number of sales immaterial.
In other words, I can generally charge more for my work when it's displayed in an actual, physical space than I can when I simply show it online. I recently sold two pastel paintings: the landscape is on a very rough paper hence the texture and the abstract is on card. I create a texture in my pastel paintings by building up the painting in layers so that early layers show through in the finished piece.
I recently sold this abstract landscape, which surprised me as our small and local exhibitions usually attract the more conservative art lovers. Luckily I suppose my favourite subject is landscape painting, which I love. I have painted other genres but landscapes, especially semi-abstract landscapes, are what keeps me painting. I did join a group some years back to develop my portraiture and figure painting but it never really grabbed me, so I have stuck with landscapes.
I have sold art via eBay in the past but decided to pull off this site because the auction system did not give me the return I wanted. I could sell but at give-away prices. I prefer to actually give my art away than to be in that situation. I am trying Zazzle at the moment, a print-on-demand site which means I can make money by selling products with my images on them.
We have looked at themes, size, colour, media, and successful deceased artists that sell well. These ideas are interesting, but do they really matter? As with any endeavour, success can depend on many factors. Print on demand POD websites such as Zazzle are a useful tool here. If an artist is to make enough money to live from their art, they must treat it like a business. Volume is one aspect of any business which must be addressed. A man who works with his hands is a laborer; a man who works with his hands and his mind is a craftsman; but a man who works with his hands and his brain and his heart is an artist.
Art is about communicating with the viewer in order to inspire moods, thoughts, or feelings. However, we artists often forget that art that sells often recreates something from the viewer's past or triggers some memory.
This may be a landscape that triggers memories of a great holiday, for example. I can personally attest that this was the reason for many of my sales. Some paintings I sold were of actual places, and others simply evoked memories of a place. Some were made up from my own head, simply composed to create a great image, but they reminded the buyers of a place they knew. I remember my first abstract sale. I was told that its colours were exactly what the buyer was looking for.
Hardly what I expected, but I still spent the money for that sale. I did not have these particular requirements in mind when I painted it but that does not counter the reason for the sale. Whatever you are painting, do it as well as you can in the genre and style that you choose. Paint what inspires you! Paint it for yourself and put your heart into the work.
Simply by doing this you will find that a better artwork will result. Question: I don't paint, I use graphite only. Is this hindering my sales perhaps? Do I need to paint pieces to satisfy the need in the art business? Answer: Graphite pencil? I would say that you should create in whatever media suits you best. However, you may find the potential market is more limited. Have you tried illustrations for books? Not a market I have any experience of myself though, but googling may help to find potential avenues to sales.
Painting in other media may help to get your name out there and become more commercially successful. Enjoyed reading your article! I found it to be a good review of my experiences in selling art as a previous owner of galleries, a publisher of limited editions and exhibitor in trade shows. Plus, the current market of online sales. How are you doing? I liked the contents and ideas on your website. Most importantly the quote which gives the meaning of being an artist in a nutshell "A man who works with his hands is a laborer; a man who works with his hands and his mind is a craftsman; but a man who works with his hands and his brain and his heart is an artist"— St.
Thomas Aquinas. But I've tried most things you suggest but still haven't sold anything in the past five years. I don't know what I'm doing wrong. It could just be advertising I just don't know. I'm with Saatchi art and have a fb page and an Instagram pag.
Thank you fir this article. Ive always used pencil anx have done the odd sketch picture in the past. Not a lover of watercolours.
Then since lock down, ive had the chance to have a play with acrylics and have painted 3 paintings arnt too bad
0コメント