Sunday, November 27, 2011

5 Ways to Promote Your Art

You've created numerous paintings, drawings, perhaps sculpture or pottery. Maybe you are happily creating anime. But how do you sell it? Selling art online seems to be the thing, but can you really sell art online?

Some artists are selling locally, but want to expand their reach to art buyers worldwide. This article explains five ways to sell your art online.

Selling Artwork

You can publicize your artwork. Let's look at how to sell artwork.
  1.  time
  2. networking
  3. updates
  4. artist statement
  5. portfolio sites
 Time

Time? You say, what do you mean? It is very important to spend enough time getting your art exposed to the art buying public. If you have a website or have your work online at a portfolio site you need to promote it every day. How?

  • post links
  • blog
  • social networking
 Networking

Start your own art blog and link to your art website. Submit your blog and website to search engines each month. You post links, blog, and participate in social networking. When you post links to forums add an image of  one of your works, offer a free small print to someone that buys a painting or use another creative idea to attract buyers. Maybe let them name a sculpture or suggest an idea for a piece of work.

You pick the best name or idea and blog about why you picked it. Encourage people to share the best name or best idea link with others. This could be a winning viral marketing idea for your art promotion.

Artist Statement

One of the traditional things an artist does is come up with an artist statement. It tells about your concept of your art...what you create and why you create it. This statement should be understandable to people who are not artists. You want to garner their interest, intrigue them, so they want to look at your artwork and buy it. Some brick and mortar galleries hang the artist statement by their work. You can put your artist statement on your own website to engage your visitor in your creative concepts.

Updates


Make YouTube videos of your work or work in progress and add a new video each week as the work progresses. This idea would work well with a large project. You can put your website address in your profile at YouTube. These updates can encourage interest in your painting, sculpture, pottery etc.

Portfolio Sites

There are numerous portfolio sites on the Internet. They usually have free and paid memberships. You can upload pictures of your paintings, digital paintings, photography, sculpture, anime and so forth. many of these sites will make print your drawings and digital paintings. They print them onto posters, cards, t-shirts, mugs, and calendars. They sell these items with your work on them and give you a percentage.

Some art sites charge for your membership and leave the selling, mailing of your work, and collecting the funds to you.

Other art sites give you a profile using their database and with paid membership you can have a separate portfolio besides the free gallery.  Some are hosting sites for art and have templates for you to build your site. Some of the art sites promote digital art or photography specifically or traditional art.

There are art sites specific to selling traditional art. A quick search for portfolio sites or art websites will get you started. You can look at some sites and see which one is best for your art promotion.

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