Lessons I Learned from Selling Art Online

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What Have I Learned?

I switched careers from a corporate job to full-time artist, and the deep dive into making and selling art online taught me valuable lessons about creating art and letting it go (to collectors) immediately. Even if it was the best watercolor I’d ever painted.

Back in the day, I sold watercolors on Ebay. It was a rewarding experience at the time, and I learned a lot about online art sales.

I had never sold my art before, so making money from doing something I loved was a revelation. Along with the “excuse” to paint frequently, there was also a king’s pantry of practices that were totally new to me.

Unprepared Artist

As watercolor sales ka-chinged via email, they also doled out a fly-by-seat-of-the-pants crash course.

Days were filled with Do’s and Dont’s of online marketing and promotion, relationships with collectors via email correspondence, photographing and listing art, writing Html code, packaging and shipping art, resisting the pull to only paint-what-sells, scanning and photoshop, international and domestic post office snags, crafting better descriptions of my work, the importance of policies, writing and updating a concise bio, the beauty of online friendships, and most of all – the practice of making art, all the time. Whew!

An Excellent Take-Away

Here’s one of the big lessons I learned in those first years: selling your art teaches you to let go.

You finish the work, post it online, make it available for sale, and then flick the switch, over to the department that makes more art.

Getting attached or ambivalent about selling a piece doesn’t help a working artist. Attachment can stall your engines.

Making vs Keeping

After seasons of rolling through a thriving make-and-sell cycle, you earn clarity in the value of the process of making. And you learn to kick the urge to keep, save, or cling to your art.

There’s a big difference between the artist’s making brain and the artist’s attachment brain. Making art is the important work we do as artists. It grows fertile in creative expression, inspired ideas, self-discipline, experimentation, and focus.

Hoarding the art we make has a suspicious connection to pride, ego and accomplishment.  Feeding those sentiments can seduce an artist into complacency in the studio. You don’t try as hard if you’re sitting idle, staring at your best painting.

Clinging to your work also says something about lack of trust – of yourself.

If you believe you’ll never paint anything as well, hanging onto your best piece of art may be a real-life manifestation of that nay-sayer’s voice in your head.  

Title it (here’s a course to help you with that part), scan it for documentation in your files, and move forward.  Trust that you’ll have more creative successes in the studio because you’re earning them by working hard.

When Patrons Love Your Work

There’s a whole other cupboard of pleasant satisfaction to be had in knowing that someone out there loves that piece you just made. They pine to gaze at it for a long, long time.

If you sell it and miss it, you can always brew a cup of coffee, fire up your computer and stare at the jpeg.

Making Makes You Better

If you make a lot of art, you’re less inclined to feel clingy towards a particularly successful piece, because it’s natural that you will get better and better, but only if you’re producing work.

If you keep your hands busy in the studio, pretty soon, your favorite painting will be so out-shined by the successes that follow it. You’ll look at last month’s best piece through a more mature lens, and observe a map of passages you’d adjust with your hard-earned, freshly acquired new knowledge.

Just Keep Making

Leave that bread crumb trail of your ever-improving process in the hands of collectors who resonate with the work you’re producing. Just like every selling artist in history has done before you.

Here is a link to a blog post from an artist I admire so much – David Hettinger. He’s writing in this post about why artists need to seed the earth with art – even more so when things look darker around us.

Let’s Plan to Make Art

How many pieces of art would you like to produce each year? And have you ever reached that goal? Working small helps if you’re aiming at lots of practice and sizes that are easy to mail. What plans do you have for the coming season of makery in your studio space?

Thanks for stopping by, and I’ll see you in the next post –

Belinda

P.S. You can subscribe to this blog to get the posts via email here, and you can also get my studio newsletter here. Watch your inbox for a confirmation email in either case. 🙂

P.P.S. The lessons outlined above are some of the topics I’m marinating on for a series of video courses. I wish someone could have guided me to avoid the uncertainty and bumps in the road when I started to sell my work. What do you think?

Art Quote

N.C. Wyeth’s children were beginning to reveal artistic sensibilities. Watching them sketch one evening in 1920, Convers remarked “Drawing! That’s the outstanding stunt in this house! All five around a lamp, each one seriously bent over a tablet of paper, recording all sorts of facts and fictions of Nature. One would guess this was night art school – or that we’re all nutty in the same way!”

K. Jennings

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