Getting Started: Tips and Principles for Independent Artists On-Line

Over the years, I've met quite a few aspiring artists who keep on-line art galleries or art shops like I do and want a few tips on how they can get more people to pay attention to their art, and possibly get to a point where they actually sell prints on a regular basis or land commission jobs every so often. I always give them more or less the same few pieces of basic advice, so the following is some basic, bare bones advice that I hope will prove helpful to others in the future.

1. Evaluate Your Skills

I'm not saying you have to be able to look at your artwork and think it equal to something you'd see hanging in the Louvre or anything, but take a long, hard look at it anyway. Would you buy your art? I mean... really... would you? If not, then it's probably safe to say that you should polish your skills a little bit before you can expect to sell it to anyone else. Consider that for you to sell a piece of art, a customer has to not only like it, but like it enough to go get their credit card and pay their hard-earned money to own it.

Get serious about what you're doing. Take art classes. Study tutorials and practice, practice, practice. Ask other artists to critique your work, listen to their feedback, and follow their advice. Develop a personal style that makes your artwork distinctively yours and helps it stand out in its own way. Then once you get really good? Keep working and try to get even better. Artists who are really passionate about what they're doing never stop trying to improve.

2. Make A Statement

I can't speak for everyone out there, but I know a couple of things that don't make such a hot impression on me when it comes to visual art have to do with artist's statements. When you post your work, do you write an artist's statement to go with it? Many people don't, and when I see a beautiful piece of artwork posted on-line somewhere about which the artist didn't see fit to say a single word, I tend to lose interest right away more often than not. I really like to see at least a few sentences that give me something further to think about when I look at the work in question.