Squidoo - a new tool for artists?

I'm investigating squidoo as a new way of reaching customers and fellow artists. If you have a skill or specialist knowledge Squidoo allows you to quickly create a web page highlighting your knowledge.

I've created one that has a few simple tips for starting out painting and drawing. Its early days yet but I'm developing it all the time.

Especially promising are its links to Flickr.com and ArtByUs.com.

More later when I've had chance to suss it out.

See my offering at www.squidoo.com/howtopaint

At the start of the year I joined some non-eBay online art galleries in an attempt to find an outlet that allowed me to charge more for my paintings.

The results are in: ebay remains the best way to sell your art. I've been experimenting with other online galleries for selling my artworks and though its true that other website sell you work for more money, none of the websites that I've encountered could sell anything like the quantity of art that eBay can shift.

So I'm just going to enjoy eBay for the excellent art outlet that it is. It lets me make a small income from my work, and gives me the incentive to keep creating.

Am I Having a Laugh?

Someone has asked me if my recommendations for selling on eBay are tongue-in-cheek? They felt some of my recommendations for making art that sell on eBay were cynical.

I detect an element of art snobishness here.

I believe that artists can get an honest wage out of selling their art on eBay - but only if you can paint fast. You have to paint fast because art doesn't usually sell for more than £50. If you are blessed with a painting style that enables you to paint a completed work in 2 to 3 hours, you can earn £10-£15 per hour. Not a bad wage, certainly not a wage to be ashamed of...

Of course, many people don't paint fast, and therefore I can't really recommend eBay to those people. There's nothing worse than selling a painting for £50, but having taken 100 hours to paint it. For these people the options are:

1) Sell it on ebay anyway - heck, you enjoyed painting it and if you can get a few quid to pay for your next canvas, then great. This is a noble and honourable attitude, Let no-one tell you otherwise.

2) You can throw the painting in a skip - a less honourable option. I believe all paintings deserve a chance of life!

3) You can pay for framing, then hoik it round several galleries until you find a gallery willing to take it, sale or return. You can then wait for several months while the painting may or may not sell. And if it doesn't sell you've lost your original investment in time, plus your financial investment in a new frame.

4) You can look for a non-eBay online outlet. I'll talk more about this option in a later post.

Are eBay Artists Selling Themselves Short?

Some of my previous blogs have caused consternation in some forums. The low prices of art on eBay seem to be the main bone of contention. The negative opinions seem to focus on the low prices 'selling art short'. That the low prices achieved for art on eBay are lowering the price of art elsewhere.

Wow, what a can of worms! Taking the argument to its logical conclusion, it suggests that art is overvalued because if you put art in a purely commercial environment (eBay), away from posh galleries and the views of a limited number of curators, the value of most art seems to be less than £100.

My first reaction is to say, yes, the value of most art is under £100 - deal with it!
I don't have a problem with art selling for less than £100. I have a much bigger problem with poor art selling for vastly inflated prices.

If your art is very labour intensive, feel free to charge lots of money. After all, if a plumber or garage mechanic can charge £30 an hour, so can a highly trained artist. But don't grumble if no one wants to buy it because the perceived quality of your art is not high enough.

All eBay does is expose artists to the ruthless economic forces that most of us have to deal with in other spheres of life. But unlike practically every other outlet for visual artists, eBay delivers an audience of thousands of potential buyers. So what if the the buyers don't have a large budget for art? At least, for the first time in the history of art, we have a large audience!

My advice remains, if you can produce art quickly and regulalry, eBay is a great place to start selling it. You'll get your artistic career off to a great start.

The Joy of eBay

If you read the eBay discussion groups that deal with art you'd be forgiven for thinking that eBay and artists just don't get on. The boards seem to be full of artists lamenting the lack of sales, low selling prices and high eBay fees.

But I sold a painting yesterday, not for much (£50). I'll pay about £6 in eBay and PayPal fees and about £10 in taxes. The raw materials (canvas and paint) probably cost £6. So I'll probably come away with about £28 profit. Not much, but the painting probably only took 2-3 hours to paint and I had the priceless joy of painting it.

And although pictures don't sell for much, they do sell REGULARLY. And thats just great! I'd rather have 10 paintings sell each month for £40, that sell one for £400. Any financial expert will tell you that a steady, reliable income is the best way to make a career. Relying on one-off, sporadic sales is just too risky.

Its not the money that makes eBay so rewarding - you get the personal feedback from the customers. The person who bought my painting says that she fell in love with it, and just had to have it. I've got eBay customers who keep coming back for more paintings (some with 6 or 7 purchases in the last 12 months).

Compare eBay with a commercial gallery - sporadic sales, huge commission, actively discouraged from any contact with customers, geographical exclusivity contracts...

Artists or Tradesmen?

Artists or Tradesmen?

A group of us were discussing the pricing of our work yesterday. Some of us were very shy of fixing a price, feeling that perhaps the buying public would have a very negative reaction to any artwork that was priced in the hundreds of pounds.

When we start out as artists I think perhaps we need to look at our artwork in relation to other trades.

For example, when our car won’t start, we take it to our local garage. When the bill comes back we see the line for materials (spark plugs, oil, filters etc) and we see a line for the mechanic’s time. The mechanics will rarely charge less than £10 for an hour of their time, often they will charge £20 or even £30 per hour.

And where do artists stand in relation to mechanics (or plumbers, or window cleaners, or street sweepers). How should they stand in relation to doctors, dentists, lawyers? Most of us would position artists’ skills somewhere in the middle. And probably rightly so.

So why do we still feel guilty if we charge £200 for a painting that took us all week to complete?

I try to charge a reasonable sum for my work. Luckily I work fast, and can produce 3-4 paintings a week. I probably charge £100-£250 for most of them, and I probably take about 5-10 hours to paint each one. Add 15% for framing costs and I really do think that I’m providing good, value-for-money art.

eBay Tips 2: Nobody will buy your paintings !

eBay Tips 2: Nobody will buy your paintings <sigh!>

Or that’s how it will feel. Art sells very slowly – ask any gallery owner or dealer. Unfortunately eBay gives us just 10 days to attract a potential buyer. The sell-though rate for the art categories on eBay is probably 1 in 10. That means that for every painting that sells, nine paintings don’t. Even when your eBay sales really get going, you’ll be lucky to sell five out of ten. So your eBay selling costs will be higher than (for example) the eBay seller who concentrates on selling DVDs and who sells on almost all his or her auctions. But take heart! Remember that your profit margins will be higher (with luck your materials will cost under £5, and you’ll be selling for £30-£50) – that’s a 600% mark up!

EBay Tips 1: Be Prolific!

Making a Living on eBay: Be Prolific!

A little while ago I published my top ten tips for successfully selling your art on eBay. Tip number 1 was ‘Be Prolific’. Here’s why:

Consistently putting up artworks to auction gets customers used to viewing your paintings on a regular basis. Remember that most buyers of art like to take a good long think before they hit the ‘Buy’ button. They might like your style, but maybe they want to wait until you have a painting that will match their sofa. You need to have plenty of paintings listed, and keep a regular turnover of paintings on your site. These measures will help create a ‘buzz’ for your site, by making it an interesting place to come back to.

Being prolific also makes sure that you keep a healthy cash flow. If you only list one painting a month, you’ll never be able to give up the day job. Why? Because, unless you are very, very established as an eBay artist you will struggle to get more than £50 for a painting and £50 a month will just about keep you in materials, but not much else!

Of course, to be prolific, it helps to work fast. This hints at another basic truth of art on eBay: art that takes 100 hours to complete still sells at the same price as art that takes 1 hour to complete. If it takes you a month to complete a painting the eBay is probably NOT the place for you to sell your artwork. So if you work slow, consider changing your style. Ebay can be a discouraging place, especially if you sell an artwork for a hourly rate that would be illegal in the third world…

Making a Living on eBay

Making a Living on eBay

I’ve been selling art through eBay for the last 10 months. Here’s what I have learnt so far. It’s not an exhaustive list:

1. You need to be prolific. Most artwork sells for under £100, so you need to be regular in putting up new work.


2. On average, 5 out of 10 auctions won’t end in a sale. Don’t be discouraged by this.


3. Expect eBay and paypal feed to take away 25% of your profits, then expect the taxman to take his 22% of whatever is left.


4. Buy your materials cheap. Given point 2 above, you really need to make as much profit as possible.


5. Don’t charge too little for postage and packing. Charge for postage and materials and add 10 or 15% for your time. Add more if you have a long trip to the post office.


6. Don’t promise next day delivery unless you really can do it. Promise delivery ‘within 3 working days’.


7. Keep in regular contact with your buyers. Send them an email when the auction finishes, when you receive their payment and when you dispatch their work.


8. Put a link to your eBay store in all your emails. Also add a link that adds your name to their Favourite Buyers list. This applies to all your emails, not just emails to customer and buyers.


9. If people send you a cheque, its normally quite safe to dispatch the painting before the cheque has cleared – and its great PR that your customers will really appreciate.


10. Always offer a ‘satisfaction guaranteed’ returns policy.

Contrail and Distant Manchester

 

Manchester - through the trees

 

I'm back...

A long walk in the country today with my sketchbook tucked firmly under my arm...where it remained for the whole journey. Sometimes you just have to walk and not get distracted by pressure to record what you see. It's just better to let the landscape wash over you in a long pleasurable wave - so the sketchbook remained under my arm while I enjoyed a crisp winter day with bright, constant sunshine coupled with low temperatures that made my jaw ache.

Looking into the farthest distance, towards the urban sprawl and highrises of Manchester, I was struck by the atmospeheric flattening of perspective and by the way that the haze (or smog) obstcures the lower floors of the buildings, while the upper floors poke out of the obscuring air and seem to float, shimmering in the heat haze, even on this coldest of winter days.

Sunset from Belmont//Tockholes 10/5/05
copyright David Pott

Megan, Alice and George at Stanley park today.
copyright David Pott

Stanley Park, Blackpool - A Real Scorcher!

A visit to Blackpool with Cath, Alice and Megan, plus Cath's mum, dad, Alex and Richard, George and Olivia.

Very hot with that special smell of hot grass, suncream and sweat! Played cricket and football until we were wobbly. Picnic on the field, pork pies and baps with jam tarts afterwards. Alice and Megan asleep in the car on the way back. My legs aleady starting to stiffen up.

The summer is shaping up nicely...

Yesterday was spent mainly at work, but managed to get out in the evenining to drive to Tockholes, then walk towards the setting sun, which always provided the best, most dramatic views - the bright sun, half hidden behing the clouds, send deep rays of light towards the earth, which becomes dramatically dark and contrasts with the bright sky.

How to Create Art That Sells on eBay

1. Bright colours. The little thumbnails that eBay gives you have to provide an image of your work that has clout - so make it brightly coloured. The brighter the better - intense, vibrant colours sell better.
2. Box canvas. EBay is all about instant gratification and not spending too much money - having to frame a piece of work puts buyers off. As an artist you don't want to pay lots of money to framers, so paint on box canvases.
3. Have a 'theme'. Lots of different paintings in different styles and dimensions don't look good together. Instead you'll need to work in themes, selling different variations on the same basic idea.
4. Don't spend too long on a painting. Time is money and unfortunately, eBay buyers just don't recognise the craft involved in spending long hours getting your painting 'just right'. Or perhaps they do, but they aren't willing to part with their cash for it. So paint 'fast and loose' and never spend longer than an hour on a painting that might sell for a penny!
5. Paint lots and lots! This point follows on from the point above. Art sells slowly, so you'll need to produce a lot of canvases to keep your cashflow rolling in.
6. Never undersell yourself. Use plenty of superlatives like 'huge' (for any canvas larger that 12 inches square) and 'amazing'.
7. Highlight any good feedback you receive in your main description, don't rely on buyers to look at your feedback ratings.

I'm painting a few seascapes on box canvases at the moment. A box canvas (sometimes known as 3D or 'gallery wrapped canvas') is simply an ordinary canvas but one which is slightly deeper than a standard canvas. This extra depth helps lift the canvas from the wall, and means that you don't need to get the canvas frames - it looks great just as it is.

For an artist this has some good advantages:

1. There's no framing cost.
2. The canvas looks very contemporary, very modern.
3. Postage costs are lower, because there's no heavy frame.

Working on canvas, rather than panel also has some advantages:

1. A smoother, more bouncy surface
2. The weave of the canvas lets the colours mix more, creating softer effects
3. A pure white canvas is a beautiful, inspiring object in its own right.

Couple on the Beach (Blackpool)
copyright David Pott

New website goes Live!

I've just finished redesigning my website. I used Trellix - a peice of software that must be the easiest way to create a simple website that I've ever found. Originally written by the man that invented the spreadsheet, it has now changed its name to Cute Site Builder.

Here's the link www.davidpott.co.uk

Alice at Moss Bank Park - Half Term Feb 2005
copyright David Pott