If I Had to Start From Zero With My Art Business
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When you are considering starting the journey on a big dream like selling your art, the fears and objections will flow in as sure as the tide.
If you’re just starting an art business, you might think the market is too saturated, there’s too much competition, you are too late, your timing is bad, and you could never possibly made an impact in the noisy world we live in.
But you’d be wrong. There's never been a better time to sell your art online, and today I want to talk about starting from absolute SCRATCH.
In fact, let's just say that everything in my business got completely wiped out. My email list, my website, my social media following and all the art I've ever made. And then an angel visited me and said, "Josie, you must start over, create and sell art." What in the heck would I do? How in heaven's name would I even start?
Well, today I'm going to tell you. I get the question A LOT:
But, Josie, how do I even ***start***?
I’ve been a professional artist for a while now. My daddy is a painter and I became declared artist in my teens. I’ve been to art school and grad school and I’ve been making a decent living as an artist for a good while now. I’ve built up a decent fan base.
But what if I had to start over? And let’s say, just for spice, that I also had a full time job or small children, or both, so time was limited, and I just had an hour or two a day to spend.
Let’s pause there for one second. You really do need an hour or two a day. If you are stretched too thin to spare an hour a day or at least a few hours a week because of other commitments, take the pressure off and just make art for fun until your situation changes. No sense in doing EVERYTHING. However, if you are determined to take a shot at making art and selling it, you can do it!
Do the next step
When you are looking at a big goal with lots of steps, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. But I want to really encourage you to focus on just the next step. You can only do one thing at a time, and each thing should be simple. When you are confused about the next move, take a breather, reset, and simplify. If the next step seems too big, it’s not the next step!
Narrow down your art style
In the beginning, work on the art! Let the art takes as long as it needs. But you must develop a consistent art practice schedule because everything depends on the art! You want to sell the art you are making, so you need to be making the art. If I could only make art on Saturdays, so be it. But your art deserves your time and attention, so show up for it!
Oce you start to gain expertise in a medium, I would narrow down my art style. Drastically. I would pick one medium and one style. This is not popular advice, but a niche isn’t jail! Your art practice will go through many iterations, but professionals specialize.
A series is at least 10-20 artworks in one style. I would aim for something that takes me less than 4 hours to complete. Plan on selling them, but I would not put them up for sale immediately. Make something that will cost about the same as a fancy dinner out for two—so nothing with hundreds of hours of labor or very expensive materials. Side note, if you want to know more about pricing, you should download my free worksheet “Pricing your Art Made Easy!”
Leverage social media
While developing my skills and voice by a robust studio practice, I would post my progress to a dedicated art Instagram account. These days, definitely focus on video but still images are good too. My target would be making one post per day. The video would be something about my art, my studio, my process, my inspiration or a time lapse. I would keep the videos under 15 seconds both to limit my time creating the video and to increase watchability—these days the best videos do not have to take a film crew and a gaffer and a boom operator.
The tech requirement for good social media content is a decent smartphone camera or a cheap digital camera. You can edit the videos in free or very cheap phone editing apps, or even inside Instagram. The only way to get good at documenting your work and your process is to do it, so you just have to start. Go for volume rather than being too perfectionistic about quality and publish every day. Be sure to interact with any comments and connections.
Copy success
Meanwhile, I would take a look at art accounts I admire and emulate their posting style. You can glean a huge amount of information from what successful creators post, how they photograph or film their work, how often they post and how they engage with their audience. This is not about copying someone’s art—the goal is always to create your own unique style. But you can absolutely learn from someone’s marketing strategy!
Build a one page website
Besides art supplies, everything so far is free, but this one will cost you some money. I would get a commerce website like Squarespace or Shopify and create 1 page. You don’t have to build out a whole website. You can do that in stages.
What would you have on that one page you ask? If it were ME, my page would be a picture of me with my art and include a (very) short bio. "Hi, I'm Josie, I make portraits of squirrels using string and bubblegum. Next collection coming soon." It would be worth it to me to hire a professional to take this photo, or ask a friend to help who is good at it.
Optional, but not required, would be to add a page with a longer bio and/or artist statement, a page with a gallery of my work, or a page that links to one of my social pages and current posts. You can build these out over time. You can actually connect most websites to Instagram so your Insta feed can fill out the website for visuals of your art.
Build your list
This is important and so many people skip this step. Social media is not a reliable way to reach people, even huge fans. The algorithms are tricky. You could get hacked (I have!)
An email list means you will have permanent access to your fan’s in-boxes. The sooner you start it, the sooner it will grow and you can begin to use it to promote your art! It’s easy to start a free Mailchimp email service. On my website there would be button and one pop-up that would ask for people's email address in exchange for something. Maybe a discount on their first order, or a promise to get first dibs when the collection gets released. The email list is PURE GOLD, and the most powerful driver of my current business. In fact, if there’s one takeaway you get from this episode I would like it to be: it’s time to start your email list!
First art Launch
After I have my collection of 10 to 20 pieces of art in the series I mentioned earlier, I would launch it for sale, one weekend only, from my website. If nothing sold, no problem. I will remove the work from view, create another batch of 10, and repeat the same cycle after 3-6 weeks. I would probably re-release the old work.
During all this, pay attention to any feedback you are getting from social media, paying special attention to something that goes mini-viral. That would be something that is an outlier. If my posts normally get 10 likes, but one gets 25 likes, I call that mini-viral, and it is important to figure out what was attractive about that post.
In this post, we covered A LOT of ground of the basics you can start today to build a successful art business from the ground up. What's your first move?
