I don’t always succeed at the tasks I set myself. One of those tasks that has born little fruit has been to sell some of my art online. Another related task has been to find a way to make a video of my art that is somehow interesting and worth watching. There are venues online to sell art (See my Ebay and Easy links to the right of this) but if you’re not well known (as I am not well known) then it’s a hard thing to do. If people don’t know you exist then they can’t buy any art from you. How do you get known? Who knows? If there was a recipe for that everyone would follow it and we’d all be famous.
So I tried again today to get things going with my selling of artwork. So far over the last two years it’s been a tough task but here I go again tilting at windmills. Jeez, that’s getting me depressed just wring about it. I’m going to have to ignore the stench of failure and concentrate on the nuts and bolts. The process. I’m good at process.
It takes a lot of work to prep stuff to be able to sell it. I need a lot of images of the paintings in order to try and sell something. I’m working on selling some of my small works so I scan in my paintings and that is usually the best image to use for selling. But you can’t have just one image so I also take photos of my art.
I have three different ways of photographing my drawings and paintings. The first is to take a photo on my drawing table. Easy enough. I lay the small painting flat and hold the camera directly above it. But that can also be a pretty boring shot. So I’ll liven it up by doing two different things. If I’m shooting a five by seven inch painting I’ll put it on a bed of other small paintings. That way there are bits of visual interest around the main painting. I also vary the angle a little and take another shot from about a seventy degree angle. This give me more variety without moving the paintings.
The second way if to make the drawing into a still life. I like to do this with my eleven by seventeen inch drawings. I surround the drawing with the implements of its making. I put markers, brushes, pencils, and other things around the paper. That makes the work look more like an object than a regular scan does. Making it look like an object grounds the work for me and makes it more relatable.
The third way I take a photo is on my easel. I stand the painting or drawing up straight and take three shots. One from straight on (usually the most boring shot), another from the left, and another from the right. The easel shots add a little more visual interest and give a sense of scale to the work. The plain old scan gives the best view of the work but all the other shots add to being able to picture it in the real world.
All these photos need basic work done to them to. Not even heavy graphics work or anything like that but they need to be organized in folders and named. Names. That’s another crazy thing I saddled myself with today. I name all my paintings and drawings with some random name. I do it so I can identify and keep track of individual pieces. Otherwise it gets confusing referring to two hundred pieces all as “That one”. I almost always name the piece right after I finish it. Things work best that way. Except last week I made about twenty five new five by seven inch drawings and wanted to keep going at a fast clip so I didn’t bother to name them. I knew it was the wrong thing to do but I did it anyway. So today after I scanned in the paintings I had to organize the scans and photos I had taken. So I had to come up with twenty five names on the spot. That was about as annoying as it sounds.
I’ve been trying to use my social media platforms to help me sell some art but one of the problems I’ve run into is that Etsy and especially Ebay don’t keep up with social media very well. Especially video. Since I’ve been trying to think up ideas of how to shoot my work in an interesting manner It would be nice if I could embed video into my sales pitch. I have YouTube videos of me actually drawing some of the pieces. Would that be nice to include? Too bad I can’t. You can embed YouTube video just about anywhere but not on Easy or Ebay. Etsy is at least good at linking stuff out to Twitter and such. I can tweet a piece that I post. Ebay can’t do that at all. It’s totally stuck in 1999 like social media never existed. It’s really kind of weird that they never updated that. Ebay exists in its own world separate from the rest of the linked up social media driven internet.
I really wish I could come up with an idea for making some videos of my work. I’d say YouTube is my strongest social media platform so if I could get something going there it would be cool even if Ebay ignores that it exists. But almost all ideas with art and video end up on an animation path. After all video is about movement so what would be more natural that to move stuff? Except art is static. You have to be able to look at it. If it’s not sitting still that’s going to be tough. Instead I’m going to have to think about angles, size differential, movement of stuff other than the art, and overlap. That might make me have to do a lot of video editing too and that’s something that eats up time like a voracious beast. Uh-oh, I better quit writing before I start to smell the stench of failure again. That’ll keep you up nights.
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