How to Sell Art Online: The Ultimate Guide
When I graduated from art school 15 years ago, I had mastered color theory and watercolour techniques, but didn’t know the first thing about business. As a year-end project, we learned to create a very basic portfolio website. No ecommerce — simply samples of our work and a contact page.
My very first week as a proper adult and working artist, I learned a hard lesson: to succeed in art, you must also succeed in business. And my sad little Flash website wasn’t going to cut it.Ecommerce wasn’t as accessible 15 years ago, and social media was essentially non-existent. For unknown artists like me, the money was in corporate and advertising commissions.
The ability to easily sell your own art online completely changed the game.
In 2017, the starving artist is a dying breed. Ecommerce and social selling have become increasingly effective means for independent artists to self-sufficiently fund their craft, and most importantly, to gain the independence to sell the work they want to create directly to their niche audiences.
For galleries, the shift in the last two decades has allowed curators to represent more artists and expand into affordable prints to reach larger audiences worldwide.
How to sell art online
Since my own career as an illustrator lasted mere months, I consulted two Shopify merchants — an artist and a gallerist — actively making their living by selling art.
Maria Qamar, the artist also known as Hatecopy, quit her advertising career to focus on painting when her pop art Aunty paintings began to catch fire on Instagram.
Ken Harman is the gallerist responsible for the Spoke Art empire — three galleries on two coasts, three ecommerce stores, a print shop and production facility.
Through Maria and Ken’s personal experiences, we’ll walk through the ins and outs of the business of being an artist, sharing their tips to help you sell art online.
Side hustle vs full time
Many new artists get their break on social, growing a devout following by sharing their work consistently and engaging in online artist communities.
Maria pursued her dream of becoming a working artist after being laid off from her advertising job, but the success didn’t happen overnight, and she supplemented her income in the beginning, while growing her fan base on Instagram.
Her full-time job, however, taught her business skills that were critical in getting her store off the ground and marketing herself as an artist.
💡 TIP: Tap into employer resources and learning opportunities while you’re still working, growing your art business on the side. What knowledge or experience can you glean from your day job?
There’s something to be said also for taking the plunge. When Ken, unable to secure a temporary pop-up space, signed a two-year lease on a space, the risky moved helped him quit his job waiting tables within a few months.
“In 2010, I curated an exhibition with an Australian artist. He mailed me a bunch of work. I rented a venue. He bought his plane tickets, got his hotel, and about two weeks before his show was set to open, the pop-up venue went out of business and was no longer available. This was before pop-ups became sort of a cultural thing. I couldn’t find a gallery that would let me borrow their space for a short amount of time. Eventually I came across an empty resale space that was the perfect fit for the exhibition. However, the landlord wanted a two year lease. I really didn’t have any other options. I just pulled the trigger.” — Ken
Selling your own work vs selling art by other artists
If you’re not personally an artist, you can still get into the game of selling art as a curator. Artists disinterested in the business aspect of their craft rely on agents, galleries, and other merchants to do it for them.
There are several ways to work with artists, from selling originals or prints, to licensing works to be printed on merchandise. Generally, the artist would make a set commission on sold works.
“Most galleries offer an industry standard fifty percent consignment split for original art. The artist provides the artwork, we do our best to sell it, and then we split the proceeds fifty percent. For prints, we actually run our own print shop in Berkeley, California. We do all of our own printing in house. Typically we offer a fifty percent split after the cost of production.” — Ken
While Maria runs her own shop, where she sells prints and merchandise, eliminating the middle man and keeping her costs low, she leans on relationships with experienced galleries to exhibit and sell her original art.
Galleries can expose your work to new audiences, and have access to resources and professionals to help promote, handle, and ship artwork.
What to sell: original vs reproduction
Some mediums like sculpture are more difficult to reproduce or use for merchandise applications (but consider 3D printing or collaborations with toy manufacturers). Most 2D mediums, however, have multiple options for generating unlimited sales on a single work.
Consider the following:
- Original fine art
- Limited or open edition prints–giclee (framed or unframed) or canvas
- Digital downloads–desktop wallpaper, stock photos, inspirational quote prints, etc.
- Custom/commissions–original works in traditional or digital mediums
- Merchandise–hats, mugs, t-shirts, enamel pins, etc.
- Repeat prints on fabric or wallpaper
- Licensing work to other ecommerce merchants
- Collaborations with merchants and creators
In addition to selling prints and other merch on her site, Maria collaborated with Shopify merchant Nuvango to reproduce some of her works and prints on clothing.
When setting up your online art store, choose a theme that lets your art breathe–large images and lots of white/negative space. Add on apps that help you run your store more effortlessly, allowing you to focus on the creative aspects of the business.
Theme suggestions for art stores:
Apps to help run your online art business:
If you sell your artwork via prints and merch, apps like Kite, Gooten, or Printful can sync with your store, taking the burden of shipping and fulfillment out of the equation.
Printful catalog of products
“I use an app to do the printing and delivering. All I have to do is upload and let it do the work for me. Now I can focus on actually creating the artwork rather than printing, packaging, shipping every single day, spending at least three, four hours just doing that. I can now use that time to brainstorm and come up with better things and connect with people." – Maria
Now I can focus on actually creating the artwork rather than printing, packaging, shipping every single day.
Maria Qamar
Try apps like Photo Gallery to feature past or out-of-stock works—they can serve as a portfolio for galleries for other merchants looking to work with you, and requiring a full representation of your catalog.
💡 TIP: Use variants in Shopify to provide customers not only with size options, but finish and framing options as well. Variants can be edited to reflect unique/tiered prices.
Photographing and scanning art
Photographing and representing your products clearly and accurately is important across the board in ecommerce, regardless of industry. Without the ability to feel a product, customers need to get the best sense of what they’re buying through clear and detailed images.
“Ultimately when you're selling works online, it's all about the image. If you have a bad image of your work, the image that you have doesn't represent the work accurately, you're going to have a harder time selling it.” – Ken
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Photographing art is a little trickier than shooting other products, and a basic light setup may still cause glare or color irregularities. Consider hiring a professional to shoot larger works or art with any three-dimensional elements.
For 2D works, however, Ken recommends scanning as an affordable and effective alternative to photography:
"We have a photography setup at our production facility. However, the artists provide the scans of their own work, because scans are something they need for their own archives. The most cost effective way to do that is to get a desktop scanner and scan the work in parts and stitch it together in Photoshop. If you've got a piece that's got a high gloss coating or a resin, that's a little tricker, but for the majority of works on canvas or paper, it's pretty easy.”
Helice Wen, via Spoke Art
Open vs limited edition
Reproducing work on t-shirts or mugs means that a single work can bear fruit indefinitely. However, some galleries like Spoke, opt for a limited edition model on many of the works they represent.
Learn More: Get ideas for things to make and sell online.
The effect is much like that of a limited time offer—creating a sense of scarcity and urgency is an excellent marketing tactic. For Ken, however, the decision to limit print runs goes deeper:
"We work really hard to find things that are very special to sell. Things that are special should be treated like they're special. While we may be able to make more money selling things as an open edition and selling as many as we possibly can, I think that by offering our works as limited editions really helps add to the value of the art.”
Offering our works as limited editions really helps add to the value of the art.
Ken Harman
Limited edition has its drawbacks, however.
“A lot of the things that we sell have secondary market values. You can go onto a website like Ebay and find those works selling for in some cases, exponentially more than the original price, because the demand is so high. It’s certainly a little bit of a bummer, because we can't give all of our art to everyone who wants it.” – Ken
To help minimize reselling, Spoke will limit quantities of certain prints per customer. They’ve also built a blacklist of known resellers.
"Making sure that the real fans are actually the ones who are able to get the things that we sell is always a priority.” – Ken
Printers and printing
It’s possible to create quality prints yourself with the right paper, ink, and printer. You can also offer your customers framed options, and DIY the framing. As a new artist, this method can keep costs low, but it’s not sustainable or scalable.
"In the beginning, I would print, package, and deliver by hand every single poster that was ordered. I did this for about 1,000 orders. Every morning, I would get up, go to the print shop, package all the prints, go to the Canada post office. At some point the volume became so much that I couldn't make time to draw or to be an artist. I was just spending all of my days delivering, and in transit.” – Maria
A local or online print company can reproduce your work en masse with wholesale pricing strategies, if you plan to do your own shipping or want to sell your prints offline, too.
💡 TIP: For a completely hands-off approach, look for a print on demand and dropship company. Maria now uses Printful for her online store.
Gallery shows, pop-ups, and offline events
Because Maria works frequently in traditional mediums, much of the impact of the texture and scale of her work gets lost digitally.
“It's actual physical work, so when we do exhibits, you can walk into a gallery and see that I'm a real person that has technical skills that can do paintings and large scale installations.” – Maria
Artists can also connect with fans and find new audiences by taking work offline. Use in-person experiences to drive people back to your online store.
Consider the following:
- Partner with a gallery to exhibit work
- Look into local art markets and events, set up a one-time or semi-permanent booth
- Consign work through gift or lifestyle stores, or set up a small pop-up within an existing store
- Open your studio to the public when you launch your website, or keep consistent weekly open-studio hours
- Run a pop-up shop (partner with other artists to reduce costs)
photo: Spoke Art
