Studio MDF | Michael Fletcher | Digitial Art Blog

Many artists and design professionals make a substantial amount of their income from the relatively passive stream of stock art sales. Useful icon sets, stock photographs, wordpress themes and illustrations. During the course of your art career you'll find you'll start lots of project and never finish them or find that they do not meet your clients needs. The many stock sale channels on the internet are a great way to monetize these poor orphaned works.

Stock art is an excellent passive income stream. Select your art submit it to various channels, tag it and wait for your art to find your clients. There are a number of considerations you'd need to make when submitting to stock markets though. Generally submitting your stock exclusively to one channel will get you higher commissions but will limit your reach as you will not be able to submit it anywhere else. This is the best option for your best quality stock that targets a very particular niche. In cases like these where you have a good quality product you'll find that distributing in one channel will get your best return as you'll be able to command better prices. When recycling work which can be used as stock you'd be better off submitting it as far and wide as possible.

Spend some time on client forums and find out what is in demand, look at trends in web design and on news sites. This is particularly useful for icon sets and illustrations. If you can produce high quality graphics that fill a common need you'll find your monthly income will swell quite quickly.

With stock photography focus on iconic images that are illustrative. Again it's important to think about what who will be trawling stock sites and what they'll be looking for images for.

iStockPhoto.com
Stockexpert

Developing an online presence is one of the most important things you can do straight away sometimes even before you've created your first piece of art.

You must spend time building your authority and your brand. When people consume art or literature the credentials of the author or artist is probably the defining factor when a choice exists. Contributing in art communities and writing articles for other websites or publications are great ways to get your name out and associated with your niche. Spend as much time as you can researching your niche. Comment on work by prominent people in your niche. Find out what allowed these individuals rise above the rest and establish themselves. Don't be afraid to ask questions. Consider approaching insiders for interviews. Understand your niche and how you can add unique value. Most importantly express your passion for your niche and you will find that others will follow suit.

Online galleries work much like their real life counterparts. These online galleries display an artists work and provide printing and shipping services. In return for the work marketing and distributing the artists work the gallery owner charges a commission on each sale. which can be anywher from 10% to 80% of the sale price depending on who you deal with.

Naturally when selecting a gallery to display and distribute your work you should consider the quality produced by the gallery first as whatever quality ships from the gallery will reflect well or poorl on you.
Print programs like those at deviantArt are useful for checking the market but unless you're willing to buy a Premium Print subscription this is not really worth your while.
If you're serious about displaying Monetizing your art your best bet is always going to be with lower volume higher quality galleries than community galleries. Smaller galleries are generally more selective but as a result are able to charge higher prices which equate to higher commission cheques. If your work is good enough you'll find your best opportunities will lie in these niche galleries that cater to a smaller market.
These galleries are great sources of backlinks as well. Where ever possible try and get them to add a link to your website. Search engines love good contextual links. When dealing with online galleries it's extremely important to find out what rates you could get on commissioned work. You may find that you do most of your work through a particular gallery and as a result you are now growing your number of commissioned pieces. Try and find out at the outset if the gallery will be able to accomodate you with your commissioned pieces by way of shipping and printing. This is great business as producing one off pieces in your personal capacity can break the bank and send potential clients running.

As with all things in the art world spend some time trolling the net hanging about in forums and you'll soon have list of links as long as your arm to go and hit up for their services. Just remember to weigh up the offers based on what goes in your pocket not what the customer coughs up.

Some Links to get you going:
deviantART Prints
Untapped source art gallery and print store
Digital Art Print Gallery
Spacescapes Gallery

Since the dawn of time the artist has looked for ways to benefit their artistic pursuits and for probably just as long they've found themselves getting screwed over by pretty much everyone else. It's no secret that society on the whole does not put great value on art. As a result the modern artist has had to become multi disciplinary. Every artist except the truly exceptional has needed to learn to be a businessman. The modern artist is an entrepeneur able to balance the books market his work, make sales, manage customer relationships and find some time to create stuff worth selling.

There are a number of ways to go about doing this these days.

Broadly speaking there are two option, sell your work yourself or use a third party. Producing and distributing your work yourself is a viable option these days with a number of printing options available on the web as well as offline. The problem with this is that once the item is sold the artist needs to keep records, make delivery and generally own the the entire customer interaction. If you hope to make art your primary income this is the kind of business you should look at running as you have control of your pricing and only have to cover the overheads of producing and shipping your works.  The catch here is that it is often more expensive as to get discounts on the printing process you would have to buy in bulk which is not always an option which will normally cut into your profit margin.

Some Online printing options for artists:

Print Wild Canvas prints based in South africa with a great web site and tons of options
CanvasRus Art printing Based in the Uk and available throughout Europe
FinerWorks Art printing US based online art print store.


My next article will look at online galleries that do the selling for you.

Now I'm not even sure if Hungary has fruit let alone fruit flies but the metaphor seems kinda right for the amount of clutter in my head recently. As it happens this state is very common and tends to afflict me in particular. It generally starts when I'm just trying to many things all at the same time.
Invariably when this happens I tend to revert to safe past times like tweaking a digital canvas that needs no tweaking or watching some boring and ultimately  time stealing television.
My strategy when this happens is simple I'll concentrate on just one big goal a day and gear my efforts around that you'll be amazed at how hard it is to focus on just one thing, but how much easier it is to that thing done.
As it stands a really exciting week lies ahead, I've registered my Domain and a number of creative tasks now lie ahead for me. First and foremost and this is my current big goal is to find a wordpress theme - I'm looking at ultimately designing a custom theme however I still have some research to do before I can start with that, once i've selected the theme I'm going to be designing a branded header for the site.
Posts will be kinda sparse not that they could be sparser than they are currently as getting set up is proving to be quite time intensive. However I'm planning to document the creative elements of the set up on this site so perhaps I can add some value as I go along.
I have also been discussing my e-book idea with a few people and am currently working out some possible timelines for the project.

So all in all yet another week without much in the way of content *sigh* but lots of excitement afoot.