The Art of Survival 10 Top Tips to survive as an artist
1. BE REALISTIC I meet people who introduce themselves as artists and who have no body of work to show you. One guy I remember said he was a semi-professional oil painter. When I asked to see his portfolio he literally took 10 minutes going through his iphone’s photo gallery to find his paintings – and didn’t manage to show me one. Before you go around spouting that you paint for a living make sure you have a collection of work that you are really proud of. If you don’t, make the commitment to sit down for the next month and produce the best work you have ever done. Then make sure you have the
collection in a place you can find them on your ipad, computer or better still, have a physical file that someone can flick through. A brochure would be even better. Go online and upload some of your images to an art site that will showcase your portfolio – that way you can share the URL with prospects as an instant look-book, or as photos on your phone. 2. CREATE A PRICE LIST If you have never actually sold your artwork at least prepare some marketing material that will help you when that sale comes. As simple as it might sound, you really need a price list prepared detailing pictures of your art, titles, dimensions and prices. Have several copies printed off so you keep a copy in your hands while a potential buyer has another copy. It helps them beating you down too much on price. Your selling position is a whole lot stronger when you have your prices in writing.
3. REVIEW YOUR MARKETING Give yourself the challenge of reviewing all your current marketing techniques and learn a few new ones – put them to the test. If you haven’t uploaded a Powerpoint presentation to www.slideshare.net this week, or written a blog, do both. If you haven’t already downloaded a free social media marketing template from the web, do that now and implement a structured marketing campaign that suits your lifestyle. 4. REPURPOSE YOUR KNOWLEDGE If you have written an interesting blog have you thought about making a quick video of yourself talking about this on camera and putting it on Youtube? You could do a sound recording and give it away as a free MP3 download on the freebies section of your website. Don’t forget to capture people’s emails before you give it away. Leaving your message on lots of different social media sites is what I call “breadcrumbing” –