How I paint art that sells

I’ve been painting in water colour and acrylic for just one year but have been successfully selling my paintings for at least half of that time. So, how do I do it? There are plenty of websites that tell you how to advertise and promote your work across the social media platforms but these don’t tell you what you need to do with your art to make it appealing in the first place. Unless your paintings are the sort that people want to see every day in their homes they are never going to sell.

My aim when I started painting was to explore and experiment with as many different techniques and subjects as possible and wasn’t even thinking about selling my work. Indeed, it didn’t cross my mind that anyone would even be remotely interested in my work and my early paintings were certainly not of good enough quality to sell.

However, as I continued painting I was also posting my efforts across social media including Pinterest, Instagram and Facebook and even LinkedIn (although I think I was rather abusing that particular platform!) and also telling my friends and colleagues about my work. It turned out that they in turn were telling others. So, it was possibly inevitable that someone might see something they liked and eventually they did. And then so did someone else! It then snowballed from there with requests for commissions.

The commissions have been interesting because none of them were based on subjects that I had previously painted so I saw them as personal challenges. The point is that all of my paintings span a diverse range of subjects and that means I have a range of artwork that could appeal to an equally diverse range of tastes. I also knew that I didn’t want to specialise in just one genre such as landscapes or abstract. I wanted to be free to paint what I like and when I like and in a variety of sizes. The result is that I have a wide range of paintings that I advertise on my website and on Etsy.

Now, I have to be honest and confess that although I do paint a wide range of subjects I have also recently moved into creating a series. The reason behind this is twofold. The first is that if my paintings are successfully selling then it makes sense to make more. The second reason is do with consistency; if I paint two cityscapes months apart they are highly likely to look and feel totally different which could be confusing to collectors. So, I now paint the same types of paintings as a single series so that each painting will have something of a similar style and then be recognisable as my work.

So, I will continue pr producing a range of different paintings and this year my plan is to exhibit my art at as many shows as p possible and then get to test my theory further.