Green Artist

You don't have to be a qualified teacher in order to teach, all you need is enthusiasm and a good knowledge of your subject, so given that you love what you do it should be easy for you to set up and run short workshops to teach various aspects of your art.

There are literally thousands of people out there who would love to learn how you create your artworks, and because every artist is different, even if they use the same materials, subject matter and techniques as you, each student will produce an individual piece that is quite unlike your original work, so you don't need to worry about students copying your style or going away with 'trade secrets'.

With the number of giclée printers out there increasing steadily how do you find one that will work well for you? You may think it's just a matter of sending a digital image to your chosen printers and waiting for your prints to arrive in the post, but unfortunately it isn't as simple as that.  

Our experience is that getting consistently good results from a printing outlet can be very difficult indeed. Since we set up and digitise our own artwork, the setup process has not proved to be a problem, and the reproduction of the original has usually been very good, but various printers in the UK have let us down on other aspects of their service, so it's very much buyer beware, and I hope this article will help you to avoid any expensive pitfalls before they happen.

You can't sell your art unless people can see it. This might seem like an obvious statement but the fact is that very many artists love to create their work, and they produce one beautiful painting after another, and then stack them carefully against the wall in their studio. The canvases just mount up and many of them scarcely get to see the light of day again. This happens because so many artists are creatively immersed in their imaginative process and hardly give a thought to selling at all.

Despite the fact that many artists would prefer to forget about selling and just keep on creating artwork, most of them do actually want to sell their art and, if it was possible, they would like to make a living from their art so that they could concentrate on it full-time.

The Internet is the world's fastest-growing medium for marketing and selling online and, as millions of people worldwide are looking for web sites about art and looking to buy paintings online, it makes sense to display your artwork where all these people have a chance of finding it.

The fact is though, that despite the tremendous interest in art, it just isn't as easy as uploading your images and waiting for people to buy and then watching the money roll in. The Internet is a highly sophisticated tool and knowing how to use it properly makes all the difference in the world to whether your work is found or not, and whether it looks good and displays well when it is found.

There are several ways of displaying your artwork online, you can have your own website, you can have a page on a friends site, you can use one of the free 'photo' albums that comes with your ISP, or you can join an online gallery.