10 Proven Ways To Sell Your Art as an Artist

For most artists, creating art comes naturally. However, selling art seems to be much harder, and for some, it seems almost impossible—especially if you don’t know where to start. In this article, we will discuss the top ten ways how to sell your art as an artist. This is a topic many people, online blogs, influencers, and more have discussed, providing a multitude of options. But does it really work? How effective are these strategies, and what are the main challenges and pitfalls?

The honest truth is that even if you know where and how to sell your art, selling art is hard. The statistical reality is that the art market is tremendously oversaturated. There are millions of artists and even more artworks, with just a limited number of art collectors and walls to hang those works. As a result, the bulk of the pieces created by artists across the globe will remain unsold. This is not the fault of the artist, the collectors, or the art world in general. The reality is that there are significantly more people interested in creating art than there are people interested in collecting art.

If people tell you that selling art is easy, then I am afraid they are making some false promises in search of clicks, views, and money. In theory, there are arguably a hundred ways to sell your art, but in practice, only a few really work, and they require the right preparation, the right art, a strategic approach, time, and commitment. As a result, we are pleased to help you navigate your way to art sales with this complete overview of the best ways to sell your art as an artist based on in-field experiences.

Other useful resources discussing pricing, professionalizing your profile as an artist, improving your art, different career paths, and more, can be found at our overview page Advice for Artists.

1. Direct Sales

Let’s start with the first and most obvious way to sell your art to your clients: directly, without a dealer, venue, exhibition, or platform facilitating the sale or providing the lead. Direct sales are great because you don’t have to share the profits with anyone, and you have direct contact with your client.

The obvious downside is that building a client base takes time and effort—and most likely, it will only occur naturally by doing some of the other things on this list. People need to see and notice you somewhere before they can contact you directly; think of Instagram, an exhibition, or an art fair. Or vice versa, where you approach your (potential clients) directly, using your contact list and an email informing your contacts and previous collectors that you have new work available for them.

There is no shortcut to generate these direct sales. You either need an existing client base or an organic demand for your art, which can only be achieved over time by investing in your career, art, visibility, and status in the art world. For more information, feel free to consult our article on how to become a successful artist next.

2. Art Galleries

Arguably, one of the best ways to generate sales, as well as art world validation, is to work with reputable art galleries. Considering their role as the direct link between the artist and the art world, galleries are the ideal business partner to sell your works. They provide an ideal setting to showcase your work, improving your credibility, exposure, and overall career momentum.

They sell your work during exhibitions where they create a real buzz of excitement around your work; they have excellent contacts and a solid client base; they can sell your work online via reputable dealer-oriented marketplaces such as Artsy or even promote and sell your work at international art fairs where your work is seen by all the most important individuals and entities of the art world.

However, working with a reputable art gallery is very competitive and difficult, as there are more artists than there are galleries to represent them, and they set very high standards and are looking for so-called “art-world art” and not just pretty pictures. Therefore, pursuing gallery representation is not effective as a short-term strategy to sell your art. However, it is one of the strategies that can make the most money through sales in the long run—as discussed more extensively in our article on the different career paths for artists.

Another drawback is the commission a gallery takes on all sales they generate, consisting of 50% of the selling price. However, as we have discussed more extensively in the past, this is very much justified as they take all the risks and are, in fact, taking care of the hard part: selling the work—which is the main issue and reason why you are reading this article.

However, be aware that there are some galleries that look like serious art galleries but in fact are not. These galleries are typically called vanity art galleries and charge the artist money to exhibit or promote their work. As a result, their business model is based on making money from artists, instead of with artists. And these art not the galleries that will elevate your credibility and career for the long-term success either.

For a more detailed and extensive take, make sure to read our complete guide How To Get Your Art Into A Gallery next.

3. Self-Hosted Exhibitions

If you do not have a gallery to exhibit your work—yet—another way to sell your work is by organizing your own exhibitions. You can do this by renting an exhibition space, collaborating with local entities such as a library or a city hall (preferably not restaurants and bars because it presents your work as decoration and not art), organizing an open studio exhibition, or even by opening your own gallery or artist-run space.

The main benefit is, of course, that you do not have to wait around and make your success happen yourself. However, simultaneously, you must also cover all the costs and work that comes with it. Be aware that organizing an exhibition will not guarantee you sales, let alone making a profit. Some artists master organizing self-hosted exhibitions, especially when they have been exhibiting as artists for a while now and have a decent amount of contacts and collectors they have built over the years. So it takes more than one try to do this right and to make this consistently a lucrative endeavor.

For more information, feel free to read our extensive step-by-step guide on how to organize a successful art exhibition. By doing so, these self-hosted exhibitions can not only be a way to make your very first sales but also a first step to make a good impression for galleries and other art world entities.

4. Art Festivals & Fairs

In a nutshell, there are two types of art fairs: international art fairs, such as Art Basel and Frieze, with booths by emerging and established art galleries, and art festivals and fairs for independent artists and smaller dealers, such as the “Affordable Art Fairs” or festivals such as Artisphere. The first is tremendously expensive, prestigious, and exclusive; the latter is more accessible but less high-end, selling and exhibiting work in tents or even where you have to bring your own walls/booth.

Especially in the United States, these art fairs for independent artists are a big thing, and some artists are making good money with them. Even more, short-term success is possible here. For success, pretty and decorative works of art are ideal as the target audience is predominantly looking for something nice to decorate their homes, and some people/sales skills are required as you will be both the artist and the person selling and promoting the work.

On the other hand, you must also cover all the costs, from participation fees to buying your own booth, transporting your studio to the fair, and shipping from the fair or your studio to the clients. It is also time-consuming and does not give artists that much perspective or exponential growth in the long run. Besides some direct sales with existing clients, as soon as you stop doing these fairs, the sales will stop as well. Even more, from the 400+ artists I have advised over the past few years, I have predominantly heard that the sales were rather underwhelming with these art fairs—most often selling nothing at all.

So be aware that participating and setting up a booth is no guarantee of sales or success. Do your research in advance and ask fellow artists which fairs or festivals have worked well for them. Preferably, ask artists you trust because very often, people will try to keep up appearances by saying they did well, whereas in reality, they did not.

5. Online Webshop

Opening a webshop on your website is another popular and often advised strategy to sell your art. There is no middle person asking for a commission—besides perhaps your website builder—and the investment costs are rather limited. Potential collectors can discover and purchase your works online, and you ship them directly from your studio to its new home. In theory, this may be the very best way to sell your art!

However, the first drawback is that is not as easy as it sounds. Opening a webshop is easy, but driving traffic to it is much harder. You can do this by spending a lot of time on social media or by spending a lot of money on advertisements. However, one must also ensure that the website and shop are optimized for a good conversation to have a positive return on your ad spend or social media efforts. This means having a high-performance website, a professional design, professional photographs of your artwork, a good website structure with natural sales funnels, quality artwork descriptions, your unique selling point, a privacy policy, terms of sale, a shipping and return policy, a solid advertising strategy and a lot of a/b testing, among others, and last but not least, art is sellable is predominantly decorative.

So, it is safe to say that to make this strategy work, you must do your homework well to know what you are doing. Furthermore, this strategy only works for the lower-end of the art market, with a price range up to a maximum of approximately $4,000, and it does not offer a long-term perspective to see the value of your work increase over time or find recognition in the art world. It is even a bit frowned upon to have a webshop. As a result, this strategy is perhaps the most transactional, with little to no contact with your collectors, no actual exhibitions, and no visibility beyond your website, leaving you a bit isolated from the art world. Yet, if you use this strategy correctly, it can be very lucrative and efficient.

6. Social Media Sales

Another direct online strategy is instead of having your website as your store; you can use your social media account—today, this would most likely be Instagram or TikTok. Your portfolio is your feed, and the sales process occurs via direct messages. You drive traffic to your art by creating social media content that performs well, perhaps following the current trends and creating a lot of art and content. You could add your website or Shopify account to your social media account to streamline the sales process or simply combine both strategies very easily and naturally.

The downside of this influencer model is that it is strongly frowned upon by the art world; it is very competitive; the art is inferior to the actual content creation; and the conversion rate is really low—hence needing a very large volume of followers to see any sales happening. Another rather important downside is that social media and its algorithms change all the time. So, if your business model relies completely on it, the day might come when you are no longer seeing the results you were used to seeing, and you’ll have to pivot your strategy drastically or even have to start all over again.

Therefore, as short-term success is unlikely, and longevity of success is also unlikely, it is advised to diversify your social media strategies and let it support your other selling strategies instead of relying on it completely.

7. Online Marketplaces

Up next, we have an indirect online selling strategy, in which an online art marketplace or platform, such as Saatchi, Etsy, or Fine Art America, acts as the mediator of your sales. The main advantage is that you do not have to set up an entire website to sell your work online, as the online marketplace takes care of hosting, payment solutions, shipping labels, and more. You can simply open an account and upload your work. On the other hand, they ask for a commission for this ease of use, ranging between 4% to 35%.

However, this is not the main issue with online marketplaces. The biggest issue is that they are tremendously oversaturated. Because anyone can open an account, and because everyone advises artists to do this if they want to sell their work, literally millions of artworks are available on these online marketplaces with a lot of low-quality art. As a result, your art will drown in this oversupply, and this oversaturation and low standards do not make online marketplaces very appealing to collectors either.

In reality, if you go for this strategy, you will most likely sell nothing at all. Only artists who have been working with these platforms from day one and are being promoted by them via newsletters and articles might see some sales. But for the rest of us, the results will be tremendously underwhelming.

It is also worth mentioning that some online marketplaces are better than others. Some are curated and do not accept any artist submitting to them. However, even these art marketplaces are oversaturated and are looking to have the biggest offer possible. The only online marketplaces that are established and used by real art collectors are dealer-oriented marketplaces, which means you’ll have to find a gallery to represent you first.

8. NFTs

NFTs, or Non-Fungible Tokens, are unique digital assets verified using blockchain technology. With the arrival of NFTs, digital art became collectible, and in the hype, a lot of great money was made. The space of digital art is, however, still really small despite the recent developments, especially when having a look at the bigger picture, as just 0.2% of the total value of the art market consists of digital art. And, within this small percentage, the bulk of NFTs consists of non-art-related NFTs—which means only %0.03 of the global art market today are art- related NFTs.

Although it is undeniable that artists were making good money with NFTs, and some of them still do today, the implosion at the start of 2022 does not seem to recover itself any time soon. Furthermore, the strong presence of NFT-related scams and the high percentage of lost NFTs don’t help the NFT space to enter the high-end art world, despite a couple of launches of JR, Damien Hirst, König Galerie jumping on the bandwagon, or an NFT auction at Christie’s, which in the end remained one-time events. 

If you are a digital artist, then yes, the NFT space is definitely worth exploring. However, due to the flipping culture and its implosion, manage your expectations.

9. Commissions

Another strategy is to focus on commissions: custom artworks created by an artist at the request of a client. These works are typically tailored to the client’s specifications, including details such as subject matter, style, size, and medium. Commissions can range from portraits and landscapes to sculptures and digital art, depending on the artist’s specialty and the client’s needs. For instance, if you are a portrait painter, you will predominantly doing family portraits, portraits of celebrities they like, or even of their dog.

The main advantage is that it is already sold before you start creating the artwork. However, to find these clients, you will most likely have to use some of the strategies above—for instance, participating in art festivals, setting up a webshop with your prices depending on the size and how you usually work, or having a social media account to find potential clients and share past commissions.

Yet, the main drawback is that you are very limited in creativity. You do what the client asks. This lack of artistic freedom and creativity will give you no long-term perspective or access to the art world. You become the executioner instead of the inventor. For some, this is perfectly fine. For others, it can be very frustrating.

10. Art-Related Collaborations

To conclude, various other art-related collaborations can sell your art in different ways. Think of working with art advisors and interior designers to sell your art for new apartments, hotels, or offices. However, this is not as easy as it sounds, and it also degrades to work very much to being just decoration. The focus is on producing a lot, and the transactions is even more impersonal.

There are even more options, such as licensing, in which you retain ownership while granting companies permission to use your designs on their products. These can include items like clothing, home décor, stationery, and more. Licensing agreements typically provide artists with royalties based on the sales of these products, creating a passive income stream. However, especially with the arrival of AI and the abundance of designs and digital art, this is once more a rather competitive option with underwhelming results where you are less and less an artist and more and more an illustrator or designer.

Alternative Ways To Make Money As An Artist

There are more ways to make money as an artist besides selling your work. Feel free to read our extensive article on 20 Ways Artists Make Money next.

Last Updated on October 26, 2024