Collectors don't usually know how to compare your student work to your best work, especially if you have not labeled your student work as such. In the collectors mind, you've created all the works on your website within a year or so. There is no way they could know that most of your work was created under a teacher five or more years ago. So they get the overall impression that your work is sometimes pretty good - and that's not nearly good enough.
Here are some simple website content strategies for artists right on the cusp of professionalism.
1. Remove your student quality work from your website or from your public albums on social media. This way, when a potential collector googles you, only your finest paintings are likely to show up. In Facebook, simply create a photo album labeled Student Work, go through your images, send all your student quality images into that album, and choose the setting: ONLY ME for the whole album. That way you can still see the images, but no one else can.
2. Get great images of your best paintings, and take some in multiple different scenarios: unframed, framed, framed and hung on the wall, detailed shots of different areas within the same painting. Now you have four images of the same work, so even if you only have ten great paintings on your site, at a glance it looks like you have more!
3. If you have a website design like mine, you can use detailed images as your backdrops. This is a lovely way to create the appearance of more artwork.
4. Use a simple and spaced design. If your website design is frilly or crowded with graphics and buttons, it will drown out your few lovely works of art. Remember, everything on your site should support the images of your work, and finding out how to look at your work and purchase it should be effortless.
5. Include a few pages in your website other than 'available works.' This could include images of works in progress (only if they look good while in progress!), videos of you painting, a blog, events, news, a bio, contact information, etc. The point is to engage those who are interested in coming to your site without making it hard for them to buy your art.
6. Separate your available work into categories such as small works, large works, sketches, themes, and series.
7. Make it easy for those who are interested in your work to connect with you either by emailing you or following you on social media or both.
8. List your prices, or at least a price range, for each of your categories. If you don't have gallery representation, your website is your storefront, so this is crucial. Read my three part blog on how to price your work to see if my strategy works for you (Part 1 here!). If you are starting out selling through a gallery, well done, you! Let that gallery earn their commission; you can simply display your work and point everyone to your gallery.
Sincerely,
