Where do you sell your work and how do you choose?
Most of my art sales come when I have a show. Between shows I’m not really selling stuff. Occasionally someone will message me on Instagram and sometimes that works out.
So it’s really just getting out. Get out, meet as many people as you can, work with as many people as you can and don’t be afraid to get the door shut in your face.
There are some tailored events that fit my style better. Cheesman Park Arts Fest has been great for me.
Denver Comic Con, Pop Culture Con now, has been great for me for all eight years I’ve done it. But I think it’s just numbers. Half of it’s just because they have 100,000 people there, you know? If you have 100,000 of any type of people, you’re going to have 10% that have money and 10% of those people will like your stuff.
I had a studio at Boxcar and their traffic was down for first Fridays and I said, What if I just rent this whole thing from you guys? And I kind of did it because I personally like renting wall space. Because I have faith that my artwork will sell and I’d rather take all the profits from that and just pay wall rent if it’s a place where I know I can sell.
So I kind of built that initial iteration into a model where I could show and artists could also rent an 8-foot section of the wall for $150 per month. We told the artists, You just give me the rent, you make the art and take the profits. And we’d have 1,000 people through on a First Friday. So it was definitely counter to the gallery model. What we found is we had a lot of artists who wanted to rent for a month but then would be like, I didn’t sell anything! But that endeavor built this whole network of other artists and artists that I’ve reconvened with to do other projects.
Definitely cons and my website [are where she sells the most].
I’ve done well at a few galleries where my work was up for a month or more. Occasionally galleries and pop-up art shows can be super lucrative, but more often than not I find the money comes from cons where I get to talk to people, or through the website and Instagram sales.
[Where to sell is based on] my audience. If the right eyeballs won’t be there, it isn’t worth doing the show. I want to sell but also to find new fans, so a show has to do both.I tend to not do a lot of formal gallery shows anymore. I will do informal galleries in establishments like coffee shops, restaurants and piercing studios since those are places where people who are drawn to my work might be.
I do 1-3 shows every month from February to December. I don’t do a lot of travel events right now because it adds the pressure of covering your booth, travel and hotel costs.
A lot of our business is online. At this point probably 60% to 70% of what we do is selling frames online.
I will reach out to cafes. I love showing my art and being able to see people’s reactions. Within a few months of moving here I’d reached out to the owner of Crema [Coffee House] about a show and he was like, Totally. It was up for two months and they didn’t take a commission. It was easy, there was no fuss, it was totally rewarding and the response was pretty amazing. People were reposting on their stories and I sold a lot of that work.
So I’d like to keep doing that kind of stuff. Get my work out there so people get to enjoy it and it doesn’t hurt my feelings if nothing sells. It’s just fun.