Art Play Time vs Art Promotion Time

When I began selling my art, I had no idea how much time I would spend promoting my work! Here's a quick breakdown of how I spend my time:

Online
At least 2 to 3 hours a day.

This is surprisingly good fun. I have met some lovely people through the Folksy forums, and get a lot of support from fellow artists here. Whether you paint for pleasure, paint to sell or are just interested in art I encourage you to visit the daily "art and aceo thread" on the folksy forum. Each day we share and comment on new work, new ideas, tips and techniques. Sometimes we have an art thread challenge where we all paint along a theme - great fun and produces an amazing variety of work.

This link will take you to the folksy forum - just look for the latest art thread, it will be named something like "aceo and art thread" Folksy Talking - look for the Art and ACEO Thread

I also take part in some of the mutual promotion threads on Folksy, where we all tweet and pin each others work to Pinterest boards. Today I also created a Pinterest board of all my paintings in my folksy shop. This link will take you to my Pinterest boards where you will find work from fellow folksy artists and a catalogue of my own paintings. Pinterest - FlowaPowa Art and Other Folksy Art and Craft

I also promote my work through my facebook page FlowaPowa Art on Facebook

And I mustn't forget writing my blog! This one has probably taken me an hour to write and check.

Bricks and Mortar shops
I spend around 2 hours trawling around shops whenever I have new cards, plus monthly follow up visits to shops that take my cards.

I get a lot of positive comments on my work, however because production costs are high for someone like me, and shops take between 60% to 100% profit on cards, it's very difficult to get cards into shops. I do have my cards in one local shop, and am still waiting to hear from a national chain.

Photographing my Work
This is quite quick - it takes around 10 to 15 minutes per painting to photograph, upload and crop, and resize ready for uploading to Folksy.

Uploading to my Folksy Shop
This is SLOW! It can take as much as half an hour per item to upload to my Folksy shop. I have learnt to upload "internet ready" pictures - I resize them on my pc to the "medium" size setting, and this helps considerable with the upload speed. Folksy does say that you can upload up to 6mb per image but I think I'd still be here next week waiting for the upload to finish!!

Art Play Time
And time spent actually painting? Probably an average of one hour a day! Much less than I would like!  I go to two art clubs each week which are very supportive, and I run a community facebook page for one of these groups. If you're local to Ormskirk, take a look at this facebook page Aughton Artists on Facebook





Thanks so much for dropping by, I do hope you enjoy reading my blog. Why not leave a comment to say hello so that I know you called? Feel free to link back to your own blog too.

Stephie