What do collectors want?

Okay, enough already with the selling fine art safari adventure. Lets leave the Land Rover and gun behind and check out of the Treetops African resort to examine what it is that art collectors really want from an artist and their artwork.

Most people who buying art are not art collectors. They are just people who like to decorate their homes with nice things. If you and your art have a good name and that certain je ne sais quois then these home decorators will buy your art, maybe even lots of it. There is money to be made there.

Real Art Collectors on the other hand (of the serious variety) are also ‘art investors’ to varying degrees, and when I say ‘investor’ that can mean not just in terms of money. Art Collectors want much much more than a pretty picture when they are considering buying your art, but of course they may also be in the business of selling fine art themselves (ie buying your art with a view to selling your art in the future when your stardom climbs to the stratosphere).

My own art has been mostly been bought by home decorators; the people who just love it because its a beautiful thing to behold, and it makes them happy when they see it in their homes. I have though on occasion had my art purchased by the real deal collectors that artists dream about having on their exhibition mailing lists. I once delivered one of my paintings to a client who had a collection in his multi-squillion dollar home that almost made me weep with joy at seeing it (after all it’s not everyday you see a Gauguin hanging in someone’s living room.)  I wish I had more clients like that, but he is the exception rather than the rule in my customer Rolodex.

So what do these elusive collectors want from us?
Read on…

Years ago when I first took the plunge into the professional art world I started out creating screen prints in runs of up to 100 at a time with home-made equipment in my Garage. I figured it would make sense to be able to distribute my wonderful works as widely as possible, and what better way than producing a ton of copies and then selling them to eager buyers.

At the time I was inspired by some local artists who seemed to have their work in every framing shop and exhibition that I saw around town. I figured that these guys were making it big, as their work seemed so popular.

They were themselves creating prints, both regular four colour process and handmade screen prints. Since the cost of a run of 1000 4 colour process (poster style) prints was many thousands of dollars and ‘Giclee’ colour inkjet printing was a mere twinkle in technology’s eye at the time, I opted for the home-brew screen printing approach.

Well, after a short while one of the local artists that I’d admired so much spotted my work in a shop and gave me a call. I was excited!  He wanted to represent me himself and use his connections to get my prints into the outlets that he had access to. This made me even more excited.

He only wanted the very reasonable sum of 30% of the wholesale price as commission, and since my prints at that time retailed for the absolutely enormous sum of $100 each (Framing Shops like to make a 100% markup) that meant that I would receive the princely sum of $35 for each print, and therefore $3500 for a complete sell out of a print run. I was almost salivating at the thought. It actually seemed like a lot of money to me at the time.

What happened when I stopped salivating?
Read on…

You’ve created a brilliant artwork.

All your friends want it but of course they don’t want to part with the vast sums of money required to prise this gleaming jewel of paint and canvas from your hot little hands. They ask “is there a print available?”

The trouble is that making large high quality prints can a very expensive process, and full colour gloss inkjet prints from your MegaCorp Mutlifunction Centre can go through your printer cartridges quicker than a Hummer sucks a Gas Station dry. You need a cheap attractive alternative.

Have you thought about making  Mini Art Prints?

What is a Mini Art Print?

In my case, the mini art prints I made were little full colour prints of my own artworks, no bigger than a business card, which I matted up, framed and subsequently sold to passing tourists at the markets. I personally signed and titled the mat of each print and popped them into neat little cellophane packages which looked irresistibly collectible. Since I had a series of artworks along a similar theme (Queenslander style  houses in fact) this just added to the collectibility factor. You can make you prints bigger of course if you want to, but they are most economical if you keep them to around the size of a regular photograph or smaller.

Photography or scanning

In order to turn your artwork into a mini print you are first going to have to convert it into a digital picture of some kind, either through scanning for smaller works or photography for larger works. It’s important to know that the better the quality of the digital image of your artwork is, then the better your end result is going to be. You can’t skimp on this step or your print will look distinctly below par. Nobody wants a fuzzy, off-centre, strange coloured print no matter how astounding your original is. A photo taken with your common-or-garden domestic mid priced digital camera will be fine for creating  mini prints, especially if you are a dab hand with Photoshop so you can crop it to size and give the colours a bit of a boost where needed to make the image really pop and sing.

Okay, so you’ve got yourself a digital image of  your artwork. How do we print this thing?

Here’s the secret. Did you know that your local mega-electrical store or photo processing shop is a great source of high quality printing? Yes, really it is!  New fangled digital photo printing kiosks are popping up in these establishments like mushrooms. Just pop your USB flash drive in and go.  These machines  do produce nice clear prints on real photographic paper and the quality  is plenty good enough for reproducing art (in a mini way). Not only that, there’s often the bonus of choosing either a matt or gloss paper in a range of different size, at a price that’s very hard to beat.

Yes of course you could print your mini prints on your own high quality ink jet printer, but the cost per unit is way lower at a digital photo printing kiosk, and much faster if you are producing your mini prints in bulk quantities. You only have to contend with the strange looks from the Shop assistants who wonder why on earth you would print 100 photographs of the same thing.

“Archival Quality”

Now, before you scoff at the thought of creating an art print on photographic paper that you would actually sell to people, just think about it a bit. These machines can produce prints that will last potentially a very long time. In my local electrical superstore the Fuji paper that they use in their digital photo printer kiosk has a spec that is designed to last for around 70 years. I was  downright cynical about these claims so I decided to do a little test for myself and took a sample  photographic print and stuck it in the front window of my studio. It was exposed to the full on heat of the Australian sun for three weeks. Afterwards I examined the results and was surprised to find that fading was almost negligible, when compared to a ‘non exposed equivalent’.

Off to market we go

Feeling confident of the product I then had some little frames specially made up in which to mount my mini prints and set off to the local tourist market to sell my wares. I  did quite well with them for a while. I enjoyed those art market days, though all that lugging about of tables nearly did my back in on a number of occasions. You can’t beat it though for direct customer sales experience though.

To Frame or not to Frame…that is the question

You don’t have to go the full hog and mount your mini prints in frames. I’ve seen other artists do similar things and just mount them on a single mat with a backing,  wrapped in cellophane to complete the package. It makes for a  quite attractive as a little gift item. Custom sized mini mats and backings can be purchased quite cheaply in bulk from a picture framing shop, but make sure you go to a framer with an automated mat cutting machine.

Things to watch out for

Some older style digital photo printing kiosks produce prints that look a bit washed out and green. Avoid. Go to a shop with the latest technology installed if you can.

Also, remember that these machines are calibrated mainly to make happy snaps of people look good. Reds may look richer,  blues may look bluer, greens might glow more. This is all designed to give people the illusion that the beach  holiday they’ve just returned from was more of a paradise than they remembered when they photographed it. Do a test first before submitting a large print run.