Selling Art in a New Decade

Selling Art in a New Decade

Selling art in a new decade!

Many of the questions we ask as artists can be answered with one single question that we need to ask of ourselves. I regularly write a new article to support independent visual artists and to share practical tips and experiences from more than three decades of creating and selling art. This week, we take a walk through some of the most popular questions I have been asked over the past five years of writing posts that are important to get to grips with when figuring out ways to sell more art and I try to answer that one single question! 

What we will cover this week!

1. What you need to do to sell more art!

2. The Artist Survival Kit

3. What is important to know

4. What your top priorities should be

5. How do I price my art?

6. Do I discount?

7. How do I get better at creating art?

8. How do I handle critics?

9. The right way to run an art business

10. Finding time to be creative

11. Finding gallery representation - is it the right fit for you?

12. Absolute things you need to know!

13. What is success?

14. Dare to be you!

15. Telling a compelling story

Each of these sections scratches only the surface of the experiences I have had over the past thirty-something years of creating art and represent only a handful of the questions I have been asked over the past five or so years of writing this blog.  Yes, there's a heap fo information but feel free to skip the bits you are familiar with and think of this as my annual guide to the year ahead, and know that you are never alone!

Not every experience here will work for every artist and if you have been creating art for more than a few months or years, there's probably a heap of stuff that you can relate to here. Most experiences in the art world are often very similar, at some point we can probably all say, been there, done that, and yes, met that awkward client too!

Many of the things we have to do as artists have importance, but there are things that are less important too. I haven't written this article in any particular order as so many of us set priorities differently. What's important to one person is less so to another. 

So think of this post as a reminder, a prompt, and know that the art world is many things, many markets, and constantly changes while parts of it always stay the same! 

Soaring Hunter by Mark Taylor

What do I need to do to sell more art?

If only I could answer that easily. It is one of the most frequently asked questions I get asked from artists. If there were any easy ways of selling art I guess the question would never get asked! Art is beautiful but it is also another way of saying, difficult.

As an independent visual artist, you have to be and do everything and usually alone. I have consistently presented that message over the years but it isn’t until an artist decides to turn professional and use their art as a means to generate income, that we begin to understand fully what is involved in making a living from art.

It is now 2020, a brand new decade and we live in an era where it has become easier than ever to get our work exposed to new sets of eyes. That has always been the one thing that underpins any artistic commercial success, getting your work in front of enough people so that you can find your own people who buy into both you and what you do.

Exposure is everything but you also need the right exposure. There are risks in not getting enough exposure but there are also risks in having too much. The art is in finding the ground just slightly off centre and directing your efforts to the people you are trying to reach.  How hard can it be?

Well, in a world with a population of seven billion-plus people and armed with the internet, you would be forgiven for thinking that it is going to be easier than it is. The problem is that over the span of a successful art career you might only have a few hundred people who regularly buy into your work and come back for more, or you might have less than that or even more who only ever buy once or twice. Whatever the number, it is never going to be the world’s total population. Yet, so often it is those seven-plus-billion people seem to be the target audience that many artists attempt to reach or at least they are when the artist first starts out. The key takeaway here is that you really can't be everything to everyone. 

Trying to pin down exactly who your audience is can be difficult, and by that I mean, it can feel impossible. It can be like finding a needle in a haystack within a haystack, with your hands well and truly tied behind your back, and attempting to search for that needle is more often than not a fruitless experience. The very first question you need to ask is one that you need to ask yourself, who am I creating my art for?

That single question is the key to everything you will do as an artist, it answers so much. Pricing, genre, style, subject, size, colour, everything you need to know can be pretty much answered by that single question followed by, where are my people.

The answer you give has to be honest. If you are creating art for people who spend $125,000 on a banana duct-taped to a wall then you better have great representation and a sterling sales history already. If you are creating a work that will make you as famous and collectable as Matisse, then you need Matisse’s provenance and a body of work that can be compared equally. Both massively difficult and nigh on impossible to achieve off the bat and as for the banana, that has now been done, move on. 

What you can be shouldn’t be a replica of all who have come before, replica’s aren’t originals and pursuing this goal will only ever get you to second place at best. If you want to end the race in first place then you really have no option except to pursue the art of you.

Finding a market for your work is, without doubt, one of the hardest things that you will ever do as an artist but it’s not the hardest thing that you will ever have to do. Just putting your work out there in the first place takes that accolade.

That is the single biggest step that an artist will ever have to take, yet the second, you posted the work online or showed it to your neighbour or anyone who isn’t in your circle of closest friends and family, you overcame that step and probably didn’t even flinch. You can now do anything.

There are plenty of barriers that you will need to navigate as an artist, none of which are ever as big as that first step but sometimes the barriers stem from a mindset. My friends all love my work but they never want to buy it, no one buys art anymore, no one buys art online, and then think of a million other barriers, they’re all interchangeable and rarely based on informed fact. Mostly, these barriers are reinforced by the millions of other artists who are in the same boat, on the same social platforms, in the same groups, saying the same thing.

People do still buy art and they even buy it online because online art sales are really on the up. As for your friends, why are you painting just for them? They are already your people and they will continue to provide you with encouragement and support, they will become your best advocates, and those things are way more important than a one-off five or fifty buck sale. What you need are people who are outside of your inner circle, a market, a demographic, what you need is a tribe.

Out of seven-plus-billion people, your tribe are out there somewhere but they’re not seven billion strong. Don’t waste your time thinking they are, just ask that question, who am I painting for?

If you are creating work that appeals to women between the ages of 30 and 39, finding them begins to seem more achievable. If you are painting for men aged 20 to 25, they’re easier to find too, if you are painting eggshells, pet portraits, fantasy monsters and mythical legends, there are tribes out there hiding within those seven billion people who want to own some of that art too.

As an artist, your role beyond the creation of the art is to go out there and find them. Focus intently on them, go where they hang out, join social groups in a niche, don’t limit yourself to every single art group on Facebook. Artists do buy art from other artists, but widening your reach to match your genre or niche is going to give you a better chance of reaching the masses.

Join communities that your people are part of and build relationships and trust and do the same offline too. Connect with those people and don’t expect the next Matisse or whoever to be born in a single day, it can take weeks, months, years and decades to build relationships and trust but never limit your beliefs by only listening to one side of the story or limiting your exposure by focussing only in areas where the competition is already high. This same mindset could be compelling you to join a pack and while there is no doubt that being part of the pack is useful at times, occasionally you absolutely have to go hunting for food far away from the pack too.

Adrift at Eventide by Mark Taylor

Artist Survival Kit

When wandering away from the pack and especially when wandering away from the online pack, having an artist survival kit with you at all times is definitely something you should have on your must-do list for 2020!

This is where you get to be creative. The contents of this kit include things like business cards, flyers, your own website that you can point people towards, and knowing exactly what you want to charge in advance of someone asking. The latter point is important because we live in an age of immediacy and because the world has become conditioned to the novelty of instantaneous, we have to be prepared to answer even the most basic of questions including the one of, how much and we need to be able to provide answers very quickly.

Business cards don’t have to be sterile and meh, they need to be memorable and wow, they are the gift vouchers to your personality, they are what people will look at when they decide on who to call for their next work, and yes, even today, business cards still, work. As an artist you are inherently creative, so why does a business card have to look so very uncreative?

Interactive flyers are better than static print outs written in a comic sans font, having tear-offs with your website and phone number on that people can take away, and maybe just writing down your social media handle so that people have somewhere else to look or find you are great ways to encourage people to take action. 

While the pomp and the grandeur of fancy invitations to art exhibitions and hardback catalogues still have a place in some parts of the art market, they don’t have a place everywhere. You have to be relatable to the market you serve or want to serve, but aspirations should never really come at the expense of the right now. To get to those other markets you kind of need a plan, then rinse and repeat.

One of the other items I keep in my artist survival kit is a pack of small 7x5 glossy prints with my contact details and website printed on the back. These get handed out instead of business cards and I sometimes switch up the design depending on who I am going to meet. The prints are specific to the cards, my logic being that one day they might be traded or collected in a similar way to ACEOs although these are a lot bigger, I have created some more traditional ACEOs in the past and given them to collectors. 

All that Remains by Mark Taylor - Created prior to the terrible fires in Australia

  

What is important to know?

Some things are just so very important, more so than other things that our minds might be telling us are super-important. We are lured towards platforms like YouTube because of some Pew-de-character who has earned like a bazillion bucks an hour and we want some of that success too. The problem is that the kind of success that successful YouTubers see isn’t so different from the way the art world works. They’re successful through relevance, luck and usually a lot of hype, all staples of the high-end art world too.

In art and on YouTube, there are millions of artists and YouTuber’s that never see anywhere near that kind of success, yet it doesn’t mean that we can’t find it. We just have to use similar tactics, be different, offer something of value, and more importantly, aim all of that unique content towards your people and your tribe. Now, ask yourself that question again, who are you creating art for? If you are on social media there is another question to ask, are my people and my tribe really here? They probably are but lurking away in obscure groups that match whatever niche, and they lurk offline too.

Art really is about the numbers, as are so many other things. The important thing is to focus on the right numbers. Is it more important to post five fillers or create a great new piece of art in the same amount of time?

If you are reading this then there is little doubt that by now you still have a million questions. There is no way unless you have a spare thirty-years or so to answer every question, and neither would I ever have all the answers. Art really is a continuous learning cycle, and then you have to start all over again, often, many times over and over again. Markets change, even art changes to an extent, and the only constant is that everything is always fluid and there are a lot of moving parts.

There are also a lot of questions that are more answerable than others, generally they are the questions that I get asked all of the time but they’re not always the most relevant ones to ask.  Some questions though really are important and it makes little sense to carry on reinventing the wheel.

So as a bonus this week I have listed the top questions from the past five years of writing articles on this site.

What should my top priority be?

This one is simple, there are only two priorities and the first one is always the one that gets ignored. You need to focus first on you. That means making sure that you are healthy, and never ever ignore anything. Without you, there is no ‘you’ art.

Art can be beautiful, easy, difficult, challenging, joyous, and any number of other descriptors, as an artist it can also be mentally and in some instances even physically draining. Creating a piece of work and putting all that you have emotionally into it can really take it out of you, as can working eighteen-hour days and meeting crippling deadlines.

I have witnessed first-hand, experienced artists quite literally sitting in floods of tears after completing a piece of work, not because the work didn’t sell or wasn’t recognised, but because the process of creating art can be exhausting at times. The art world can also be brutal and this isn’t something that just happens to other artists, there have been times over the years when I have felt like that too but you really do have always prioritise yourself first.

The second of your highest priorities should always be to produce great art, then you need to produce more great art, and again and again and again. If you are never creating art, are you at that point, still an artist?

You really do have to constantly produce art, you also have to make sure that the quality is never compromised. Every work should be your best but not every work will necessarily sell at least in the beginning.

Make sure that your work is seen as far and wide as you can, but keep it focussed. There really is little point in expending energy in showing your art in places and online in groups, if the buyers or more specifically, your people, aren’t there. Find your tribe!

Figure out who your people are. These will be the people that connect with both you and your art and who will come back time and time again whether they buy or not. Once you have begun to find your people it becomes much easier to go on and find your tribe!

Figure out what your art means and where it will have a fit. Like people, showing your art in shows and in online groups that have very little or nothing at all to do with the subject matter is like shooting hoops from a hundred miles away! Keep asking that same question, who am I creating the art for?

Adrift Under a Burning Sky by Mark Taylor

How do I price my art?

 Consistently. That is the single best piece of advice I can ever give.

If people see your work in a gallery for a thousand bucks but know they can buy directly from you for five-hundred bucks, that will never end well. You will most likely no longer have gallery representation when they find out that you are undercutting them. Online, people scour for bargains regardless of their own wealth, even billionaires never say no to a bargain. If your pricing is consistent they are more likely to buy at that price rather than shop around and you are not then undercutting yourself or running the risk of devaluing the worth of your art. 

How you work out pricing is something that very few people will be able to give you the answer to. Experience, provenance, sales history, quality, cost of materials and time, the rent on the studio or the heating and water, location, scarcity, those are the costs that have to be bundled into the price sensibly and pro-rata. Comparisons between you and other artists can be a starting point but never assume that just because the work of those artists is similar in style that, that is exactly where you are at. You could be more or less experienced, you might both sell in different territories, there are variables around every corner. But comparisons are by far the best way to give you at least an initial idea. The rest is down to how much value you can add, who your tribe are, and how well you create your art. 

Ultimately, it all comes down to one thing, how much will your people pay?

Do I discount?

There are multiple trains of thought around discounting and the right answer for one artist might not be the right answer for another. Selling art requires knowing about a lot of things that aren’t obvious and knowing about who your market is. There’s that question again, who am I creating art for?

Discounting is also about context, it is also about recognising the tells, the small actions that people take, the inactions, and it is as much about what people aren’t saying as much as what they are.

Discounting won’t suddenly give your sales a boost if you don’t already have a core base of buyers. If buyers collect your work as an investment it could even do you more harm than good. Think about the times you have gone shopping only to find the item on sale the very next day. How did this make you feel? Now imagine buying a ten thousand dollar artwork and finding out that the value was just halved, intentionally by the artist you supported.

Most working artists never work in the investor market, and this is where the context in discounting can be something to consider, but even so, I would always warn against offering an almost daily-discount-deal. Even some high-end galleries will offer a discount but the difference is that any discount will have been planned and pre-negotiated with the artist and will inevitably have been decided on after some careful thought and a good look at the numbers.

In the non-investor markets you have to be mindful of desensitisation which is when potential customers will wait around to see if the art they want is going to be offered in the next deal. They have no intention of paying full price because the new norm has been set and so have your prices if you discount all of the time. Instead, offering the occasional work at a lower cost or offering a smaller work that is within reach of other markets is a far better way of handling the often thorny issue of discounts.

Print-on-demand makes it easy to offer discounts to buyers but the problem is that if you are only making a few dollars commission on a sale, the discount is pretty worthless, it is a gesture at best when you are talking about a discount of only cents or pennies, but there are other ways you can add value, it doesn’t always have to be monetary.

If you are earning slightly more than a few dollars commission then discounting becomes more tangible, but again, it still needs to be planned and should never become your default.

Upon a Breathing Tide by Mark Taylor

How do I get better at creating art?

Practice, practice, and more practice. No one is truly born with a creative bone in their body, but everyone can train their creative muscle. Then you have to keep on going, carry on learning, and continue developing. Art is for life and every artist benefits from learning and discovering new techniques. Your professional development is what ultimately keeps your artistic star shining!

Formal art education whilst useful isn’t totally necessary but that will be dependent on what you do and where your people are, and what they want and how much you want to learn. The real learning begins when you are doing the thing that needs doing, collecting the experience, and challenging yourself to constantly become better. The end goal should always be to head towards mastery of your work and you are uniquely positioned to achieve it, climbing towards mastery of anything you do should always be your default.

YouTube, Vimeo, social media can be used to refine your skills and extend your knowledge, an art school is an option too, but you do have to slide into a learning mindset where you want to learn rather than feel you have to learn. Formal classes are without a doubt an excellent grounding in the world of the arts, but the learning doesn’t have to be quite so formal, we have to recognise our own learning styles and find ways of learning that we are comfortable with.

You might find that you learn best from mixing the way you learn, some people are better at learning on their own, others might get more out of their experience by learning within a group. Other styles of learning include visual, logical, aural, verbal, physical, and there is rarely an instance where one style will work better for everyone. Blended learning using a range of learning styles is usually the best way for most people but some will find that they have a dominant learning style.

How do I handle critics?

Let’s face it, with the internet everyone can be a critic. In my experience, there are multiple types of critic, good, bad, indifferent, professional, and WAC0s, or more specifically, weekender art critics with zero of anything to say, who troll anything and everything online without having any demonstrable experience or knowledge of the arts and who find that expletives are best used to describe whatever they don’t agree with.

These people really are quite toxic and usually have very little to no respect for people’s feelings, and little to no knowledge of the arts. People are people and there will always, always be a few who will be unconstructive towards you and your work for a million reasons, but usually, because they’re WAC0s.

Professional art critics don’t always get it right either, that is because art is subjective. But find your people and find your tribe and they will become your greatest advocates and critics, the rest really is just noise.

If you do get critiqued by a professional critic, they can really make or break an art career. Talk to them, thank them, interact with them, and most important of all, learn from them. A bad critique doesn't have to end in tears, it can also be a new dawn, and hey, the great news is that you did everything right to get noticed.

If you haven’t as yet binged on the latest Netflix series, Don’t F&@$ With Cat’s, oh my wow! I really wasn’t expecting the ending that it had. But I think there is an art-related message in there too, Don’t F&@S with artists! Ever! What a great T-Shirt that would make!

Adrift and Finally Free by Mark Taylor

What is the right way to run my art practice as a business?

There are no right ways, there are no wrong ways. Even when you have been running your art practice as a business for many years there will always be moments when you wonder if everyone else but you has the answers. Much of the art world is noise and often, that noise emanates from aspects of the multiple art markets that you don’t necessarily work in right now or ever will.

It is about doing things your way, not trying to be the next thing that is the exact same as the last thing, and it is about being professional in how you do it. 

Build up relationships, build up trust, be genuine and authentic, because that is exactly who your tribe are looking for.  

Do the essentials to create a presence, website, online transactions, the ability to sell directly and be able to market and sell offline too. The exposure is there for artists today but you have to work to find it. Most of all, you have to work hard for everything. You absolutely have to celebrate the small wins, learn from the non-wins, and take steps, forwards, backwards, side to side, every step will either move you forward or will allow you to learn from moving back. Just keep on moving!

Your art skills might be fine, your mastery of art theory and history might be second to none, but if you really want to make a business out of art, then you need to run it as a business, learn about business and dedicate a bunch of time to doing it right. In my experience, the art businesses that don’t do well are the art businesses that forget the basics of business or who never really get to grips with them in the first place.

How do you find the time to be creative?

We are creating for most of the time as artists, or at least we should be, but we’re just not always creative in a physical, let’s make some art sense. It becomes more and more about prioritising things that you need to do, that you have to do, and learning to let go of the things that you are never going to get around to do, or really won’t pay you back for your time. I think for me anyway, much of my early years as an artist were spent doing things that could have waited, not blocking out time and protecting it, and not having a plan.

Time, protect it, plan it, find it and make it. Take the pressure off yourself wherever you can, think ahead, prepare marketing materials in July for Christmas, your art might be seasonal but you don’t have to be. Never be afraid of asking for help, and if you need to outsource, then outsource. That’s the only way to grow.

Glow Over a Dry Stone Wall by Mark Taylor

How do I find gallery representation?

Firstly, ask yourself why you really want it in the first place. If the answer is because it will be less work and more money, you ain’t close to being represented by a gallery and you might want to reconsider art as a career choice. Galleries are not for every artist and they’re not for every piece of art, they are also very hard work and not wholly necessary today for a majority of successful working artists.

Finding a gallery to represent you isn’t an easy path, good galleries will already have a queue of artists waiting for a show and when you do find one, you might not have      your work on display in the gallery all of the time. It becomes a little easier to find representation once you have a consistent track record of sales or if you have a lightbulb moment of genius that everyone wants to be a part of, but those are rarer than unicorns and you might or might have only one or two lightbulb moments throughout your entire career, or maybe never at all.

Create your portfolio with care and love, keep it live and replace pieces that don’t have a fit with where you want to exhibit. Present your very best works and make sure that any portfolios are in the format that the gallery wants to see. Make sure that you read the rules of engagement before you even approach the gallery and follow them to the letter.

Get out and about, network and socialise, and talk to people, listen intently to what is said and what is not said and never assume anything. Galleries will want proof that you are self-motivated, the last thing they want is a for an artist who expects the work to be done for them and unless you have a queue of galleries waiting to take you on, the commission is usually the commission, it is rare that you will ever be in a good negotiating position from the off.

  

What are the absolute things I really need to know?

Form, perspective, anatomy, composition, colour theory and lighting, how to run a business, manage your marketing and social media, and that this is going to be a heap of hard work. Regardless of your medium or artistic style or method of choice, these are the fundamentals that underpin visual art and your desire to become a self-sufficient professional visual artist.

It’s more than okay to be weird, different, authentic, real, kooky, and weirder. There really is no point in being anyone other than you because you have a really long journey ahead and wearing that other mask forever will quickly become tiring and it will completely wear you out. Don’t try to recreate the art you just saw from someone else, the world wants to see ‘you’ art and it's always even better when it’s something weird or absolutely WOW! Those really are the only two benchmarks that make great art!

What is success?

There are a million art-related questions that can never be answered. There are no quick wins with art, and sometimes it really is down to trusting your own gut instinct. You know you better than anyone and you know what you create and why you create it, and from today you should even know who you are creating your art for. You are the expert in you. You have to own the narrative and then provide the lens through which people will look.

Find your passion, master your craft, work hard, and never give up. Keep learning new things, and push yourself further each time. You also have to define what success really is and what it means for you but having put your work out there, to begin with, you have already had a taste of what success really is. 

Figure out what motivates you, is it, recognition, money, or fame, because those might not be immediately attainable right now, and we do have to admit that some of those things might take years if they even happen at all. Or is a success simply about creating art, building a reputation and taking small steps to those greater things? No one but you can define what success really means for you. So ask, what is it that I want most, be honest, and work on a plan that will get you there and never be afraid to change the plan on the way.

Adrift Under The Northern Lights by Mark Taylor

Dare to be you?

Firstly, you are not alone. I can guarantee you that another mind-blowing number of artists decided on January 1st that 2020 would be the year that seals the deal, validates their dreams of becoming a self-sufficient artist, and I can pretty much guarantee that a few may have already given up on the idea altogether.  Focus on you, and don’t give up.

Dare to go after exactly what you want. The thing is, we can fail equally as well at the things that we don’t want to do so we might as well fail at doing something we love. Everything and everyone is really only temporary in the great scheme of things, but with art, you have an amazing opportunity to leave behind a legacy, do something that is different and even become stereotypically weird if you want. Wear a bow tie and a top hat, wear a pair of jeans and so sockless in a pair of sandals. In fact, please do go sockless in a pair of sandals, but for the love of Dunkin Donuts, do whatever you dream.

Never get stressed about the things that can be fixed. Get your pricing wrong, try again, worried that your next piece won’t sell, find your tribe, regret not entering that competition, enter the next one. There is so much we have to stress about but adding to the pile with things that can be sorted out really doesn’t help. Sometimes it really is what it is, move on.

Take advice from more than one source. I would be mortified if anyone ever only listened to me, I have my own experiences in the art world as others will have theirs. Individually those experiences might be helpful but always, always make sure that your knowledge isn’t based on a single viewpoint, collective experiences are so much more relevant. Equally, there are offers of advice from every corner of the internet, some of it good, some of it not so good, and some of it purely written with the intention of nickel and diming and not just on the internet, offline you will find offers of paid for help too and not all of it will be at all helpful. Art is quite a specific niche which needs a specific skill set, so ask an artist or someone who has experience in the art world for advice.

Last year, I mentioned getting an accountability buddy, someone who can nag you into doing the things you promised yourself that you would do, and this year, yes, you probably really do need to find one. It could just be the occasional text message, but knowing that someone is checking in and making you accountable for what you need to do is just so refreshing. Often we work in silo’s and for the most part that is probably why so many people want to become artists, but being your own boss means that you never have to be accountable to anyone or anything, it also means that you can convince yourself in a hundred different ways why you can’t do this or that right now. Having an accountability buddy will make you way more productive!

Add compelling stories to your art...

Remember to tell a compelling story...

No matter what they say, it's all about the money. That's not an artist talking although for some it could be, that is the opening line to the film Pretty Woman starring Richard Gere and Julia Roberts. 

Opening lines set up the story and can provide the entire context and that's maybe all you need to introduce your art. Storytelling is inherently what humans do, each story having a beginning, middle and an end. The beginning has to be the hook that makes people want to listen to more, it can even become the basis for a series of works which continue to tell that story and I don't think it really does any harm to your search engine optimisation strategy either. 

Story's are memorable, they pull the audience in, and whilst it is important to tell stories through art, it's also important to never forget the story of you. Art buyers connect with artists on many levels but even more so when you have your own compelling story. You don't have to have been through a multitude of life-affirming events, but making yourself relatable to your audience really is key to building up engagement, trust and authenticity.  

Looking Ahead…

Hopefully, you will have found this week’s insight useful or at least taken something relevant away from it. Each of these topics could have an individual post, maybe even a book written about them, and there will forever be something new within each subject area that we will need to know. I sadly have only so many words in my fingers and so much space on a page before it begins to look a lot like War and Piece extended edition, and even this isn't that far off! Maybe these subjects will be covered in my planned podcast at some point, getting around to doing that at the moment though is a little tricky, I still need to sort out my kidney stone!

As always, if there is something that you want to find the answer to or a topic that you would like to see covered, let me know. I don’t have anywhere near all of the answers but collectively we might do. 

Bringing together a hive of minds has been something that I have lived by for years, I find little point in anyone having to carry on reinventing the wheel when it has already been reinvented 33.7 times a day for the past however many hundreds of years. If you have any tips for artists we would love to hear about those too, so feel free to leave a comment or use the contact form to get in touch.

As always, best wishes, stay happy, be creative, and I will see you next time!

Mark x

About Mark…

I am an artist and blogger and live in Staffordshire, England. You can purchase my art through my Fine Art America store or my Pixels site here: https://10-mark-taylor.pixels.com   

Any art sold through Fine Art America and Pixels contributes to the ongoing costs of running and developing this website and making sure that I can bring you independent writing every time and without any need to sign up to anything! You can also view my portfolio website at https://beechhousemedia.com

You can also follow me on Facebook at https://facebook.com/beechhousemedia where you will also find regular free reference photos of interesting subjects and places I visit. You can also follow me on Twitter @beechhouseart and on Pinterest at https://pinterest.com/beechhousemedia

If you would like to support the upkeep of this site or maybe just buy me a coffee, you can do so right here.