5 Things You Can Do to Start Selling Your Art
If you're wondering how to start selling your art, you're not alone. One of the questions I'm asked most often is, "How do I actually start selling my paintings?" The good news is that you don't need a gallery or thousands of followers to begin. Here are five simple things you can start doing today.
Share it. Don’t hide it.
Sharing your art can be scary but if you have a goal to sell it, you can’t sell it if nobody sees it. If you are painting in your basement and you never put it out there, how will anyone know you have art for sale? Getting over the fear of sharing is step 1.
2. Start With the People Who Already Know You
Every collector starts as one person who sees your work. Share it with people in your life. Your family, your friends and then watch your audience grow from there. Post it on social media. Build a website. Post the title, the dimensions, the materials used and the price. Invite people to comment and tag a friend. Write a story about it or talk about what the painting means to you. Give it a story. Build a connection to the painting by sharing a sentence or 2 about it.
3. Put a Price on Your Artwork
If your goal is to sell it, you have to put a price on it. Price it in a range that feels good to you. If someone offered you $40 for it, will you be happy with that $40? Or do you feel better about $400? Pricing art is a whole other blog post, but essentially, set the price and see what happens. Give a value. If you don’t put value on your art, no one else is going to do it for you.
4. Create more art.
The more you create, the easier it becomes to let your work go.
If your goal is to sell your art, you need to have some inventory. It is harder to sell 5 paintings and let go of them if you only have 5 paintings. The more art you make, the easier it will be to let go of them as you start producing more and more. It can still be hard to let go of your art, but it feels more precious when you have less of it. And it’s harder to price it if you have less of it. So if you’ve made 5 or 10 and you think you can sell them…make 30. Then make 50 more and so on.
5. Don’t quit your job…yet.
I’ve heard about more than one artist who got excited that they started to sell their art and they really thought they would start selling a painting everyday. So they quit their job in hopes to sell art full time, and then are surprised and disappointed by week 3 that they haven’t sold any more paintings and can’t make any money at it. Wait until you have consistently sold lots of art for a long time. And that long time depends on what your goals are. If you want to replace your current income with art sales, that is going to take some planning and structuring of a business plan. For now though, create some art, put it out there. Price it and try and sell it and see what happens. Just because you sold a couple paintings, that doesn’t necessarily mean that crowds of people are going to be flocking your website or breaking down your studio door to come and buy from you. It takes time. It takes a long time.
Paint because you love to paint. Keep creating, keep sharing, and keep improving. Selling art isn't about one painting—it's about building a body of work and a reputation over time. The artists who succeed are usually the ones who simply keep showing up.
Selling Your Art Takes Time
Selling your art isn't one big moment—it's a series of small steps repeated over and over again. Share your work, price it with confidence, keep creating, and give yourself time to grow. Every successful artist started exactly where you are now: with one painting and the courage to let someone see it.
