How To Create High-Quality Canvas Prints That Sell

For those of us who take art a little more seriously than a simple hobby, it can be a difficult process to translate artistic vision and skill into a profitable venture. But, thanks to the internet and a whole host of online platforms made by artists and for artists, being a monetarily successful artist is much more in reach now than it ever has been before. This doesn’t mean that it’s a walk in the park by any means, though. Making a living or even just having a successful side gig of selling your artwork takes quite a bit more work than simply posting your artwork online and hoping someone decides to pay for it. You’re offering a product, and that product needs to meet certain standards in order to be attractive to potential buyers.

So how do we create high-quality canvas prints that will sell? There are a few different factors to consider. Certainly, the quality of the print itself needs to be as perfect as it can be. Visual art mediums like painting, drawing, and digital art count visual clarity as one of their most important traits, no matter what the subject matter of the piece may be. However, there’s more than just how the piece looks that affects whether it will sell. The subject matter itself and even the convenience of buying the piece can also affect whether you’ll actually make that sale at the end of the day. This article will dive a little deeper into how you can create art prints that look their best as well as how you can position yourself to sell more of your prints over time.

Create Artwork for Multiples Niches
If you want to focus on making sales for your art prints, you’ll need to be comfortable with branching out a little beyond what you might normally want to create. Finding your audience is a huge part of creating a system in which you receive regular requests for prints. To find that audience, you may want to shift your focus to creating artwork that specifically targets a niche of people. If you only love to paint bowls of fruit, you are more than welcome to do just that, but your list of potential buyers will be quite a bit smaller. If your goal is to create prints that will sell often, branching out into other niche interests can make it much easier to expand your circle of potential buyers.

Offer Size Options
If the medium you prefer to work in means that your pieces end up being quite large, it’s going to be more difficult to find someone who can pay for the original piece. Our goal here is to create prints that will sell, and that means that you may need to create prints of your original artwork that are different sizes to help accommodate different buyers’ needs. While you can create canvas prints of your work that are the same size as your original, offering variable sizes allows more potential buyers to get a version of your work that will work better for their situation.

Find the Right Platform
The platform you choose to market yourself on makes a big impact on the kind of customers you might receive and the kind of profit you’ll end up making. Common platforms for selling artwork, places such as Etsy or Shopify, are the first thing that might come to your mind. Depending on your artwork, these platforms might work completely fine. However, don’t count out the lesser-known platforms right away. They may just have more of the kind of people you’re hoping will buy your artwork. Play around with the tools these platforms give you and find the one that works best for you while also familiarizing yourself with their pay structure, so you don’t get ripped off accidentally.

Focus on Simpler and Faster Pieces
If you’re hoping to create and sell high-quality canvas prints as a way to make a living or supplement your income, you need to be realistic about what you can handle and what is worth your time. If creating extremely detailed and highly realistic pieces is what you love to do, then by all means continuing doing so! Be aware, however, that these pieces will need to be at a much higher price because of the extra labor and time they take to create. Higher prices can often be a deterrent for more casual art buyers, which may make up a sizeable portion of all your potential buyers. Trying to make a living from your artwork becomes a little easier when you can release new and original pieces more frequently, especially when you’re just starting out.

Use High-Quality Ink and Paper
A lot of what we’ve talked about so far has been more conceptual business advice for selling your prints. However, it’s important to remember that you need to provide a quality product in the first place if you want repeat customers. Regular old printer paper and ink from cartridges you can get at big-box stores can make any beautiful piece of artwork look much lower quality than it really is. High-quality archival ink and paper can better reflect the original piece’s vibrancy; they have the added effect of lasting much longer that traditional ink and paper over time.

Invest in a Quality Scanner
If you’re trying to turn a physical piece of art into a digital file for easier distribution, you’re at the mercy of your scanner’s ability to pick up on the subtleties of your work. Quality is unfortunately always lost when you try to scan a physical piece to make a digital copy, but the trick is to figure out how to make that quality loss as imperceptible as possible. Thankfully, modern, high-quality scanners can make that drop in quality practically impossible to notice, but that means you should invest in quality scanning if you want the original piece’s full clarity to shine through.

Here at The Stackhouse, we want to help you create the prints you need to make those sales. We can help you create canvas board prints that maintain the quality of your original piece while making it easier to distribute to buyers. Contact us today to start turning your hard work into something that will really sell.