Green Artist

The KEBAartmate is a wonderful piece of equipment from the Swedish company Keba. It was designed along with English watercolourist Ben Haslam, who distributes it in the UK.

Stretching your paper is one of the main bugbears for all artists and if you’re like me, you begin your painting with enthusiasm, moving on to applying the watercolours with a “can’t wait to stretch it and come back to it later, I’ll just carry on and hope it’s okay” type attitude. But it never works, does it? You’re just getting stuck in when the papers starts to curl, and although there are ways to rectify the situation later, it’s always just a bit too late when you realise you would have been better stretching your paper first. But it’s a bother isn’t it, or at least it has been up to now.

In part one of this article we looked at how you could add extra value to your artwork by making sure that it is signed legibly, by giving it a title and by adding a short explanation or description to it. In part two we will be looking at other ways of making your artwork worth more money when you come to sell it.

Something that a lot of artists don’t remember to do is date their art work. In fact some artists don’t date their artwork deliberately because they have the idea that people would prefer to buy new work rather than work that was done a year or two ago. But often it actually works the other way around, and especially as you become more well-known, your earlier works become more important and can command a higher price. If your artwork isn’t dated then you can’t use this to your advantage later. I’m not suggesting that you write the date you created the piece on it, although you could put it on the back somewhere if you like, but I do suggest that you keep a notebook with details of all your art pieces in it, and make sure that the dates they were made are included.

There are several things that you might not have thought of, that add extra value to your artwork and can make it worth more money when you come to sell it. I’m not talking here about reworking pieces you feel haven’t come up to scratch. Yes, it is sometimes possible to rescue a less than perfect watercolour by using a pen and ink technique, and you can paint right over parts of an oil or acrylic painting to in effect completely rework the area, but here I am talking about techniques that don’t involve changing your artwork in any way.

Sometimes you only need to put a cardboard mount around a painting to bring it out of the doldrums, and there is no doubt that the right mount and frame can do wonders for a slightly mediocre piece of art. For a sculpture, or a piece of ceramics, the right stand and appropriate lighting can make a big difference to the way it displays, but after you’ve made sure that your artwork is being displayed to its best what else can you do to add to its worth?

Probably every artist dreams of becoming successful enough to make a living selling their artwork. Some artists achieve fantastic success within their lifetime and become famous and well paid their work, but these people are in the minority. For many artists the dream of becoming well known and really well paid never becomes a reality and these artists make do with living on a small income, or they make money from other activities that may or may not be related to art.

Many artists are really quite bad at marketing their art and this is probably because they would prefer to spend their time creating art rather than marketing it. But art rarely sells itself and even if it is well displayed in an exhibition it may need an ‘extra something’ to help it sell. It would be really quite unusual, but enviable, to be in a position where people are clamouring to buy your work and ready to pay good money for it without you having to do any marketing at all.

Some artists supplement their income by teaching workshops and/or selling artists materials, and in many ways this is preferable to supplementing your income by some means that is totally unrelated to art, because at least you remain connected and focused on the art world.