I’ve been looking at techniques that artists use to sell and promote their art online. My findings are that Artists who are achieving a high profile online are consistently turning to video to reach a huge audience.
Here’s some examples:
Amanda Bittar - This Canadian artist cleverly creates over the shoulder videos of her creating an oil painting. The video is sped up so the viewer sees the artwork unfolding from start to finish in front of their eyes. Amanda also uses branding well in the starting screen logo that she uses for each video. Then she provides links to her website where the artwork is available to buy plus prints available. She posts her videos on social networking sites i.e. groups on Facebook and video sites like Youtube.
Artist Leonid Afremov also uses video of an artwork being created to promote his art. Afremov’s videos tend to be done by someone else filming him, rather than a fixed camera shot filming like Amanda Bittar’s video. The essence is the same where the viewer sees an artwork from start to finish. As well as uploading to Youtube, Afremov uses his videos on his Ebay auctions, and his buyers seem to love seeing the artist at work. I think this is where video really adds value to an artist’s website, as buyers can see the artist physically creating an artwork, and feel reassured that in buying from this particular artist, they are buying a genuine original work of art. Equally important video helps build relationships between the viewer and artist that online, would be otherwise more difficult to initiate. In getting to ‘know’ the artist, more art sales are often made.
Val’s art diary on Youtube is a phenomenal video collection by an artist who talks to the camera about her choice of topic for her artwork then proceeds to create the art. She then sells the piece of art via a silent auction by email method. Her videos are cleverly filmed and edited, and have a huge subscriber base (27,205 subscribers and her videos watched over 1 million times).
She uses her obvious beauty and sexuality combined with provocative painting subject matter to pull in viewers, however artists should pay attention to her superb marketing skills and video editing competencies as a totally equal contributing factor to her huge success on Youtube.
To achieve a fraction of her success on Youtube would for most artists, result in a huge boost of viewers to their artwork. This is why I think it is important to look seriously at video for promoting your artwork.
If you have raw video footage that you need editing into a cool, watchable format for online video, just contact us and we can discuss how we can help.
Related articles: Make a Video of your Art
Related blog posts: The Crafted Webmaster – How to use online video to promote your art
