Not everyone wants original art for his or her wall. Many people love to support artists, but don’t have the money, the space or the eye for choosing pieces to adorn their home.
But these people can still be your customers and collectors, if you provide them with quality products featuring your artwork. Selling inexpensive art products can be a great way to capture a new audience, spread the word about your art and make enough money to get by when your larger pieces aren’t selling.
Apart from prints and postcards, here are 5 great ideas for small-scale art products you could sell:
Playing cards
Who doesn’t love a game of blackjack or SNAP with friends and family? Cardgames are still popular and unique decks are highly coveted by serious players. So why not create a deck of playing cards featuring your artwork?
Many online print companies will allow you to print decks of playing cards featuring your own designs. You can even customize both sides of the pack, so you could create a unique motif for each suit. A playing card pack featuring your artwork could sell for between $10-30.
Scrapbooking supplies
Scrapbooking is all the rage with creative mums and grandmothers wanting to preserve their favourite memories in a unique way. If your art lends itself well to these whimsical and personalized designs, you could create your own mini-scrapbooking packs, or downloadable digital scrapbooking embellishments, and tap into an entirely new and potentially lucrative market.
Team up with a scrapbooking company or explore possibilities with printers or designers to create your own product lines. You could sell scrapbooking papers and packs for $5-$100, depending on their quality and contents.
Notebooks
Notebooks are a great little seller—they’re cute, portable, useful and they make great gifts. Art notebooks are particularly sought after, since for many people they serve as a kind of fashion accessory.
Bespoke printers can customize notebooks with your artwork, or you could take a bookbinding class and learn to make your own. Depending on their size and quality, notebooks usually sell for between $5-$50.
Gift tags
A pretty gift tag on a present can be just as delightful as the present itself, and with Christmases, birthdays, births, marriages and a hundred other occasions where gifts are needed, a box of beautiful gift tags decorated with artwork in the kitchen drawer will never go amiss.
Again, gift tags can be printed by many companies online, or you can make your own by printing images of your artwork with a good quality photo printer and attaching them to high quality paper tags. Tie them up with ribbon and you’re done! Gift tags packs can sell for $10-30.
Canvas bags
Canvas bags have two distinct selling points: first, they show that you are an artist who thinks about the environment, and second, they look trendy and fashionable.
Many artists sell art bags as fashion items for a relatively high profit margin, since people are now beginning to collect bags featuring distinct designs. You can have canvas bags printed with your artwork from many print companies, or learn to screen print your own. Canvas bags could sell for between $15-45.
As an artist, it’s important to consider lower-cost items as a potential method for building your art business. A group of customers who buy at a lower price point can sustain an artist during periods when original paintings and prints aren’t selling.
Feel free to use one of the suggestions above, or come up with a new idea for your own art. Think about it. . . what line of inexpensive art items could YOU make?
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