The custom header I created for my Fine Art America website.

Back around the end of February, I wrote about my experiences getting started with Fine Art America. Two months have gone by, so it’s time for the update I promised in Part One. Certain negative aspects have been corrected, so that’s good news. There remain some things I’d like to see changed, but overall I would highly recommend FAA to artists looking for an online presence, especially if they need a print-on-demand (POD) provider.

For $30 a year, FAA gives you unlimited gallery space on their main site, as well as a distinct website that has no FAA branding. Customers can order framed prints through either venue. However, when customers order through your personal website, the customer sees only that you have a professional ecommerce site, allowing them to order prints, framed and unframed, prints on canvas, and greeting cards.

From a marketing standpoint, this is more impressive than a customized Zazzle or Redbubble gallery, since it appears to be a stand-alone business site. Even better is the ease with which you can create your professional-looking site using FAA’s tools. Customization on other POD sites is difficult, to say the least, and often requires a solid understanding of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). FAA, on the other hand, is very easy to use. I created the customized header (above) in Photoshop, which really helps the site look unique.

Sean Broihier, the owner of FAA, seems to be very focused on the needs of his artist customers, as well as the buying public who visit FAA. Knowing that customers will want to take a close look at artwork before buying, Broihier created a high-resolution zoom tool. This helps increase buyer confidence. The only other place I’ve seen this sort of thing is on a stock photo site. Other POD sites don’t seem to realize the importance of such a tool.

Broihier provides artists with a neat slideshow widget, which you can see over on the right here on my blog. When I add artwork to my gallery, the slideshow automatically picks it up. The slideshow’s movement attract the visitor’s attention, and shows off my work at the same time. I think it’s really useful.

FAA also automatically provides buyers with color swatches based on the main colors in a piece of artwork. Again, I can’t think of a similar site that does that. Along with visitor counts, there are visitor comments. These help build buyer confidence.

When you upload artwork, it appears automatically in the huge gallery on FAA, as well as on your own website. No need to do dual maintenance of two sites.

The buying experience is very professional. I ordered an unframed and a framed print from FAA, in order to check out the printing and framing quality, as well as delivery time and packaging. My order arrived in about ten days, and was packed very securely in a big box. The framed print looked just great. The colors seemed to be an exact match, and the framing quality was excellent. I used to work in a frame shop, and I’ve framed dozens of my own pieces, so I know what to look for. I couldn’t have done a better job myself. The back was covered nicely with kraft paper, and wired ready to hang.

I should step back and mention that the online process for ordering a frame is intelligently designed. You pick a frame color and you’re presented with all frames that match that color. You can then order a mat, and the viewer shows what your work will look like in that frame with that mat. The color of the displayed mat didn’t seem to match the color I picked, always, so that may be a little bug.

As an artist, you determine the minimum and maximum print sizes available for ordering. The site lets you know what the biggest size printable is for your given file, so that’s helpful. Other sites don’t address this sort of thing well, if at all.

Buyers can choose from a range of papers. If you know that your work will not look good on the default matte archival paper, you can’t stop buyers from ordering it, unfortunately. You can, however, add a note in the piece description, recommending the proper paper. The unframed print I ordered was printed on the matte paper, which is the cheapest available. The dark blacks didn’t look as dark as they should have, due to the paper. The Somerset paper I used in the framed print showed accurate and rich colors, though it was a bit more expensive.

Normally, an unframed print comes rolled in a tube. Since I was also ordering a framed print, FAA used a large flat box, and packed the unframed print flat in the box, which was a pleasant surprise. I was quite pleased with my purchasing experience on FAA, and feel confident that my customers will be getting a quality product when they order. FAA also has an unconditional guarantee.

Back in Part One of this review, I mentioned that you can’t pick your own domain name for your FAA website. What I failed to explain is how easy it is to work around that. If you own your own domain name (such as www.bobnolin.com, you can tell your domain registrar (the company that you pay each year to maintain your URL) to “point” to your FAA site. If you roll your mouse over the slideshow on the right, you’ll notice, down at the bottom of your browser, that it says “www.bobnolin.com.” When you click on it, it takes you to the FAA site, which is really www.bob-nolin.artistwebsites.com. Here’s how you make that happen:

You select “Forward Your Domain” and then tell it where to forward to. Each registrar has a way to do this, I believe. It is free, too. Also, I tell it what title I want to appear up top in the visitor’s browser (”The Art of Bob Nolin”). Choosing “Frame Redirect” causes the URL to say “www.bobnolin.com”, which keeps the visitor from getting confused by seeing www.bob-nolin.artistwebsites.com. I’ve had some questions about how I did this, so forgive me if I got too techie there!

As I mentioned in Part One, the FAA website was not working very well when I was trying to sign up. Sean Broihier assures me this was due to heavy maintenance to the search engine, and that the server should be up all the time now. In two months, I’ve never again experienced a problem. So that’s a relief. Also, FAA employs several full-time customer service people, which was another issue in Part One.

I need to wrap up here, but I do want to mention the community on FAA. My works are frequently commented on by other FAA’ers, and they’re all very nice and supportive. There are groups and an online forum, you can create a blog, an email newsletter, and so forth. These things all add to the feeling of a community, and they’re free. The $30 fee is only if you want to use the POD service and/or have your own website. From what I’ve seen so far, this was $30 well-spent. If you have questions I didn’t answer here, please leave a comment below. Also, I’d love to hear about your own experience with FAA.

Thanks for reading!

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Fine Art America has been offering websites, for $30, since last year. We finally get around to checking them out. Come along for the ride, and see what our experience is like.

I first reviewed Fine Art America in January 2009 (link to article). Fine Art America is similar to Red Bubble and Imagekind in that it enables you to sell both originals and prints of your work, using Print On Demand (POD) technology. Since that initial review, FAA has added a great new feature: websites for artists. Art you upload to FAA’s site becomes immediately available on your website, and vice versa. FAA and its POD program are free. Adding the website is a mere $30 a year (most sites charge that much–or more–per month). So FAA, which already offered more than its competitors two years ago, has added even more to help you get your work out there. Their visitor counts per month are over 500,000, which is 100,000 more than Red Bubble. Imagekind’s numbers are much, much lower. (See the chart from Compete.com, below). If you’re depending on your art marketplace site to get you visitors, these numbers are a very important consideration. Nothing says you can’t sign up with all three, of course, and it might be a good idea to do so, as long as they are free.

I decided to take the new website function for a spin, and write about the experience here in occasional articles, beginning today. I invite readers to comment about their own experiences with Fine Art America, RedBubble, and/or Imagekind. What’s working for you?

Visitor counts from 2010 for FAA, RedBubble, and Imagekind. FAA maintains a respectible lead.

Well, shrinking down the page from Compete.com to fit on the blog probably renders it unreadable, but there it is. I’ll summarize, in case you can’t make it out. The blue line represents FAA’s monthly visitor count for 2010, hovering around 500,000. Below that, in green, is Red Bubble, at around 400,000. Imagekind, in orange, is around 160,000. So this gives you an idea as to how busy these sites are, and which is the leader. I should point out that traffic numbers alone aren’t the whole story. For instance, even though Zazzle has over 5 million visitors a month, I’m willing to bet that nearly all of the visitors are sellers, not buyers. There’s no way to tell, however, what the ratio is. And that’s what you really want to know: how many buyers will be visiting. I don’t believe any of these sites is publishing their sales figures, unfortunately.

This is what a default, plain-vanilla website looks like. There are a few things you can change, but not many.

I decided to begin concentrating on selling prints of my digital and traditional artwork. One of my considerations was that I own my own domain name. This made FAA very attractive, because I could tell my domain registrar company to redirect all links for “www.bobnolin.com” to my new FAA website. This was easy to do, and meant that I wasn’t going to lose anybody who already had me bookmarked. After enrolling in the “premium” member plan for $30, a website is created for you. The URL is “www.xxxx.artistwebsites.com,” where xxxx is your name, with a hyphen in the middle. For example, mine is www.bob-nolin.artistwebsites.com. You can’t change it to something else. Your new website is clean and simple. Not exactly Web 2.0 (or are we up to 3.0 by now?), but it looks professional.

The banner across the top (a) has a few color choices, but the design is the same. You have three font choices: Courier, Times Roman, and Arial. Luckily, you can create and upload your own banner art, which is what I did. (See below.)

The navigation tabs (b) are not changeable. Even if you don’t want to use, say, the blog feature, you are stuck with a “Blog” tab. The “Login” tab is for the website owner’s use only, so your customers may click on it and wonder why it’s there. They may wonder if this is a membership-only site or something.

The page itself (c) has a “profile image” (mandatory, though you can use an image of your artwork, if you prefer — I’d rather people look at my work upon entering my site, not my face) on the left, and your name and bio on the right. And to paraphrase Henry Ford, you can make the background any color you like, as long as it’s white or black.

And finally, the artwork (d) is here twice, once under the “Artwork” tab, and once under the “Galleries” tab. You can’t turn off one of them. I would prefer to just have Galleries, and have them right here, without requiring a click on a tab. I like the way Krop.com has designed their profile page, and hope that FAA can take a few design pointers from them. Krop also has a nice tool for modifying the thumbnails for each image. Here’s a look at my Krop profile page:

Notice the differences: you get three feature images at top, and then galleries are right there, with sliders. Everything's on one page, which increases chances buyers will see your work.

This is what the header of my new FAA website looks like. I’ve created a new banner image, and (forgot to mention this) you can change the colors of the tabs. You can choose any hex number for them. Background is strictly #000000 or #FFFFFF.

This banner art was created in Photoshop. The tab colors complement the image.

I hate to end on a negative note, but I do need to mention that during this week of trying out FAA, their servers have, apparently, gone down at least three times. In one week. Sometimes, for an hour or more. Another time, parts of the website (the part where you go to buy a print) weren’t working.

After hanging for a long time, these dreaded messages have appeared...several times.

This problem led me to find out that FAA has very poor customer service. I’ve sent several emails to “support@fineartamerica.com” to ask about the server being offline. As of today, I have not received a response. I also sent an email asking a technical question, but again, no response. There is an FAQ page, but it is mostly a sales piece, with little “how to” info. If you’re not technically savvy, you may want to stay away altogether, unfortunately. The lack of support also means that your customers are not getting their questions answered. According to the owner of FAA, he is the one and only employee running the whole shop (he subcontracts the printing and framing). So bear these caveats in mind when deciding whether FineArt America is for you and your business.

That’s all for this week. I’m still uploading images. I will say that, when it’s working, this is a very impressive piece of software. The search facility is probably the best I have seen. FAA really stresses the importance of using keywords. Take a few extra minutes to put in as many as you can think of, and then your work WILL be found by willing buyers. Best of luck to you!

For more information, here’s an in-depth interview with the owner of Fine Art America, dated March 2010. It’s very informative.

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Before Craigslist and Fiverr, unemployed workers used hand-made signs and pounded the pavement.

You may notice that I don’t write a lot of articles in the “Marketing” category, here on Digital Image Magazine. There’s a reason for that: it’s hard to come up with good, solid ways to earn money as an artist. I don’t want to recommend something to my readers if it’s not worthwhile. But it’s not always easy to tell when something is a good idea, and when it’s a terrible one. For instance, just this morning, I learned about a website called Fiverr. Fiverr has only been around since March 2010, but it’s already ranked in the top 300 websites in the world! That’s pretty amazing. Apparently, Fiverr’s got something a lot of people are interested in. What could it be?

Fiverr is a site that allows you to buy or sell services and products for five dollars. Payment is via PayPal, and Fiverr takes a small amount out of the five bucks, as does PayPal. What you’re left with is three dollars and change. And for that not-quite-four-dollars, people are offering all kinds of things. Need someone to sing Happy Birthday in Chinese? Write a blog post mentioning you? Draw your ad on their face and take a picture? Fiverr is where you can hire someone for five bucks to do these and many, many more things even more bizarre and strange.

At first, this just seemed sort of odd and funny. But then I started noticing that people were willing to do artwork for not-quite-four-dollars. Photo retouching. Poster design. Digital painting. Web graphics. CD cover design.

For five bucks.

I checked out blogs and such to see what the buzz was about Fiverr, and surprisingly, most see it as a positive thing. Some artists and writers claim that it’s a good way to build a portfolio, to get your foot in the door, and so forth. But to see artists offering their services for next to nothing does not sit well with me. I can’t help but think it’s a sign of the times, the bad economy, and the scarcity of good-paying jobs. It seems innocent enough, perhaps. While you’re waiting for the economy to pick up, why not pick up a few bucks on Fivver? But perhaps this state of affairs is actually contributing to the employment problem. After all, why should employers hire well-paid professionals when they can get a logo designed for five bucks?

For artists and other creative professionals, Fiverr is the end result of a process begun by Elance, Guru and others which have freelancers racing each other to the bottom, in hope of snagging a gig. According to MSN’s Money column,

Since the start of the recession, the number of freelancers listing their services through online contracting site Elance tripled to 700,000; CrowdSpring has more than 61,000 graphic artists and writers competing for work by submitting finished projects on spec. Yes, thanks to today’s fantastically abundant labor supply and technology that has American freelancers competing directly with their Third World counterparts, anyone can hire decent talent for less than the minimum wage.

Catch that last part? “Less than the minimum wage.” In other words, the Internet now makes it possible for professionals to compete against each other, fighting tooth and nail, for the dubious honor of making less per hour than a greeter at Walmart. Personally, I believe we are in for a long, hard economic recovery, from what many are calling the Second Great Depression. Unemployed workers aren’t out on the streets, as they were in the 1930’s, so the true situation is not as visible as it was then. Instead, the unemployed are at home, in front of their computers, bidding against each other for every dime.

Okay, that was not the sort of article you’ve come to expect on this site. But I thought it was an issue worth raising. I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts and stories. Have you had experiences trying to get work online? What’s your opinion of Fiverr and it’s many clones (there are many copycat sites like Fiverr)?

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© Leeloomultipass

Just recently, I became aware that stock photo sites, such as Dreamstime and iStockphoto, sell more than just photographs. They also sell illustrations, including the type of photo manipulations and paintings we explore here on Digital Image Magazine. In other words, you could possibly sell your work as stock images! In this July article, we took a look at sites (such as Zazzle and Cafe Press) that enable you to sell reproductions of your work. But what if your work doesn’t really suit the poster and greeting card market? What if, let’s say, you happen to create really nice backgrounds that other artists and photographers would find desirable? Perhaps you love to paint clouds, but really don’t want to put anything else in the picture. Such images might work really well as stock illustrations for others to buy and then build upon. It turns out that a number of artists are doing a brisk business selling such images. This is an opportunity worth investigating, since it costs nothing to participate (contributors don’t pay to upload images), and could result in a nice source of income for you.

It turns out stock photo sites aren’t the only game in town, either. There are stock illustration sites, as well! Who knew? So we’ll take a look at a few of these as well.

Dreamstime

Getting started as a contributor (i.e., an art seller) at Dreamstime is pretty simple, as explained on their Sell Your Images page. Upload your files, and if they meet Dreamstime’s standards, your work will appear for sale online. When an image is first uploaded, it is assigned Level 1 status. At Level 1, you earn 33% royalty. The image advances to Level 2 once it’s been downloaded (bought) 5 times, and so on up to 50 downloads, at which point the image is a Level 5, and earns you 55%. Not a bad deal: the more your image sells, the higher a percentage you earn on each sale. I like this system, where the demand for an image determines its value. You can get some added exposure for your portfolio by uploading free images. If you grant exclusivity to Dreamstime, you earn more per image. But you can also opt to be non-exclusive, and upload your work to other stock sites.

To get an idea of what type of digital art is selling on Dreamstime, start with this collection of Fantasy Backgrounds by contributor Leellomultipass. On the right-hand side, change the sort option to “Downloads descending,” to see the most popular first. At the bottom of each thumbnail image, you’ll see a number next to the letter “d.” This is the number of times this image has been bought and downloaded. The number next to “v” is the number of views. So you can pretty easily determine what’s selling and what’s not.

Dreamstime has some pretty clever folks working for them, I’d say. The site has a game called “Stock Rank.” Here you’re asked to compare pairs of images, side by side. One has never sold, and one has. Select the one which has sold, and you get a point. You can play over and over, honing your skills and marketing savvy. Have fun and learn what sells at the same time! Genius.

iStockphoto

One thing to keep in mind about iStockphoto is: to them an illustration is a vector file. In fact, with Dreamstime and iStockPhoto, and other stock photo sites, the world of images is divided into photos (bitmaps) and vector files, and that’s about it. So, I guess we’ll just follow the “photo” path when submitting our images.

Dreamstime claims they pay the highest royalties among stock photo sites. They certainly pay much better than iStockphoto. iStockphoto offers only 20% royalty no matter how popular your image is. If you grant them exclusivity, you can earn up to 40%. Balance this with the fact that iStockphoto gets somewhat more traffic than Dreamstime, and you’ll see that deciding where to submit your work is a bit complicated. You can start with this collection, titled “Digital Backgrounds and Textures,” to see the sort of work currently on the site. You can sort here by downloads, to see the most popular, but the thumbnails don’t show number of downloads or views, as with Dreamstime.

One other negative is the collections on iStockphoto. Like Dreamstime, anyone can create a collection with a flick of the checkbox on a lightbox (a group of selected photos). But unlike Dreamstime, finding others’ collections is darn near impossible. If you figure out how to search or browse collections (other than the six on the main page), please leave a comment or shoot me an email. Thanks.

Shakespeare Landscape by John Martin. Available through Illustration Source. Click on image to go to the site.

Stock Art sites

To find sites that sell illustration stock, try “Stock Art” in Google. That’s how I found these. I have no idea how good these are. Some seem to be concerned with having a limited number of artists (200 or 300, let’s say), I suppose to maintain the cachet of an old-school agency. Others are more open-ended, like a regular stock site. Here’s a sampling to get you started.

• Illustration Works
• the ispot.com
• Laughing Stock
• Stock Art
• Stock Illustrations
• Veer
• Illustration Source

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You never know what sort of bargains you will find online.

1. Just because a site is free, if no one sees or buys your work, it’s pretty much useless. Just as in a “brick and mortar” art gallery, you need to attract interested buyers. Just because a site has lots of traffic doesn’t mean they’re visiting your particular gallery. Do some searching on the site. How hard is it to find, say “Pink flowers in a field” or “kids blowing bubbles”?  If a site has a good search built in, and uses lots of categories for browsing, it will increase the chances that your work won’t get lost in the digital crowd.
2. If you post your work to a site and then sit back, waiting for the money to start rolling in, you’ll most likely be disappointed. You need to help people find you. So, along with traffic numbers, this comparison lists any marketing tools offered to help you get the word out.
3. To help you compare apples to apples, we list the base price charge for common print sizes. Your profit is whatever you charge above the base price.
4. There are some important considerations that are harder to quantify, such as print quality, customer service, and turnaround time. To get a handle on these, it’s a good idea to check out a site’s user community forum before committing yourself. If the users are complaining and angry, you may want to look elsewhere.
5. If you plan to sell work from your own website, you’ll need to consider shopping carts and that sort of thing. Some sites allow you to customize a gallery page on their site so that it looks just like your site. This way, customers don’t know they left your site to buy, which is a good thing. Other sites give you shopping cart code to add to your site.

With all this in mind, here’s our list of sites currently offering exhibition space and POD (print on demand) services, with some information on each to help you decide. If we’ve missed any, please add them in the comments sections.

Back in 2008, when we reviewed Deviant Art, the site had over 7 million members and was hosting nearly 60 million images. It doesn’t look like they post those numbers anymore, but we must assume that the numbers have only gotten even more amazing in the last two years. Deviant Art is ten years old this August, so it’s looking like they’re going to be around for awhile. It takes a lot of effort, community involvement, not to mention talent, to get noticed on Deviant Art. It’s free to join, and everything that gets submitted is accepted (unless it breaks the rules, of course). This means there is just a ton of work, and the number just grows every minute. In the Alexa list of top websites, DA is currently number 115, and Compete.com says they had 4,565,415 unique visitors in May 2010. There’s a lot of traffic here, no question, but there’s a lot to see, too. Fortunately, there’s a deeply categorized browsing system, which is helpful for finding particular types of work. There’s also a search function, but strangely it doesn’t find member names, only image titles (”deviations”). Your ranking within a category is determined by the number of Favorites (votes) your image has received from other members. Deviant Art charges $79.99 for a 16×20 gallery wrap canvas print, so you’ll need to charge more than that to make a profit. Through the paid option ($29.95 a year), you get a Portfolio, which is showcase website, better pricing options, as well as other perks.

Imagekind was purchased a few years back by Cafe Press. They are known as a high-quality, top-notch publisher. Their current Alexa rank is 16,137. In May 2010, there were 193,862 unique visitors. You can upload an unlimited number of images for free on Imagekind. A paid premium account ($94.99 per year) comes with a customizable website, called a Storefront, including shopping cart and credit card handling. This will help build your professional image. You can make your Storefront match your existing website, if you have one. Base Pricing: Pro Matte Canvas, gallery wrapped, 16×24, is $95.99. You set your markup above this to turn a profit.

Since we first wrote about them in 2008, Zazzle’s reputation within the digital art community has grown. Zazzle’s Alexa rank is 1174, and during May 2010 they saw 3,704,331 unique visitors. There’s no rule saying you can only choose one of these sites to work with, of course, especially since they each service different markets, to a point. Zazzle and Cafe Press sell posters, which retail for $15 or less. This is much lower price point than the framed giclee prints on Imagekind, or wrapped canvases on Deviant Art. Zazzle’s a good place for popular fantasy and sci-fi art, which is the type of work that wouldn’t necessarily do well under glass anyway. There is no charge to join Zazzle, and no paid premium option. You can completely customize your store page so that it looks like a page on your website. Marketing tools include storefronts for MySpace and Facebook. There are over 350 products just waiting to be printed with your artwork, everything from ties to tees. Just keep in mind that your work will be part of a huge crowd of BILLIONS of customize products and posters.

Cafe Press and Zazzle are quite similar, in that they are all about printing on products, especially t-shirts. Cafe Press, however, charges $59.95 per year for a customized store front to match your website (and to lose the Cafe Press branding, as well). Another difference is that Cafe Press does framed prints in addition to posters (though I couldn’t find information on base prices). The Alexa rank for Cafe Press is 1372, and 4,149,532 unique visitors stopped by in May 2010.

FineArtAmerica.com has both fine artists selling originals and digital artists and photographers who need POD services. FAA charges $30 per year to join the premium program, which includes POD printing and framing. The base pricing is explained at length, but at first glance it’s quite confusing. I think a 16×20″ stretched canvas would be around $50-60, but don’t quote me. FAA, as we mentioned in this review, offers a bunch of options at the free level which other sites don’t offer at any level. The list includes email marketing, event promotion, a shopping cart you can embed into your existing website, customized sales page on the FAA site (and a full website with premium membership), a blog, and others options. FAA’s Alexa rank is 8880, and in May 2010 there were 637,213 unique visitors. When visitors look up artists, they’ll find the artists who live near them listed first, which is quite unique. The site’s own data (as of September 2009) shows that there are 25,000 members.

If you’re living across the Pond, Artybuzz may be for you. Shipping charges for your European customers will no doubt be less than the other, American sites listed here. Prices are listed in British Pounds, but the base price list does show that a 16×24″ canvas print (not sure if it’s wrapped, stretched, etc.) is $105.52USD, quite a bit more than any of the other sites. There are no fees for joining or using Artybuzz. You decide how much mark up to add to their base prices. Artybuzz’s Alexa rank is 912,309, and had 167 unique visitors in May 2010. To be fair, though, the site has been up for less than a year.

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This week we look at some portfolio sites: places you can show off your work, often for free, and still look like a million bucks.

In a previous post from a year ago, we took a look at places to show off your work. I’ve recently found a few new (to me, at least) portfolio hosting sites, so it seemed time to revisit this topic. Herewith are some of the best places to create an impressive, professional-looking portfolio.

Viewbook

Viewbook is a classy-looking site, producing some very nice-looking portfolios. I was looking for a way to allow visitors to see zoomed-in high-resolution version of photos, but it doesn’t look like Viewbook has such an animal. Clicking on a photo in the portfolio just advances the slide, which I found counter-intuitive. The pricing options run from $48-$228 per year. Within that, there are albums, portfolio pages, and custom websites, though what these categories indicate remains a mystery. Like many of the sites listed here, explanations and good hard information is usually lacking. With some combination of price and portfolio-type-thing, you can allow users to download images, but how that’s done isn’t explained until (I guess) you sign up. There is no way to monetize your gallery. You can show work, but you can’t sell it here. If you’re interested in selling images, check out this post.

Coroflot

This free site is all about connecting freelance designers with employers. There are job postings, and member galleries (portfolios) are grouped by a variety of categories, such as Art Direction, Architecture, or Illustration. There’s no limit on the number of images you can store. Coroflot pays its bills by running ads (not many) and by charging employers for job postings. If you don’t mind having the Coroflot logo at the top of your portfolio pages, this site might just right for you.

Krop

Krop is sort of like Viewbook, but it offers a 10-image-limit free version, and it has a job board. The paid option, at $9.99 a month, allows domain name mapping, RSS feeds, embedded videos, and a range of templates. The free version, however, ain’t bad looking at all. The only help available here is a very nice intro video. As with Viewbook, there is no FAQ or Help link. I hope this isn’t a new trend. Deciding among all these different sites is hard enough without having all the facts available. By the way, Krop is well-named: it has a built-in thumbnail cropping tool that will save you lots of time. It also includes a nifty resume builder that does a nice job. For professional designers, Krop is pretty darn cool.

deviantArt Portfolio

A few months ago, the folks at deviantArt began to offer gallery space in the form of a portfolio builder. It builds a very basic portfolio, with only a couple of options to choose from. I can only assume deviantArt has plans to develop this thing further, because right now it’s only real advantage is that it’s free (though there is a paid option). Once again, there isn’t any Help information, just a sexy video to get you to sign up. There’s no way to browse through existing portfolios, even to view some examples. No one is going to happen upon your portfolio, so you’ll need to promote its URL elsewhere. I’d like to see deviantArt develop this into a “professional-level” side of their site, but we’ll have to wait and see what they come up with.

FFolio

Ever wish you could create a professional-looking portfolio using Flickr? Soon you’ll be able to, using FFolio. The idea here is to store your photos on Flickr, and then display them using FFolio. That’s about all they’re saying at this point, but if you’re interested, sign up and they’ll email you when they go live.

Carbonmade

Carbonmade, like Coroflot and Krop, is aimed at professionals seeking work. Galleries are called projects. Portfolios are grouped by categories, and within those categories, the most recently updated portfolios appear first. This sounds, at least at first, like a fair system. There is a free version (5 projects/35 images limit) and a paid version, at $12 per month. And thankfully, there is a Help page.

Behance

Of the sites listed here, Behance is probably the one chosen by most top professionals. Here you can find work, and then share files as you develop a project. There are a lot of big names here. You’ll need to fill out a request for an invitation before you can get started.

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With a strikingly fresh style, Art Paws creates dog and cat portraits unlike anyone else.

Back in 1998, the Internet was still brand new. The “Y2K problem” was still two years away. A brand-new search engine named Google was born. Windows 98 (First Edition) was released. And down in Dallas, Texas, digital artist Rebecca Collins began selling digital portraits of dogs and cats. She called her home-based business “Art Paw.” Eleven years later, Art Paw is going strong, and it’s easy to see why. It’s not just that the portraits are outstanding; Art Paw gets Internet marketing right. Digital artists–and any small business owner–can learn a lot from Art Paw.

According to the website, Art Paw “… was the very first of its kind on the web and continues to offer the largest contemporary Art Gallery for hip and cool urban animals.” The vast majority of me-too digital pet portrait firms use a cookie-cutter approach involving one or two Photoshop filters. Art Paw has always been about creating unique, hand-painted works on canvas, executed in a bold and exciting style. Today, Art Paw is run by two humans (Rebecca and Dan Collins), assisted by their three Scotties (Ajax, Big Tommy, and Pixel).

Ordering a portrait online couldn’t be easier. As Rebecca advises those just starting out, “Before you launch a huge marketing campaign, make it easy to order on-line.” The website is easy to navigate and organized logically. There are just three main portrait types, which makes it easy for prospective buyers to decide what to get. The types are Painterly (an example of which is seen at left), Warhol, and Master Paw. The studio was the first to offer the now-ubiquitous Warhol-style for cat and dog owners. The Master Paw series puts your pooch or kitty into a famous work of art. Ten years ago, according to Rebecca, “It seemed like magic to have your pet in Mona’s lap.” There are several masterworks to choose from. You can also suggest a different painting, as long as it’s in the public domain. These paintings really show off the sense of humor and whimsy of the artists at Art Paw.

Mona and friend

In addition to offering custom portraits, Art Paw also sells dog and cat artwork through Cafe Press. The studio retains the copyright to all paintings, and offers a huge range of images on everything from t-shirts to coffee mugs, calendars, and magnets, as well as framed art. (Portrait customers can request to keep their work private, if so desired.) The Cafe Press pages look just like the Art Paw website, so that users are presented with a seamless buying experience. This is a very smart business model, since it allows Art Paw to make income repeatedly from past portrait jobs. The products go out into the world, helping to spread the word further. Art Paw also offers products through Etsy.com.

The Art Paw shop on Etsy.com

Art Paw makes use of two other web tools: Twitter and blogging. The Art Dog Blog is frequently updated, showing off new work as it is produced. One blog entry in particular, ” Pet Portrait Marketing Guide” is highly recommended. Another web technology important to their success is SEO (Search Engine Optimization): do a search for “pet portraits” and Art Paw will be on the first or second page of results. That takes a lot of effort, but it pays off.

Print and other traditional advertising are also part of the Art Paw recipe for success. Click on the Press Room link and you’ll see a long list of magazine articles featuring Art Paw. You can even watch a clip from The Today Show featuring an Art Paw print. Rebecca has the following advice for getting the word out to the media:

If you want to garner some PR you have to create a media kit and also figure out how to tell your story. Ask yourself “what about your work makes it newsworthy”? I have been fortunate and have had many journalists stumble into my work via the web. I also have been coached by a good friend that is a publicist. Hiring a professional publicist is the best advertising dollar you can spend. If you do have a writer interested in your story you must jump on that opportunity fast. I never hesitate to overnight image cds when they are needed.

It’s worth noting that this web-savvy business credits its early success to print ads. “For the first 6 or 7 years I spent a few thousand dollars a year on magazine ads and this was a great way to build my brand,” says Rebecca. “I have been pulling back some on print advertising lately because the word of mouth and repeat business has been so high. I find that I don’t have to place ads to continue to keep my calendar full. In the beginning I also did a lot of outdoor doggy charity events to find my clients. That is another marketing arena I have pulled back from due to time constraints.” Being too busy with paying jobs is a nice problem to have!

Art Paw customers come from everywhere. 95% of their sales comes in from the website. Working from amateur photographs can be tough. Rebecca told me “It is always a challenge to get good photos to work with, no matter what style we are doing. People have no clue really about proper resolution and I have had to get really good at my craft in order to compensate for low resolution images, glow eye and out of focus shots. High resolution, well shot images are always a joy to work with however you are going to learn ten times as much from having to work with a lower quality image. Sometimes I send people back to look for better photos and yet often we are dealing with a pet that has passed away and picture choices are limited so I just have to make them work.”

Art Paw sells through pet shops, too, giving the shop a commission for orders it takes. This is one of the advantages of a well-defined niche: your market is clear (dog and cat owners), and your strategy is to get your work in front of that market wherever it is, be a pet shop, a dog show, or online surfing. Art Paw is thriving, even in this difficult economy, which shows that digital artists can indeed make a living from their art. Just don’t expect overnight riches. “It takes about 5 years to really find your groove and start making a real income,” says Rebecca.

I guess you could say a successful business isn’t born overnight!

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This week I’m taking a bit of vacation, so instead of writing an article, I’m just going to post a link to a very good article by someone else. (Don’t you wish you could do this at work? Just link to other people’s work and pass it off as your own!) The article is titled “Selling Painted Portraits, Fact or Fiction: is anyone really selling Painter portraits?” The previous link downloads a PDF file from Painter workshop instructor Karen Sperling’s site. Sperling has been involved with Painter since version one, and continues to hold workshops for photographers looking to learn how to use Painter. As an artist offering Painter services through my studio (A Work of Art), I found this article very interesting–and encouraging! There’s lots of good information here regarding pricing and marketing, so I urge you to check it out, especially if you’re a photographer thinking about adding Painter to your product line. And if you’re looking to learn Painter, be sure to check out Sperling’s classes and her new book, at her site Artistrymag.com. Have a good week!

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Setting prices doesn't have to be a horror story. A look at the science of pricing.

In an earlier post, I talked about the need for portrait photographers to separate themselves from the rising tide of amateurs entering the field, due to the low cost of entry. Good, professional-level cameras are affordable and ubiquitous, making it possible for anyone to try their hand at running a portrait photography business. Add to this the increasing number of photography franchises in malls, plus Walmart, and you’ll quickly see that competing for the bottom end of the market makes no sense. How can you compete with someone whose entire overhead is a single digital SLR? And why would you even think of competing with Walmart?

In a sluggish economy, it may seem that the smart thing to do is to offer lower prices. That may have been possible in the pre-digital days, for photographers. For artists of all kinds, the Web has lowered the cost of entry so drastically that competition for the low end is simply staggering. Anyone can have a website. Since it costs nothing to start a business, every field is being flooded with rank amateurs posing as professionals. As Seth Godin says in his bestseller The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick),

The problem with infinity is that there’s too much of it. And in just about every market, the number of choices is approaching infinity. Faced with infinity, people panic. Sometimes they don’t buy anything. Sometimes they buy the cheapest one of whatever they’re shopping for.

Godin’s suggested solution: “Be the best in the world”. By that, he means be the best in your niche. And that means, of course, that you need to get your business out of the race to the bottom and find your niche. If you’re a portrait photographer, that could mean becoming a boutique or high-end studio. If you’re a digital artist, it could mean creating stunning, unique works that go viral on the Web, helping you to rise above the crowd and make a name for yourself.

The good news, I think, is that you are no longer a high-volume business working around the clock just to stay afloat. Instead, you can focus on your core talents, the unique skill set you alone have, and polish it up until it shines so brightly people can’t help but talk about you to their friends. When people just have to have your product or service, they will be willing to pay a premium for it. And you will be paid well to do what you love to do.

Sounds great, you may be saying, but how do I get started? I’ve gathered a few articles within this post to help you do just that. For photographers, a good place to start is this article on the Professional Photographer Magazine site, which tells the story of how Tim and Beverly Walden found their niche and built a high-end studio.

They needed to define a photographic niche with a style distinctly their own. Unlike high school senior portraits and wedding photography—things everyone needs and anticipates having to pay for— they settled on a style of portraiture that aroused the customer’s desire to own something original, personal, unique. Dubbed “relationship portraiture,” the Waldens’ distinctive brand of intimate black-and-white portraiture didn’t come together overnight. But having defined a niche and committed to refining their photographic style, the Waldens laid the foundation for a new and profitable business model, based not on pricing or customer need or a season of the year, but on the perceived value of their work.

A recent post on the Photofocus blog, “What Photographers Can Learn From Apple,” is directed towards photographers, but the lesson applies to anyone trying to create a successful business: even in this economy, you can prosper if you offer products or services that are unique and high quality. As one blogger put it:

If you price for profit and give your clients the best quality and service you possibly can, you will survive this time. Matter of fact, if you’re like Apple, you might be better off than ever before. Apple just had one of its best non-holiday quarters ever, in one of the worst economies ever.

People still have money. They are still spending their money. Stay steady and you will ride out this storm.

For help on pricing your work, photographers will find this blog post helpful. Note that the author points out that your highest-priced package should never actually sell: it’s there to make all your other prices seem more reasonable in comparison. A similar practice is used in retail when selling big-ticket items, according to Ellen Ruppel Shell, author of Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture:

How many of us, for example, have ever paid full price for a mattress? There’s an object, you know, it’s always, quote, unquote, on sale. Well, it’s really not on a sale. That’s the real price of the mattress. The other mattresses in that department store have higher prices, but the merchant doesn’t really expect to sell those mattresses. He rotates all his mattresses into the sale pile, and he expects to sell them at that sale price, which is actually the full price.

I like to pass that story along to my photography studio clients when they ask how much to charge for a photo painting I’ve done for them. I point out that they need to charge a premium for the painting, but that it shouldn’t be the most expensive item on their price list, or it won’t sell. You may want to keep that in mind as you set up your prices.

Price communicates an item’s value to the customer. Don’t think in terms of “what’s the most I can ask for this without scaring people away?” Instead, when pricing high-end goods and services, consider that a low price might actually be seen as a negative. Remember that it’s the high price of Apple products that help build their cachet. If you’re offering something no one else has, or that no one else does as well, you can name your price.

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When looking for an digital painter to work with, it's important to share the same taste in art. Joan Stewart and I share a love for the work of artist Steve Hanks, whose watercolor is shown here.

In Part One, we took a look at the long tradition of photographers (such as Wallace Nutting) hiring artists to turn plain photographs into cherished works of art. We saw how Nutting capitalized on the desire of middle-class homeowners to own and display fine art on their walls, despite limited budgets. In Part Two, we’re going to see one example of how this tradition continues in the current day. Savvy portrait studios are turning to digital painters, just as Nutting once turned to his small army of hand-colorists. In Nuttting’s day, his colorists were all local workers, employed at his factory-like facility. Today, photographers can hire digital artists anywhere in the world, thanks to the Internet and email. For example, since my studio, A Work of Art, began back in 2004, I have worked with nearly 70 different photographers spread across 18 states.

One of my first jobs was for photographer Joan E. Stewart, in Cranberry Township, PA. Joan’s studio is about 45 minutes away, so we do almost all of our collaborating by email and over the phone.

Photograph copyright JE Stewart Photography.

“This portrait of two children was commissioned by their mother as a key element in a room design,” Joan says. “She wanted it to have the feel of a painting, with an impressionistic, pastel look, with the children involved in a simple activity. It was not important to her that the children’s faces be completely visible, she was truly hoping for an art piece featuring children which happened to be her own. She is thrilled with this piece.”

Joan got a strong sense, from her client, what sort of painting was desired. She took photos of the room where the painting was to hang, so I could see the color scheme and decor. Since the bouquet of lilacs in the photo was blurred, she sent along another in which it was sharp. Joan and I made sure we were on the same page, artistically, before I got started.

“Bob was able to understand the vision for this painting,” Joan says. “When we originally met about collaborating, it was clear that we had similar tastes in art, and in fact, both had a strong liking for the art of Steve Hanks. When I mentioned to him that my client liked what she had seen in a Steve Hanks book, he knew just how to proceed.”

To begin with, I swapped in the sharp-focus bouquet, and cloned out distractions such as the sapling and iron fencing. Since we had the freedom to step away from the “real” backyard setting, I thought a small pond in the corner might look nice. At Joan’s suggestion, I added a lot of flowers to the background, using colors to match the client’s decor. I also desaturated everything but the two main figures, which helps them to pop, and gave the pastel look Joan wanted.

Completed painting by A Work of Art Studio. Copyright JE Stewart Photography.

Joan says, “Bob has been able to add another dimension to the services I can offer to my clients—something that I would love to do myself but just do not have the time. One of the most important elements of collaboration of this nature is good communication between photographer, artist, and client. Bob really listens to what I am asking for, and is very accommodating when it comes to making changes. This give-and-take is so important to the creative process!” Keep this in mind when looking for a digital artist to work with. It’s critical that your aesthetic tastes match.

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