How To Make Money With Art Prints

1. Intro: Hello, everyone. I'm so glad you're here, and I'm so excited to talk about art prints. For those of you who do not know me, my name is Laurin, and I am the artist behind Laurin Art, where I paint and sell my own original paintings shown here. I also create and produce my own art prints. I teach online painting classes, and I teach a course called art to Print, where I teach professional artists how to create beautiful, high quality art prints from their original artwork. I am very passionate about helping others use the skills that they have to create a sustainable and profitable income. I consult on all different kinds of businesses, and it's truly one of my favorite things to do. But if you're watching this video, chances are you're an artist. So we're going to talk about how to make a sustainable and profitable income specifically as an artist as that's something that I have mastered myself. This video is going to be in three parts. We're going to talk about why you should be offering art prints, how to sell your art prints. Then I'm going to go through a list of frequently asked questions about creating and selling art prints that I got from you. Right before, I created this webinar. I asked you, what do you want me to cover? You all sent in so many questions and we're going to cover all of those. I also want to let you know that everything that I'm talking about in this webinar is all from experience. This is stuff that I do in my own business. Everybody has their own way of doing things, but this is the way I do things, and I've had a lot of success and so I'm just truly just sharing my experience with you. Let's go ahead and get started. 2. Why You Should Offer Art Prints: All right. Why you should offer art prints. I'm going to go through all the reasons. I think you should be offering art prints to your audience. Offering art prints of your originals is the easiest way to diversify your income as an artist. It is the most perfect companion product to originals. Diversifying your income is super important. If you know this, great, if you don't know this, I'm glad you're here because this is very, very important. You need to diversify your income as an artist. My income, we're going to think about it like a Pi. Mi income is split up between originals, which happens to be my smallest slice of the Pi, prints, which are my biggest slice of the Pi, my online art classes, my art to print course, and licensing. That is what makes up my Pi. When you have many different Pi pieces or streams of income, whichever way you want to look at it, It makes doing business, it makes being an artist, your full time job way less scary. Because if one Pi wedge is getting smaller, or one stream is slowing down a bit, You don't have to freak out because you've got other wedges in your Pi and you've got other income streams to make up for the ones that are slowing down a little bit. Art prints are so easy to offer from your original artwork. It is so easy. Literally, all it is is capturing an image and then printing it. That is the easiest way to diversify. Art prints by you time. What I mean by this is they give you time to create art from a place of want versus from a place of need. You can choose when you want to spend your creative energy because you're not relying on selling originals to pay for your life. You don't have to create a new original every time you want a paycheck, is incredibly freeing and sustainable. If you are anything like me, which I imagine a lot of artists, at least from my friends, I know that this is pretty much the same across the board. Creative energy is very, very different than being a normal human energy. It just really sucks something from your soul. When it's there, it is fantastic and you can just Like when my creative energy shows up, I paint until it stops. I don't stop painting until my energy stops and I get a lot done and it is amazing. But when it stops, it's like dead for a little bit. I have a lot of time to just pretty much recover and which is nice if you're offering art prints, but if you're not or you have other streams of income, but if you do not have other streams of income, it can be scary because that means you're not getting paid. But if you have art prints, when you are in that in between time of creating and selling originals, you're still bringing in a paycheck. It's just automatically coming in. You're literally just hitting print. Or you're sending it off to a print shop and they're printing and shipping it to your customer. You just have an image on your website for people to purchase. It is the smartest and easiest way to diversify your income and it gives you so much time and takes the pressure off of relying on your own creative energy to create your income to pay for your life. Art prints are an excellent way for people who are not in a place to invest in originals to still be able to enjoy your artwork. Originals are typically expensive, mine are very expensive, very expensive. But my art prints are very affordable, but they're also incredibly high quality. It's not like I'm giving them a cheap option. I'm giving them a really n affordable option. Art prints are an excellent way for people who can't invest in originals, yet they still want something really nice, and they want something really beautiful that they can buy something that's more affordable for them. You also could think about it this way. A lot of art print collectors. You can think about the art prints as an entry product into your whole line of products. It's a way for someone to become a fan of your work, and then maybe one day they will turn into an original collector. You never know. There are also people out there who just do not value original artwork. There is nothing wrong with that. There are people who just want to fill their house with art prints on every wall. They would rather have $2,000 worth of art prints versus a $2,000 painting because they can stretch that $2,000 way farther with art prints than they can, one $2,000 painting. Y'all, I got to tell you, there is a massive art print audience out there, way huge and way shocking when I found them, which is my next point. Let's go to that. There is a significantly larger audience for art prints over originals. I was legitimately shocked how many people were coming at me with wanting to buy art prints. When I started offering my art prints a larger sizes. I used to only offer up to 11 by 14, and then for my landscapes, I was only offering five by seven and when I bumped up my print sizes, we started printing ourselves and bumping it up to 24 by six, There was the floodgates opened, and just people started coming. They wanted all kinds of prints. It was shocking. I had no idea. I truly thought that there were more original buyers than there were print buyers. I was wrong, and I'm here to tell you there is a massive audience for print buyers. You need to serve that audience because they will serve you back and it will be good. 3. How to Sell Your Art Prints: Okay. Start building an e mail list right now, right now, finish this webinar and then start building an e mail list. This is so important, y'all. This is so important. Social media is fantastic, but if you've been on social media, you know that it is not reliable. I don't know. I think I have 108,000 followers or something. A tiny portion of those people. Maybe not even a quarter of those people actually see my post. Seriously. That is ridiculous. 108,000 people chose to follow me, but maybe only 24,000 actually see my post. That is stupid. But if they're on my e mail list, I can e mail them and get in contact with them. You have to have an e mail list, very important. How do I build an e mail list? Offer a freebie to your people, whether it is a background, I offered phone backgrounds. Here is my paint palette. This is something where if they get on my e mail list, they get e mailed a link and they can download six free paint palettes or offer a discount code, like a 10% off discount code. There are so many different ways that you can incentivize people to get on your e mail list, and that is just really really important. This is what I'm saying. Offer a freebie to incentivize people to get on your e mail list. Most people don't like getting on e mail list. I don't like getting on e mail list. But if there is something that I'm going to get out of it immediately, I am definitely more inclined to get on the e mail list. Then the next point is, how to keep people on your e mail list? Don't annoy them. Really just do not annoy them. E mail, e mail at least one time a month. Two to four times Max is my opinion because then you can just really annoy people. I'm testing the waters right now because I've started a series called print of the week where every week, I'm offering a print that is 15% off just for that week. Know, hopefully, the people who actually want to buy my prints will stick around and the people who they may leave. But also, that's okay because you don't want people to take up your e mail space and your e mail list who have zero intention of buying. So Keep that in mind. Don't annoy people, but don't let them forget about you. Just stick to one time a month. Only send valuable information. Do not send fluffy, stupid e mails, Only send something valuable because you're going to have a higher chance of people sticking around. Find ways to talk about your prints in a meaningful way. You may be like, Okay, Lauri, you're saying to talk about my prints all the time, but what the heck do I talk about? Here's some ideas. Share the inspiration. Show you got the inspiration for this print, say you have a photo of the print and you're like this was when I was camping. I do that a lot. I talk about my prints. I painted this from when we went camping somewhere and it just blah, blah, blah. Talk about your inspiration. If your print has been someone tagged you in something where they hung your print on their wall. Share that. Share a print where it was featured. Show the process of creating the painting that the print was made from, but you're selling the print. Like say you have a process video of you painting that painting. Even after that painting has been sold, you can still share that process video and say prints available on my website. Easy. Show the print next to the original. One of my favorite photos, and you've probably seen it recently. I don't know, maybe, maybe not. Is I love showing my original next to my print because I like showing people the difference between comparing the original to the print and seeing how similar they are and just how good my prints are compared to the originals. I do that a lot with my little cats original because I still own that one, so it's easy for me to show that one. All right. Be consistent and show up. This is so important. If you are not showing up in your social media space. Unfortunately, guys, social media is a huge part of this pie. Build your e mail list, so it's not the only big part, but it is important. Show up and be consistent, show up in the e mail boxes, not too much because that is an intimate space, but at least show up consistently on social media. Show your work, just be there. It will help I promise. Here are like a little bit more advanced ways to sell your art prints. Create a wholesale line. Don't let this freak you out. Don't be intimidated. It's not as big as it sounds. It is really not that bad. Creating a wholesale line has been an amazing tool for me because what you're doing is you're getting your work in front of people who either don't online shop or they've never heard of you because I don't know. Maybe they've heard of you, but they go in a shop and they're like, Oh, I like that, and then they see your work, and then they're like, I'm going to look her up and they look you up, blah, blah. It's a beautiful story. I think of wholesale. It is not my most profitable income stream. So keep this in mind. Wholesale is not the most profitable. Wholesale you sell your wholesale prints to retail shops for 50% off your retail price. You need to keep that in mind. Say, My eight by ten prints are $45 on my website, a shop will buy that same print for 22 50, and then they'll sell it in their shop for $45. My print is always selling for the same price, but I sell it to the retail shop for 50% off. And that's just the way it goes. That's the way that shops make money. But the way I think about my wholesale line is I think of me getting paid for PR p for advertising. Because otherwise, I've got shops I've got my prints and shops all over the US all over Canada, and there is a massive chance that those people who are buying my prints and those shops have never heard of me, and but now I'm in front of their eyeballs. So wholesale line is a great place to start. And using a wholesale marketplace like fair fair.com is awesome. There's a ton of wholesale marketplaces out there, even shop if I has one, but a wholesale marketplace has been a game changer for me. So I would look into that. Another more advanced thing is you can use ads to sell your prints. I don't recommend doing this right now. Do what I've told you previously to this point. Do all those things. Then once you have that going and you've got your print process going, you know how to you've got a good production situation going. Then consider ads. They're great. We've used adds a little bit and we plan to use ads even more, but But ads are expensive. They're expensive and they're effective, but they're expensive and sometimes if you can figure it out yourself great, but you might have to hire people to do it for you. It's like its own thing. I would just focus on the other things before you go to ads, but that is an option. 4. FAQ Part 1: Pricing & Management: All right. Let's go to frequently asked questions. All right. I love this and my notes on this are a little all over the place, so it may take me just like a second to navigate, where are my answers to these questions? Okay. How do I price my prints? This was the biggest que or the question that I got asked the most. And I'm going to do my best to answer this. Pricing is very important, very, very important. You need to you need to know what your cost is. By cost, I mean, how much money do you personally have to spend to create a print and to have it packaged up and shipped out the door, how much money does it cost you? How much money is the actual printing of the print, whether you're printing it yourself, like the canvas, the ink, or whether you're getting it from a shop, how much are they charging you for the print? How much is your envelope that you're shipping it in or your tube or the sleeve, the backer, the washi tape, your your card insert, your sticker, all of that, your postage, all of that. You need to know your cost and you need to get as detailed as you possibly can. Cost, number one, then you need to figure out the labor involved in putting it all together to get ready to ship out the door. So you need to put an hourly rate on that. So like say, It doesn't need to be your personal hourly rate because you as the artist, your hourly rate is going to be way more than a high school student you have helping you package prints during the holidays. Their hourly rate is going to be a lot less than your hourly rate as an artist. Think of it from a random person helping you package prints, what would you pay them an hour? Then you need to time yourself. How long does it take to print and package this up? And so then you divide that time by the hourly rate, figure out all these things. You've got your cost, you've got your labor, and then you need to have your markup for profit. So this is all of this is going to be different for everybody. I can't give you hard fast numbers on any of this because everything is different. But a 40 to 60% profit margin is a really good profit margin. So like say, gosh, I can't even attempt to do the math. But you say you have your cost and your labor, and then you add like 60% or 40% or whatever. 40 to 60% in your price should be profit, and then whatever all that is, added up, that should be your price. You've got your cost, your labor, your markup for profit equals your price. Hopefully that makes sense. Keep in mind that price is cost is going to be different across the board. I print on Canvas. Canvas is more expensive. My cost is higher than someone who's printing on a super affordable paper, which the person who is printing on that paper, they can either make more profit by keeping say, like me and Joe Schmo, we have the exact same priced print, but mine is more expensive but mine is printed on Canvas, his is printed on paper, he's probably going to make more money off of that print than mine. Or he could lower his price and have more affordable prints. It's just like you can wiggle it with once you figure out your cost, your profit margins and all that. One quick note about that is if you are going to have a wholesale line, keep that in mind that your retail price is going to be slashed in half when you're selling to retail shops. Again, I do not think of my wholesale line as a super profitable thing. I think of it as I'm getting paid a little bit of money to advertise my stuff to people that I normally would not see. You just have to have a different mindset for wholesale. At least that's what I do. All right. Hopefully that makes sense. In summary, again, cost labor plus a 40 to 60% profit margin equals your price. Do I have to print my own prints or can I outsource them? No, you do not have to print your own prints and you can absolutely outsource them. I chose to print my own prints because I'm a little bit of a control freak. I typically like to work with a higher profit margin and I was wanting to keep it in house and have a higher profit margin. Having a higher profit margin, printing them myself also requires way more time and effort into print. You could just completely outsource them. Yeah, you're not going to make as much money off of each sale, but you don't ever have to think about it. There are two there are pros and cons to both situation. It is like, what do you value more? Do you value money more or do you value freedom and time more? Because you're going to give up one or the other, for sure. It's just what do you value more? Also with pricing your prints, I want to say another tip is to look around, you go study people's prints, study the quality and then study their prices and be like, Okay, Yeah, I think my quality lines up with this quality. It might just be a good gauge for a pricing. But there's prices all across the board. Just look around, but also be realistic about, is your quality as good as theirs or is their quality really bad? Could you be charging more vice versa? Okay. I started with outsourcing my prints from the very beginning. I think that's actually probably the smartest place for everybody to start is outsourcing because then you just don't have the response you can test print sales and stuff to see if people are people buying it, do people like it? Outsourcing is such a great option. Printing yourself is also a great option. It does take more time and energy, but they're both really good options. Okay. Next question. At what point in my business should I offer prints? If you can sell original paintings or drawings or whatever it is that you're selling, you can sell art prints. End. If you are unable to sell your originals, I would it's probably time for you to ask a couple of hard questions. One, are you pricing your originals too high? Two, are you creating is your work good? Do you need to practice more in your craft more or because it could just be pricing. That could totally be it, or do you need to practice your craft? I know that's a harsh question to ask yourself, but is something good because it's a good question to ask because you just need to make sure that you're putting your best work out there? But to answer that question, if you are able to sell original artwork, I would say, why not start now? Start now. Because there's people, I hate it. I love buying original art. I love buying original art. When something sells out, I'm just like, it's just such a disappointment. I will tell you this. This is just a little experiment from my own personal experience. I've started where I sell an original, it sells out. I can see what's happening on my website from Google Analytics. I can see tons of people are trying to buy the exact same painting. I can see them doing this, but only one person gets it. But then I send out my e mail for, hey, the original is sold, but here's the print. A those people who didn't get it, they go by the print. It doesn't always work out that way, but that is a real example that has happened with myself. People just want that piece, they want that art, and if they can't get the original, then they're going to get the print. Go ahead and start offering them. At what point should I bring printing in house? This is a very personal choice. Some people do not want to deal with the time and labor involved in creating their own prints, producing their own prints. But if you do choose to do that, I would say, wait till you get you're getting consistent print sales, and then you can do the math and see, Okay, we're getting multiple print sales a day. If I'm ordering this from my outsourcing place and if I were printing on myself, where would I be making more money doing it myself or should I keep going this way? Again, it's just like, what do you value more, your time, or do you want more money, and do you want to spend more effort into that? Again, either option is great. It's just what do you value more? I would just say if you eventually do want to bring it in, wait till you have consistent print sales and then evaluate all your profit margins and how much is your cost, could you make more money bring it in or keeping it out, et cetera, all that. Because the truth of the matter is is when you are printing yourself, the profit margin is actually way more higher. It's much higher, but it also requires way more effort and time. So what is more valuable, time or money? Although at some point, you would be able to hire someone to do that. Right now, I've hired someone to do all my prints and it has it's still more profitable for me to hire an employee and print them myself at the volume that I'm doing at this point. 5. FAQ Part 2: Audience, Equipment & More: All right. What are the best selling print sizes? This is hard to answer, but I mean, it's not hard to answer. Standard sizes. That is the easiest answer that I can give you. Go and look at like frame shops like online frame shops and see what are like standard sizes, go into a hobby store and see what size frames they offer. That's exactly what I did. I went into Michael's and I looked around and I looked at the frames and I saw whichever ones I like the best and what sizes were they. Then that's just how I picked it. Um, I offer a lot of different sizes. But that's because I print myself so I can have a ton of options, but it may be better for you just to have a small, medium, large or small, medium, large, extra large. U That's the way I would look at it. I would say my best selling print size ever is an eight by ten. It is also probably the least profitable one, but it's an eight by ten, that is definitely the best selling print size that I've ever had. That's one tidbit, but I would just go for standard print sizes. All right. Do I need a big audience to sell art prints? No. You do not. I started selling art prints when I had a couple hundred followers and they have just like grow and grow and grow and grown, and with that, my audience has grown because my print collectors bought prints and they share it with their audiences, and then those people come follow me and my audience has just grown because of that, but no, you do not need a big audience to sell art prints. Something that I am really big on is fostering a following of quality versus quantity. And because I don't know if you've ever heard of the whole concept of 1,000 true fans. It is I'm probably going to butcher it on here, but it is so important. If you have 100 true fans who spend $100 a year buying your product, that's $100,000. If you have 100 true fans, who spend $100 a year on your product? That's $100,000. You can change that number up, but the point is, it's like you can make a big impact, not that many people can make a really big impact in your business. $100,000, that's a big number. You could say, you have five, 500 true fans who spend $100. It's $50,000 right there. That's not small potatoes. That's good money. Just think about that. Think about the quality versus the quantity. Another thing that I love is that followers do not equal dollars. There was a long time there where I had a very small following. I know I have a large following now, but it was not always that way, and I just want to be very clear on that. My following has grown very quickly, recently, but that was not the case. I grew very steadily and had was making much more money than people I knew who had massive followings when I had a very small following because I had quality followers. Do not feel like you have to have this massive audience to make money as an artist. You don't. Build quality, be real with your people, serve them well and interact with them and love them, and they'll love you back, I promise, like It's just the way again, it's like energy. The energy you put into stuff, you're going to get that energy back. All right. Let's keep going. Do I need professional equipment? Yes and no. Depends on what you want to do, to create The answer is yes, but it's not like as much as you need. To say you're outsourcing art prints, and you don't need a printer, you don't need ink, you don't need paper, you don't need of that. The way I teach how to get the best images of your artwork, you'll either need a camera or a scanner, or you can rent a camera. That's a really good option. Or a scanner, and you need a computer, and you need adobe like adobe light room and adobe photoshop. If you are on my e mail list, you probably got my equipment guide that I send out, that's a good place to look. You do need some, but it's not as much as you may think. But also it's worth it. All right. How do I decide which paintings to make prints of? I I make like prints of all my paintings. I have in my experience, more is more, because you never know like you just literally never know what is going to sell. That is the weird thing about all of this. Is there something that I'm like, Man, this is a good one? This is going to go viral. It's just going to be amazing and it sells nothing. So for me personally, I make prints of everything just because why limit myself. That's the way I look at it. But if you want to limit yourself, maybe just gauge off of your audience reaction to a piece that like to an original you post. If people are going crazy, then you definitely make it a print of that one. But I don't limit myself. Do prints devalue an artist original work? We already talked about this. No, they do not. They bring more awareness to your original. They bring more value to your original and they only elevate it. They make it even better. That person with the original is like feeling so good because they're like, Yeah, you just have a copy of this, this beautiful original that I have. It's actually the answer is no. It does not devalue. My battery is running low. Hold on. Let me pause and plug this in. All right. My battery is plugged in. Okay. Next question. I'm going to get through this, try to get through this quickly. How do I safely package prints? You know what? In my art print course, I show you exactly how I do that. And it's super simple. Not a big deal at all, and I also show you exactly where I buy all of my materials to package prints so that they make it to wherever you are shipping it safely. 6. Final thoughts: Okay. Look at me, smiling and Hazel a little hazel pup. All right. Hopefully by now, I've convinced you that offering art prints, whether you're printing them yourself or you have someone else do it is worth the effort. Art prints have made a huge impact on my business. They make up 45% of my income. My art is all over the world because of them. My art prints alone, alone have allowed my husband Taylor to quit his job in the medical field to work with me full time, and it's given us the opportunity to employ a couple of really amazing people. My art prints have also meant so much to my collectors. I received countless e mails from people who are just so thankful for the ability to purchase something really beautiful, but at a price they can afford. By offering art prints, you're not only doing yourself a favor or a huge service. You're also making people all over the world, really happy. You may be like, Okay, cool. That's really great everything, Larin, but how the heck do I even do this? I got you. After I was printing and offering my own prints and showing them all over Instagram, my website. I was getting bombarded with messages and e mails from artists being like, How are you making these art prints? Please teach me? A, there's no way to teach this over text messages or DMs. It's just not possible. I decided reluctantly because I swore I was never going to create a course like this, but I did it, and I'm really glad I did because it's changed a lot of people a lot of artist businesses, and I love that. But I decided to create art to print where I demonstrate exactly how I do this. Actually, if you look at this photo, the photo to the right, that's my force lake print. We make that print right there together in the course. I have my original, a scanning in, and that is the print we make and that's one of my best selling prints. You see exactly how I do that. That is the print we create together, in my art to print course. In this course, I hold your hand through the entire art to print process. From what equipment you need to how to use equipment, how I package up my prints, to ship to customers. I literally show you everything, and if anything new ever pops up, I always immediately update my course with the latest and greatest so that you always have the best information to make the best prints. I have mastered art prints. Just ask any of my collectors. I know what I'm doing, and I'm showing you my exact process in creating them. This course is for anyone who wants to make art prints, whether you want to print yourself and you want to either have just a small little printer in your home office or you want to have a massive print shop like me, or if you don't ever want to touch a printer ever, but you want to get good images of your work, and you want to outsource your prints. Or third option. If you are maybe you're not ready to offer art prints, but you want to make sure that you are getting the highest quality image of your originals before they go out the door because maybe one day you'll change your mind and you'll want to offer prints like five years down the road. This course is for you 100% for you. This is all about capturing the image of your original. That one day, either that day is like tomorrow or that day is five years from now, that one day you can reproduce your original print form. This course is for you. Because the most important thing about that I teach an art to print is just getting the good image. Okay. This is really, really important, especially for those of you who may not be ready to offer art prints, which is totally fine. No pressure, for sure. But do not let another original go out the door without getting a good image of that original. I have so many original paintings out in the world that I did not get good images of that I would love to offer art prints of. I have this gorgeous desert series that I painted, and I don't have any I don't I have prints of one. That's just one. I don't have any of the images, and it breaks my heart because I love them and I would love to be able to offer prints of them. Don't let an original go without getting the image. My passion is to see artists thrive and art prints are an easy win for everyone. They're an easy win for the artist, and they're an easy win for the collector. So I invite you to take this next step in your business and sign up for my course art to print. And learn how to get the best possible quality images of your work. If you want to print yourself, I'll teach you how to do it. If you don't want to print yourself, no big deal, you can outsource it, and I'll give you resources to do that as well. I invite you to sign up for the course, take the course, offer your prints, and then watch your business change before your eyes because it will. Thank you so much for your time, and I hope to see all of you in my course art to print.