Maximizing Your Art Business: From Crafting Your Artist Statement to Printful Integration

This week began with Sergio Gomez’s video, How to Write an Artist Statement that Stands Out with Example. Part 1. I won’t be going over his main points because this is a short video and you really need to watch it and do the process yourself.

I found it helpful in terms of organizing my thoughts. However, his last step – one that he places great emphasis on – disappointed me.

He recommends that when you have your rough statement put together, that you use Quillbot Ai to paraphrase it for you and add fluidity.

Quillbot, in my opinion, does not necessarily make your writing better, it just makes it different. For example, I use the word “meticulous” when describing my process and Quillbot replaced this word with a synonym that was not a better one – just a random synonym.

Admittedly, if you are unsure of your writing and need someone to offer you variations of phrasing, then, by all means, use this program. As a writer, I didn’t find it particularly useful.

In Part 2 of the Artist Statement lesson, Gomez describes how to use another Ai tool – ChatGPT – to reword your statement for various purposes. I skimmed through this once I saw what he was recommending. I suppose it would be good if you needed to condense your statement into two sentences or less.

BUT…ChatGPT is not flawless grammatically.

I noticed that when Gomez asked for two sentences, one of them provided by ChatGPT was a fragment and not a complete sentence. This could be important to recognize if an application asks for a certain number of sentences.

Sometimes a fragment is fine, like when used as a tagline, “Serving the Northwest for 40 years,” but the bottom line is, don’t turn over your human intelligence to Ai. You still need to critique what it comes up.

Next I dove into Pinterest by watching artist Krystal Cole’s video on “Pinterest Marketing for Artists…”. I learned a lot and will probably rewatch this one again, but my biggest takeaway is that the goal is to drive viewers to my online shop to purchase from me. That means that I need to work on my online shop (Etsy) so that it has plenty of items (more on this later).

According to Cole, you need to post on Pinterest 3-5 times per day. She uses the app Tailwind (there is a free version but otherwise the cheapest plan is $14.99/mo.) to schedule posts on a weekly basis but apparently Pinterest has one built in that may work as well.

In addition to your own posts, you need to include reposts. She says you want to chose those that don’t compete with what you’re selling but add to it. Choose from sites with several hundred thousand monthly users.

Note: when reposting, use a watermark of your site on the image to drive those folks to your shop. Ideas for reposts: boards, how-tos, freebies. Videos are favored, whether they are yours or reposts.

I moved on to a Pinterest sponsored video featuring Heather Farris called “Marketing for 2024.” This one made my head hurt and second-guess whether I could do this. She seemed to assume she was speaking to people who majored in marketing. I may come back to this but one but so far I'm not recommending it.

Getting my shop ready – I spent a lot of hours yesterday signing up with Printful in order to sell merchandise with my art on it. This was something that Sergio Gomez recommended and I can see the value of it since these items are generally useful and less expensive than original art.

Printful is another on-demand printing service. I did some research and saw it being highly rated, although it is a bit pricier than some of the others. One of the best features is that it integrates nicely with Etsy (and many other online shops).

It did take me some time to set up and figure out, but I got two items designed (a tote bag and a computer sleeve) with two different art designs and imported into Etsy.

I am very proud of myself that I exercised restraint and, instead of publishing these, I saved them as drafts. This is so that I can test the quality of their work first. I ordered one of each of the products and will let you know when they arrive if the quality meets my standards.

There are many things I have still to learn about Printful (shipping, etc.) but they have a lot of teaching videos and I love the idea of selling useful items. I’d like to try phone cases next.

I hope the things I’m learning are useful to you. Please let me know in the comments if you have questions you’d like me to research or do a focused blog on in the future.

In the meantime, experience something beautiful to feed your soul with this week.