How To Get Started Selling Your Art: PRINTS!
Heads up, this is a long one!
Artist Alley, Comic Con, the local vendors market down the street from your house; we’ve all seen art events featuring artists like you, selling prints, stickers, and other goodies, but how do you get manage to get merchandise to sell to begin with? Prints may seem easy at first glance - it's just printing our your image in theory. Well... not exactly, there's a few more factors than just that; the image quality and the many different production vendors are the big ones.
Before we even get to purchasing stock, it’s important to have art that will work for printing. That brings us to DPI, what is it? We’ve all seen it when making a new canvas in our drawing programs, but it’s essential for printing. DPI itself means “dots per inch,” this refers to how printers print small dots of color to make up your image when printing; the more dots, the more precise the image. All art you’re thinking of using to print must be at least 300 DPI for a clear image – no one wants to buy a blurry, pixelated print! In Clip Studio Paint, DPI is labeled as "Resolution," as pictured below.
Alright – now that we have art that’ll look good, how do we go about producing it into a real-life piece? I have a lame little printer who despises anything I ask of it; colored ink and nice paper are expensive, so printing my art in-house isn’t really up my alley. My golden grail go-to for printing is CatPrints! CatPrint is insanely welcoming and affordable for beginners; their packaging is bio-degradable, and a percentage of proceeds are given to cat shelters to help with their costs. If you donate to your local shelter and shoot them a screenshot, they’ll even give you a discount code. They can get free hard-copy prints (a physical copy of your image to see how it looks), digital copies to ensure your prints look nice, and free sample packs to see what kind of paper you’d like to print on. They can do foil printing, too, to make a digital piece shine like a mirror. Shipping is very on time, but when it comes to printing, I don’t recommend placing an order a week before you’re going to be a vendor, or else you’ll pay rush shipping fees!
Alright, your prints have arrived; how do we price them? Do you want to package them? There are tons of questions! It’s up to you how much you want to mark up your prints; the more you order in bulk, the more affordable the cost for a single print will be; 10 pieces might run you at 2.50 apiece, and 30 might get you closer to a dollar or less. Cat Print allows you to print multiple prints at bulk prices as long as it’s the same size – so you can print ten different designs at a 5”x7” size with ten copies of each and pay the bulk fee for 100 prints, not ten separate ones. Prints of this nature aren’t original, but they’re still paying for some of the time and effort that went into creating your art. I keep my prints at a flat price of $15 for one and two for $25! You are the artist, and you value your works; price them as appropriate; ensure you’re making a profit.
Packaging for prints depends on the artist; you’ll frequently find lots of prints packaged in a thin plastic wrapper; this can make your product look more professional, leaving a great spot to slip your business card into. Additionally, having some sort of transparent cover will protect your print without obscuring the image itself. Here's 200 5x7 print bags for only 7$! For a bit, I would save excess butcher paper for a more sustainable approach to wrapping prints; but it can take a lot of time to wrap prints individually when you're busy at an events. If paper is more up your alley, consider displaying one print and keeping the rest of your stock behind the counter wrapped up and ready to go!
I like personalizing my prints to make them feel higher quality. I sign the back of each print, including the title, year of creation, and a fun little print number on the back. Writing on each one requires a lot more work when ordering tons of prints, but many people at events I’ve been to don’t understand what a print is; the custom writing on it cements this strange postcard-looking thing into more of a displayable art piece!
This concludes the Prints section of my write-up on how to sell art! To review, make sure you have high quality DPI, a trusted vendor, and a mindset of how you want to display and price your pieces. I'll go over stickers, booth setup, websites, and payment tracking in the next few parts if there's interest.
Good luck in your art adventures!
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