I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Wednesday Website, I explore and plan for some improvement to my website.
Last week for my Wednesday Website post, I wrote about progressing in my online art marketing and sales plans. I’m getting ready to upload paintings with metadata to Saatchi Art. Best practice is to include an “in-situ” photo showing what the art will look like in a room. This shows the scale and the style of the art in a way you can’t really gauge just from a head-on photo of the painting itself.
I could put together composite photos myself by taking actual room photos of my own or using licensable photos from online. But there are also a couple services that make it really easy. I tried two yesterday: Artplacer and Canvy. Each had their advantages and disadvantages. I generally liked the room photos on Canvy better, and it allows you to change more elements of the images than Artplacer does. Artplacer allows you to change the wall color only, as far as I could tell, but with Canvy you can change furniture and other items in the room photo as well.
But Artplacer provides customization of the painting image’s shadow against the wall, so you can make it look more like the painting is sitting away from the wall. Many of my paintings including the one below are on deep stretched canvases and are meant to be hung unframed. However, Artplacer allows for more customization of frames, should a particular painting need one.
I created the in-situ photo for Treasure Chest, above, using Artplacer. It’s fun to see what a painting looks like in a room. It also helps me understand which of my paintings are possibly more marketable, because they look better in rooms. I imagine this is going to influence what I paint. If I want to go online-first with my marketing and sales, I need to create paintings that look stunning online, not just in person.
Here’s another one, of my painting Field of Black, also 24″ x 24″ with a depth of 1.5″, also created with Artplacer. I bought a year’s subscription to Canvy, because they were having a sale, but I might end up paying for Artplacer too.
Here’s one I created with Canvy for my painting Below the Surface (20″ x 20″ x 1.5″):
It’s fun to create these photos and think about what settings might benefit from one of my artworks.
Today I’m going to be choosing a couple paintings and working on prepping their four photos I want to include for each one:
- Head-on, cropped to show nothing but the full painting
- A close-up to show color and texture variations in the piece
- An in-situ room photo
- A side angle photo showing the canvas depth and edge treatment
Step by step, I’m moving forward.