Selling Black And White Or Sepia On Faa

My first sale here, was black and white. :-)

A good number of views and some nice comments, but no sales yet, unfortunately:



Still, monochrome images are interesting to make!

The only two sales I've made to outside sources have been b/w. A 12"x16" and a 20"x30".

I've made quite a lot of b&w sales on FAA over the years. I don't do that much sepia work.

My first sale was a toned black and white

It seems that B&W may be a harder sale no matter were your selling them, but it also seems that true art collectors prefer B&W.

I do fairly well with monotone images... Sold a sepia image yesterday.

Black and white is not a subject. A good subject, photographed well, will sell if it is promoted and found.

My last sale was monotone.

Don't worry about views. They are meaningless. My 2nd to last sale sold with 5 views.

Sold few of these and others.

Some images just seem to want or need to be monochrome. Don't worry about what sells better, choose the best for the image.

I know it's done a lot for photography, but I didn't think it would work to well for paintings. However, I thought I'd give it a try just for fun so I converted some images of my paintings to monochrome. Just sold this one so I guess it can work for paintings too.

i've sold black and white before. sepia would only work if the scene you were shooting looks old. i don't make a lot of black and white though, we live in a world of color so i choose that instead. black and white is an art in itself. i think my 9ft pano that sold was in black and white.


---Mike Savad

Eric,

Just counted mine up and was surprised! 15% of my sales were B&W,which is higher than I would have estimated.

An assumption could be made then, that I would have had 15% less sales, if I didn't offer a B&W version of a color image.

What does anyone think of that!!!???

Rich

Crista,

I was just over at your place and looked at these great images!! Congrats!

Rich

There was a discussion of this in the last couple months, and as I recall my sales are ~20 bw. Iirc several other people also shared their % so if someone can find that thread it would help a lot.

I think b/w seems quite popular but i can only comment regarding drawings and not photography, As far as my sales go the b/w are more popular.

My most recent sale was a sepia toned photo. Like Mike said, it has to be something that looks old to begin with, that doesn't have obvious modern give aways.

Sepia has made up about 25% of my sales. Mostly the church interiors but one elephant pic.

Well I'm a painter, so we just do illusions of sepia, and don't do this much (and don't know how to do digitally), only have this one. But it has sold once on FAA.


-- mary ellen anderson

Thanks for all the feedback. Since I live on the islands and the colors are so vibrant most of the images look better in color, but maybe a dozen or so I might try to put in either black and white or sepia. I kind of like sepia because it kind of looks like old parchment paper. That is just me.

My first sale on FAA was this sepia. I also sold some black and white from my Venice series.

10% of my FAA sales (over three years) have been black and white. I'll admit to having only a handful of them in my portfolio, so even that number surprises me!