Advice For A Young Artist

I love your work! Come back to FAA! How long were you here? Did you market your work? Don't under-price your work! People will be willing to pay! It can take a long time before one sells. The more work you post the better.

Thank you, I appreciate your feedback. I had been here since 2011 and have sold only one print the whole time. I had advertised over social media but I do not have a large online network.

If you want you can have a free FAA gallery. With that you can only upload and sell 25 images. What do you have to lose?

I still have one, I may as well leave it up.

Fellow young artist, here! Your work is stunning!

As Jessica said, it is good to have a lot of art up on this site. Also, I made the mistake of not adding keywords, and when I did, I didn't do enough! I would definitely advise you to add all 500 characters in your keywords and to not add spaces between the commas. For example: flower,abstract,pink. I hope this helps you and I hope you come back to FAA!

Your originals on Etsy are often going for less than many successfully selling artists here get for prints, copies.

Dave

Advice?....enjoy being a young artist?

Here are my advises:
You need better images for your works they are very grey have you try scanning? Do you stretch your watercolor paper, some looks very buckling.
Only sell your best works:some of your works are only $10, don't sell anything you ever done for the shake for making a few bucks, only sell works you are proud of'
Do not let selling as you motivation for making art, keep learning, improving and the buyers will come.
Yes, enjoy being young!.

The art world loves up and coming artists to discover. Don't spend all your time online. Get out there and knock on some doors.

Your work is fantastic. My advice;
1-Don't let anyone tell you that you are not good enough or you can't do it.
2-Don't change your art for anyone but you.
3-Do what you love, don't work with the main focus being to sell-let your passion and love for art be your motivation.
4-Don't let your insecurities price your work-Many artists feel that their work is not good enough, or that they are not well known and price their work low-a buyer will pay for what appeals to them, and most actually feel better paying a "true value" and feel bad and won't buy if your art is priced too low because a real art buyer knows the value and feels like they are taking advantage of young artists by not paying enough.
5-As I tell my kids, less internet MORE ART!

Thank you everyone for all your feedback, there is a lot of good advice here.

I agree, money should not be a main motivation for making art. I only recently got into it more in that way and it has been quite stressful -- I feel that I am being less true to myself if I worry about selling art too much. When I first opened the Etsy I imagined that this was a good thing because maybe it would mean that I could make art full time rather than becoming an accountant (I went to university for accounting so that I have a backup to pay the bills but it is far from my interests). I am not a very good salesperson in person, I am quite shy so it is tricky, so I found the internet to be a good place to share my art.

This season I am going to focus more on creating artwork that I am proud of and that has sentimental value, and put the business side of it in second place. I guess I got quite excited at the beginning and got very into it (I only opened the Etsy two weeks ago).

Thanks again to everyone who commented, you are very kind.

And yes, I agree -- young people like myself should spend less time online and more time exploring the world and their creativity.

Best Wishes

I do better selling in galleries and art shows.
I use my FineArtAmerica account as a way to show people my art online, to make prints available for people who want prints, and to find other artists to discuss art and argue with. You can get advice/ideas for selling your work, but we all have to be our own sales reps., which is work.