Author: Aisling

Are you struggling to sell your original art… or even your prints?

The fact is, as of late 2025, fewer than 25% of Americans have $2000 in the bank.

50% of Americans have less than $500 in savings.

And 23% of Americans age 25 – 34 have nothing in their bank accounts.

Yes: Nothing. (Ref. Nasdaq.)

If you’re in business, you need to know your potential audience and customers.

If your usual fans & collectors are among 75% of Americans, they can’t buy your $1500 painting, wall hanging or assemblage, no matter how gorgeous it is, or how badly they want to own it.

Sure, your art may be worth that much or more.

Value isn’t the issue here.

The more pertinent questions might be:

• Do your business practices make your future customers feel better or worse about themselves?
• Do they like how they feel around you and (especially) around your art?
• Do you have rapport with them?

If they don’t feel that sense of mutual understanding on a personal level – even as artist-to-customer – they won’t be as open to connecting with what your art communicates.

Sure, you can focus on the minority who can afford your art.

However, that probably shouldn’t be your exclusive focus.

Reaching the 75%

If you’re meeting some of that 75% at art shows, galleries, or even as you’re running errands – and hope to attract them as clients, customers and collectors in the future, when they’re back on their feet – now is the time to establish rapport. They’ll remember it later.

Think about what you can do, so they feel a connection with you right now. What can you give or sell to them that they can own, and – at the same time – help them feel better about themselves?

Even if the person can’t purchase any of your art – even as prints – right now, he or she should walk away thinking, “That art is so great.  I’m going to own some of that, some day.”

Contrast that with the sad, “That art is beautiful, and yet another thing I can’t afford. Maybe I never will.”

See the difference?

So, make it possible for the person to connect with your art and feel good about it, right now.

The importance of gifts

Whether it’s a happy conversation, an occasional artcard, or a link to a webpage where they can download something… make sure you connect with your friends and fans, and they remember it as a happy meeting.

This isn’t a reciprocity thing.  It’s not, “I’ll give you this now, and you agree to give me something in return, later.”

The gift economy is a little different. 

It’s about bonding as individuals, and as a community, to establish a personal connection and goodwill for the sake of the group and each other, period.

What do you get out of this?

You get to be part of a happier, more connected community…

                                                                                         in a happier, more connected world.

You get the satisfaction of having done something good. 

Too often, that’s vastly underrated.

Remain sensitive to what’s really going on, despite appearances.

This is your opportunity to do something nice and helpful… and be remembered for it.

Everyone wins!

Pave the road to your successful future.

It’s fine to focus on people with cash who also like your art.  That’s common sense.

However, I hope you’ll invest a little happy karma by making it possible for everyone to own some of your art, right now.

This may require a little creativity, but you can do it.

(Note: If you liked my graphic at the top of this article, it’s a free download.  You can click on the image or here to download it as a 5″ x 7″ poster.  If you collect ATCs, click here for that free download.)

To understand more about
our economy and the importance of gifts
read Linchpin by Seth Godin

Never underestimate the value of the U.S. government when it comes to surreal and absurd images, many of which are in the public domain.

I mean it.  And, if you’re easily offended, or if the subject of VD bothers you, avert your eyes.

Seriously, this poster (at right) appears to be in the public domain.  (See notes at the U.S. National Library of Medicine.) You can download a 4MB copy of it at the gov’t website.

I can see so many very wrong uses for that image.  I’d like to put it on a tee shirt, except that I want to replace the VD words with… something else.  I’m not sure what, yet.

I look at her and think, “Really? I mean really? Is that what men found alluring in the 1940s?”

However, that’s not the only image of its kind. A search at the gov’t website using the phrase “venereal disease” turns up all kinds of strange posters of apparently dangerous women.

Check out the sweet girl in the poster on the left.  (Click on the image for the full, print-quality image at the NLM.)

Wasn’t she a famous movie star?  She looks really familiar… like someone I’ve seen in old movies.  Well, now we know about her history!

I’m amused by the phrase “‘good time’ girls.”  It makes me wonder, were there “bad time” girls?

That poster is in the public domain.

The next poster for your consideration (or amusement) is about clean water.  Gosh, it looks like our boys were dealing with all kinds of dangers in the 1940s… wasn’t war enough?

Because that was produced specifically for government use, I’m pretty sure it’s in the public domain.

Click the image to see a really large copy of it.  There may be even bigger versions in the NLM files.

(Of course, if you’re going to use it for a product, it’s smart to research the provenance at the NLM website.)

And, so it’s not all one-step-away-from-zombies, at left is an early poster that has a lot of possibilities if you’d like to alter it for a political statement.

This one is from 1917, so it’s almost certainly in the public domain.  (Most – but not all – American works from before 1923 are now in the public domain.)

If you have questions about copyright law and what’s in the public domain, one of my favorite resources is Cornell’s chart about copyright terms and limits.

I wrote the first draft of this article in 2006, when the arts community was still deciding if we were “art journaling” or creating “artists’ journals.”  Then, I expanded the article in 2011, weighing in on the continuing debate. (Today, the phrase “art journaling” seems preferred, so I’ve updated the article… but only a little.)

Two phrases are often used interchangeably:  ‘art journals’ and ‘artists journals.’

For me, an artist’s journal is an illustrated diary or journal representing the artist.  It’s about the person’s life, or some aspect of it, such as a travel journal, a diet & fitness journal, or something like my ‘decluttering journal’.

It usually includes art and the journal is also a work of art, in itself.

Many people call that “art journaling,” and I suppose it is. I mean, are we getting tangled in semantics, when the art is what really matters?

So what else is an art journal?

By contrast, an art journal is where I keep notes about art I’m working on or might want to create later.  It includes visual inspiration – photos, articles, etc. – as well as my own thumbnail sketches, etc.

It’s sort of my pre-art brainstorming, in a journal format.

At left is a page from a 2011 art journal. The photos and sketch represent ideas that I used to inspire an oil painting.

I use an art journal as my on-paper memory of inspiration and original ideas.  It’s sort of like a visual thumb drive of art ideas, for later use.

If I don’t jot down my ideas in a journal, they’ll vanish from my thoughts in a matter of days, if not hours.  I tend to have a steady stream of creative ideas, and one soon replaces another in my consciousness.

For me, it’s part of the creative process.

Here’s how my ideas develop, through my art journaling

People often ask me where I get my original art ideas. Well, I’m not sure that they’re entirely “original,” but they are fresh and new, if only to me.

Here’s a typical sequence: I started by surfing the Internet to see what other artists are currently working on.

Yesterday, I viewed a website called The Starving Artist’s Way, which included a project using second-hand woolen sweaters that had been washed and dried to shrink them in a “felted” style.

I didn’t think much more about that – not on a conscious level, anyway – but later in the day, after a nap, I woke up thinking about what else I could do with that kind of wool.

While the thoughts were still fresh in my mind -and evolving – I jotted them down in my art journal. These are my two pages of notes:

In a nutshell, I was thinking about the kinds of wearable art that I could make with felted-style wool.

(Geek note: It’s not actually “felted” wool when you wash & dry woven/knitted/etc. wool to shrink it. It’s called “fulled” wool. Felting is when you use the raw fibers and a tool to tangle and/or compact them.)

This merged with the Mondrian art that I was reminded of when I was playing an online game, Kingdom of Loathing, yesterday.

And, once I started jotting down these ideas, I remembered when I used to make stained glass windows. Those patterns would adapt nicely to this kind of wool treatment, too.

I’m not sure that I’ll ever actually do anything with this idea. I get a bazillion of these ideas, steadily.

So, I’m scanning the pages from my idea journal, and putting them into my next art zine. I’m doing that for two reasons.

First, it documents that it was my idea. It drives me crazy when I decide to run with an idea and it turns out that another artist has been working on a similar concept… and people think that one of us is “copying” the other, when we’re not.

Second – and more importantly – I am sharing this idea so that someone else might be inspired by it and adapt the concepts (or copy it line-for-line, for all I know/care) to his or her own art.

Sharing art journaling, and the “copying” issue

My grandfather was a successful inventor and used his ideas to create his own (large) company.

When his original ideas were copied, he used to chuckle and say, “Plenty more where that came from.”

In other words, he didn’t complain about those who copied him.

I’ve always liked that, and he was the richest man I knew, when I was growing up. He literally made millions (when that was a lot of money) from his creative ideas; he was a good role model.

So, I’m okay with the idea of sharing my art journal pages so that people see what one can look like.

However, these may be my own definitions.  How you use the terms ‘art journals’ and ‘artists journals’ may be different… and that’s fine with me.

The creativity that matters more than the words!

Why art? Really, why would anyone take the time to create art, unless  he or she is a full-time artist?

The answers are clear to anyone who’s independently created art of any kind.

Even if it’s a scribble or a graphic note in the margin of your class notes, if you’ve ever expressed yourself visually, you’ve created art.

Note that I said independently created art.  That’s important.

If it was a class assignment, or something you had to do, the art process may have been vacant.

For many artists, the art process is where the value is. If the process is drudgery, it’s only mimicking art.

Artist Harley Brown said it well. “Within a second of starting a picture, I’m on top of a mountain which has finally become my reality. So, when I tell people to do a drawing a day, it is not only to learn to observe or perfect skills, it is putting ourselves closer to what we really are and for what we live.”

What makes art important in our lives is how art makes us feel.

Whether you’re creating the art or admiring it in a gallery or on your drawing pad, art should evoke an emotional reaction. If it doesn’t, the art isn’t necessarily bad, it’s just not resonating with who you are, inside.

For most artists, particularly when you’re starting out, the focus must be on the process. Your results will improve with practice. The joy is in the creative moments and the discoveries you’ll make — good and bad — as you work on art.

Your art, whether it’s drawing or painting or singing or fine-tuning a recipe, is a process that makes you feel more authentic… more alive.

In The Book of Awakening, Howard Thurman is quoted, “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

Separate the technical aspects of art from the joy of creating. Sometimes, the learning process can be as exciting (or boring) as singing scales or reciting multiplication tables. However, the process of putting the pencil to the paper, or paint on the canvas, is where the magic is.

Aim for something original. That won’t come from copying others, or measuring your work against theirs. The finished product may be a disappointment, but the more important question is: How did you feel when the work came alive? Did you forget about time and tidiness? Did you feel in flow, following a joyful current?

Musician Jeff Beck said, “As long as there’s something original going on, that’s all that really matters.”

He’s right.

Art can be about the finished work. However, it’s more important to focus on the energy that is grounded in and emanates from the creative process.

If you feel that spark of vitality, even for a few seconds as you’re creating art, you’ve seen a glimmer of what drives us to be artists… and what keeps us fully alive in every moment.

We create art for how it feels, not necessarily for the merits of the finished work.

Photo credits
Art class – erdogan ergun, Turkey
Art gallery – brendan gogarty, Australia
Girl in field – Armin Hanisch, Germany