Artist Business TRACK: Lesson 2, Shooting Photos of Your Artwork

Prompt

Shoot photographs of your artwork for use on your website and on social media. The idea here is to stock up on tons of photos so you have a substantial inventory of photos to draw from.

Remember, there is no such thing as having “too many” photos! Even photos you don’t use right now may have use in the future.

While the quantity of photos that we are asking you to shoot may seem like a lot of work, it’s actually much easier to shoot extra photos while you’re at it. It’s a gigantic pain to go back and reshoot because you didn’t do enough the first time around!

Photos of you

Shoot 5 photos total, trying out each of the following types:

Straight headshot
Working: example 1, example 2, example 3
Just for fun: example 1, example 2, example 3
Figure with art: example 1, example 2

Photos for social media

This slideshow has many examples of the photos listed below.

10 Photos, workspace: example 1, example 2
10 Photos, materials: example 1, example 2
10 Photos: artwork + materials, example 1, example 2
10 Photos: hands + materials, example 1, example 2
10 Photos, sketchbook + hands: example 1, example 2

Photos for your website

20 photos of your artwork, clean & cropped

Photo editing software

Edit your photos: check the focus, adjust the brightness, contrast, crop, do color correction, and more.
Options for editing include your phone, Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom.

Bare bones equipment

A smart phone + natural light will get the job done!

Photographing Artwork, Clara Lieu — How To Photograph Your 2D & 3D Art

Professional equipment

Ongoing Assignment

How to Shoot Photos for Instagram

Get concrete tips for how to photograph your artwork for better performance on Instagram. Find out how to create a stronger engagement with your audience by shooting photos that represent your creative process as an artist in a manner that is visually stimulating and also informative.

Specifics such as how to set up your process, what angles to take, and how to balance your posts are all explained, Discussion led by Art Prof Clara Lieu and Teaching Artists Deepti Menon & Cat Huang.

This video provides a comprehensive look at how to photograph your 2D & 3D artwork, showing common problems and with practical techniques to achieve photos that will accurately represent your artwork.

Having high quality photos of your artwork is more important today than ever: you need photos of your artwork for your website, social media, and more. Discussion led by Art Prof Clara Lieu.

Watch the 5 min. video on 3D art
Watch the 8 min. video on 2D art
Watch the 120 min. video
Video Walkthrough
Slideshow

How Artists Can Use Kickstarter

Art Prof Clara Lieu speaks to artist Mia Rozear about how she ran a successful Kickstarter campaign, raising $25,000 with an initial goal of $8,000. Watch our stream where Mia announced her Kickstarter campaign. Mia ran a campaign to produce printed tarot card decks, from 78 hand painted tarot cards titled The Curious Travelers Tarot Deck. Mia explains the specific strategies that she used on social media, video production, communication and more into order to run her successful campaign.