A Fine Art site to try – Society6

A friend recently mentioned that they had more success on Society6 than they have on Fine Art America, and after my last post about getting back into Fine Art, I decided to give it a go! But when I checked out the “popular” works under the category “Art Prints”, I found that many of them were actual works of art – ie paintings (or at least prints of paintings). Not to be deterred, I did what I promised to do in the previous post and bought a copy of the Watercolor Studio from Jixipix and got to work on creating my first work of watercolor art!

Not bad – even though I say so myself! If you want to try this sort of thing, here is my link for the product on Jixipix – it is $49.99, but definitely worthwhile if you want to quickly create “works of art”! 

This is what I found out about Society6 to help you get going quickly.

Although the site talks about uploading a minimum file size of 6500 x 6500 pixels, it doesn’t seem to stop you uploading smaller images. Perhaps that limits the maximum size for some products, but the user guide for sellers is pretty contradictory about this topic. On the one hand it suggests you photograph your paintings with a camera of at least 12MP, then it says you shouldn’t upsize them in software, and finally it says that you need this 6500 pixel minimum! All impossible to meet if you follow their instructions! Anyway, I upsized my painting a bit, but have since uploaded photographs without any size increases.

Then you have to set the prices for your prints, framed prints and canvases. I looked at some popular prints and came up with a table to enter the mark-up for the three categories you need to enter:

Basically you overwrite the suggested mark-ups with the numbers in the right hand column.

Then it suggests you enter 20 descriptive tags. I found that you could enter them one by one, or you could use a comma separated list. So I searched for similar images to mine in the keyword tool of Stock Submitter, and looked for the 30 most common keywords for those images. Copying those (or perhaps the top 20 of them) into the clipboard allows you to paste all the keywords at once into the Society6 entry bar. You can then delete the ones that aren’t really appropriate and add a few new or better ones. Much quicker than typing each one in turn. Finally, they suggest that you should put a more descriptive explanation about what you liked about the shot or what it means to you.

This sets up the three main categories of prints, framed prints and canvases. Metal prints are a bit different as they are of fixed sizes (or ratios). They only accept 1×1, 2×1, 2×3, 3×4, 4×5, and 5×7 ratios. I created an alternative copy of my image and the site allows you to upload that version without changing anything else about the tags and descriptions. Worth doing to allow metal prints to be ordered.

You can scroll down and select other products if you image fits (or upload specific versions for those products if you feel like it).

My new portfolio is live on Society6 now. I’ll keep working on this when I have some spare minutes, and will report back if and when sales appear!!