Digital Art on Fine Art America

I’m still interested in exploring more ways of selling fine art – and so have revisited Fine Art America again to see if I can get some traction. I’ve had few sales this year. I talked about my pricing strategy at FAA in an earlier post and I haven’t changed that, but I’m investigating uploading more artistic images rather than my normal stock photos. Looking at the recent sales on the site makes me think that people are after a more painterly look!

Sunrise over the ocean

How did I do that? 

I read an interesting review of a new plugin in the Photoshop Magazine – one dedicated to oil painting, particularly impressionist styles. The company is called JixiPix Software – the plugin Impresso Pro. It was given 5 stars in that review.  It works as a plugin to both Lightroom and Photoshop and also as a standalone product and costs $49.95. There is a 20% coupon on the home page if you sign up to their mailing list. I tried the trial version first, which is fully functional, but doesn’t include the “save” feature and got an idea of what it can do – there are a lot of presets and then you can alter various settings within each preset, but generally I stepped through the options and chose one that I thought would look nice for the image in question. I then played around with a few of the settings to get it just right. If you click on one of the photos, you will see it for sale on FineArtAmerica.com. That lets you zoom in and see the detail of the painting. I’ve only done three so far, but plan to look at my other images and try different effects depending on the subject. Who knows if this will turn out to be a winner, but I’m having a bit of fun with it!

Forest scene in Autumn

Another sunrise over the ocean

One slight issue I had with Impresso was that you need to convert the image in Photoshop to sRGB before running the filter – their support people thought it did that automatically, and are investigating, but if you don’t, the image you get back from the plugin won’t match the colors you were seeing.

Apart from that, it is easy and fast to use – just what you need to create artistic digital art pictures for Fine Art America. I’ll report back on sales, and for more of my work, check out this more recent post.