6 Quick Photography Tips to Take Your Art Business to the Next Level

If you’re an artist, photos of your artwork are key to selling your work, growing your audience, and being picked for opportunities like shows, grants, and residencies. So it makes sense to spend time developing your photography skills. Here are some tips for how to take better photos of your artwork:

If you’re an artist, photos of your artwork are key to selling your work, growing your audience, and being picked for opportunities like shows, grants, and residencies. So it makes sense to spend time developing your photography skills. Here are some tips for how to take better photos of your artwork:

1) Use the Right Equipment

Do you need to buy a DSLR camera to take professional-quality photos? While DSLR cameras are terrific tools, they aren’t a requirement. A newer-model mobile phone or digital camera likely has the resolution and settings you’ll need. 

A tripod for your phone or camera is an inexpensive but useful investment. It puts you in control of the camera’s location and angle, and takes shakiness off the table. If you’d like to learn more about my suggestions for photography and video equipment for creatives, feel free to visit my website where I provide the specific tools I’ve used.

2) Be Direct

Be sure to center your camera squarely in front of your painting and shoot directly at it. If the painting is at an angle (on an easel or leaning against a wall), be sure to adjust the angle of your camera to compensate.

Why all the fuss? If you take a photo from an angle, it will distort the image of your artwork.

3) Give Me the Background

The ideal background is white, such as a white wall. If you don’t have a white wall, you could put a large white paper onto the wall and hang your painting on it, if the painting isn’t too large. 

Grey is another acceptable background, because grey helps showcase the colors in your art. 

Above all, avoid taking photos of art on a busy, distracting background like wallpaper.

4) Lighting is Key

A good photo lives or dies by the quality of the lighting. That doesn’t mean you have to break the bank buying lighting equipment.

The ideal light is daylight from a nearby window on a cloudy day. However, you’ll notice that the side of the painting nearest to the window has more light than the side that is further from the window. Overcome this by placing a big piece of bright white foam core, styrofoam, or poster board near that side of the painting to bounce light onto the side that needs more light.

Speaking of light, a white room bounces the window light well. You want all of the light hitting the painting to be indirect light so there won’t be shadows, so keep that in mind if you add additional artificial lighting.

5) Learn to Edit

A great photo doesn’t just happen—there is always an editing step that takes a good photo and makes it great. Take the time to learn how to use photo editing tools to control the final outcome of your photos. 

Make sure the colors match the actual colors of your painting. Crop the photo in the most pleasing way. Learn to adjust the image shape and size for your intended use (social media, blog, print, etc.).

By the way, I don’t use fancy tools for this. . .Canva works great! It’s one of my favorite programs. I use it daily, in fact. One of the things I love the most is the resizing feature. With the click of a button, you can resize images for various social media - Instagram, Facebook, blog posts. . .whatever. If you haven’t tried it yet, I encourage you to give it a whirl. It’s super easy to use.

6) Put Yourself into the Photos

A key part of marketing your art is marketing YOU, the artist. So don’t forget to take photos of yourself while you are working on a painting as well as photos of you with your painting. These shots of you in action show the viewer the face behind the painting and can help further the like-know-trust progression.

Your Tips?

What are your favorite tips and tricks for photographing your work? I’d love it if you’d drop them into the comments.

***This blog post may include affiliate links, which means I may get a commission if you purchase. However, none of the fees of these resources have been increased to compensate me. When possible, if special discounts are provided to me, I extend them to you!