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This is one of my most asked questions so I am going to try and offer what advice I can. It certainly did not make any sense to me years ago and I would have liked a bit of help.

To preface this entire guide will be from the perspective of an artist attracting an audience for their work that is interested in buying and supporting their art.

Understanding and reaching the audience.

These are the people you want to see your work. If you are trying to create something commercially viable you must always keep the audience in mind. What matters to you is often lost on them and it is easy to lose track of that when you are emotionally involved in your work. 

Everything I discuss from here on is centred around the audience and how they will potentially regard you and your artwork. 

1. Time does not matter to the audience. 

I see this brought up a lot. “I worked very hard for a long time on my art, someone else did not, why don’t people appreciate that.”

To be incredibly blunt, why should they? Two artists create two similar pieces of work. One took 3 days, one took 3 hours. Both are at the same technical level and a similar concept. Why should one be “worth” anything more to the audience, who only sees the end result.

Time rarely matters to the audience. An audience with no art background of any kind will find it very hard to judge how long someone spent on a piece of art (especially digital art) unless-

It’s very clear. A huge traditional painting for example, with something for scale. A linked video showing the process. 

The artist states the time taken somewhere. Again, this is only really going to matter to the audience if it surprises them or justifies their own assumptions about the work. (It looks good, but they work quickly, how do they do it!)

I know there will be exceptions. People who really appreciate art will understand and recognise the time taken to create it. You aren’t leaving your success to exceptions though. You need to work with the majority.

Taking a long time to produce a piece of work only really informs your potential audience that they are going to have to wait a while to receive the content. If the work or the concept behind it are strong enough this is not a problem. It hurts an unknown artist trying to establish themselves though for the following reasons… 

2. Your upload schedule.

People like consistency and the best way to capture any kind of audience in media is with quick regular uploads of content they are prepared for, are looking for or easily understand. I will list a few things that I feel an audience appreciates or deviates towards.

A regular upload schedule, be it daily, twice a week, even once a month. As long as it is clear. This is a great way to keep viewers coming back to you once they find your work and are happy with the content you appear to be providing. 

The time you upload matters. If you post your artwork while the world is asleep no one is going to see it. On sites like tumblr this is even worse, hours can go by and your work will be pushed further and further down the audiences dashboard.

Consistent content. It’s great to try new stuff, but unless your audience knows you for it it could possibly confuse people browsing your page or site. Artists often get categorised as “The dude that draws X, Y Z” for a reason, it’s just easier for an audience to understand.

Do not add unnecessary comments to posts. Nothing puts people off more than 2 paragraphs of text explaining the process or a personal story on why it took so long. Save that for a separate post, consider that your audience needs to share your image. Make it as easy to share as possible.

3. Your content and the concept.

Content is important. Your finished artwork can be technically beautiful, but if there is nothing there for people to understand or relate to they will have no reason to care, or they will be purely judging your work on its level of technical ability. 

That can only go so far if the content is too strange, specific or incomprehensible. Very few people are going to share a technically impressive piece of work if it disgusts confuses or upsets them in some other aspect. 

Vice versa, a strong or interesting concept can take very simple artwork a very long way. The perfect storm is to have both a fantastic concept and strong artwork working together, but you must consider how much work that will mean you have to do and how fast can you do it. Find a balance. 

What grabs an audience varies greatly. You can build up your own brand with your own ideas concepts and characters as long as there is a consistent theme. More often than not an audience will look for:

Things they recognise 

Things they can understand at a glance

Things that are relevant to them and their lives

Consider these examples, try to consider which one has the most immediate appeal to the general public:

4. Make things easy for them, some important general advice. 

Upload on as many sites as possible, and where appropriate. (No one on a website purely for webcomics is going to appreciate your oil paintings, for example).

Join forums, sign up for art sites. Get to know people and make contacts to get your work out there. Understand the audience on the sites you frequent and what content they do and don’t enjoy. This takes time, this does not happen overnight. You have to commit and find your own path here. 

The audience will not just come to you. You need to be proactive. You have to get out there and find them, but be careful, nobody likes to feel like they’re being sold something. 

Wherever you post your art, MAKE IT EASY FOR PEOPLE TO FIND AND SHARE! Tag, list and group your content. Tags allow people to find things they already like, make use of that. Give them as few reasons as possible not to share your content. Put yourself in the shoes of the audience and think about what they would and would not want to share with their friends and people that know them. 

To conclude

I hope this will give some people who are really lost a few extra ideas when it comes to creating commercially viable content. It upsets me to say this but sometimes there are ideas that, no matter how beautifully illustrated or conceptually brilliant, will just not resonate with certain groups of people.