Sarah on rules, tradition and building community

What non-traditional meth­ods do you use to mar­ket and sell your art?

I think almost every­thing I do would be con­sid­ered “non-traditional” by very tra­di­tional artists, but I don’t know how much of it is really “out there”. I try to see mar­ket­ing as another cre­ative out­let, where I can exper­i­ment and try new things.

For a while I was live stream­ing from the stu­dio for an hour a week, which went really well and I got some new fans from that. The other day I live streamed for an entire after­noon and auc­tioned off the piece I was work­ing on, which was a lot of fun. I try to keep my mar­ket­ing as fun as pos­si­ble, or I’ll get bored!

My art is avail­able in prints and will also be avail­able as greet­ing and note cards in the near future. I’m cur­rently plan­ning on hav­ing an entire sec­tion of my site ded­i­cated to small sketches so that peo­ple can get orig­i­nal art at an afford­able price and it’ll force me to stay in practice.

What do you do dif­fer­ently to get your work out to those who want it

I’m con­stantly try­ing to think of other ways to get my art out there to peo­ple who want it. I’ve had afford­able art sales where I’ll sell small sketches from around my stu­dio, or some of those older pieces that didn’t quite fit my body of work but were still good paint­ings and needed a home. I want to make sure that there’s a way for every­one who loves my art to have access to it. I’m def­i­nitely not elit­ist when it comes to peo­ple get­ting my art. The more the mer­rier, in my books.

Do you have a com­mu­nity of followers/buyers?

I think this is some­thing I’m evolv­ing slowly. I think it has to come organ­i­cally – you can’t force peo­ple to love your work. I do have a small com­mu­nity sup­port­ers and buy­ers, and it seems to be grow­ing as the months go past. These are the peo­ple who read my blog, leave com­ments, respond to my newslet­ters, hang out with me on Twit­ter and just gen­er­ally cheer me on. Not all of them can afford my work, but they do what they can to sup­port me in their own ways – pro­mot­ing my work on their blogs and Twit­ter etc.

What meth­ods do you use to build your community?

My secret weapon for build­ing a com­mu­nity is being your­self. It’s like shin­ing a spe­cial kind of light from your house – all of the right peo­ple flock to it and the ones who aren’t a per­fect match may come for a bit but even­tu­ally leave.

More prac­ti­cally, I make sure I’m present, around and respon­sive. I try to respond to emails promptly, I reply and retweet lots on Twit­ter and when I can, I respond to blog com­ments. I don’t do any of this per­fectly and it’s always a work in progress.

About the Author:

Sarah Lacy is a reg­u­lar con­tributer here on the blog. She is an amaz­ing young artist who drips wis­dom and pas­sion, for life and art, so much that she clearly is an old soul. She is rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the energy, self insight and pas­sion we des­per­ately need in the gen­er­a­tion of artists and cre­atives who will replace us.

Sarah makes “art that reminds you to dream, to breathe, to laugh breath­lessly in the rain”, in doing so she hopes help peo­ple learn “to feel again”.

Sarah’s pas­sion and love for what she does has been chal­lenged by the her con­stant com­pan­ion of Chronic Fatigue Syn­drome. As a per­son who knows all to well the chal­lenges of liv­ing with a debil­i­tat­ing chronic dis­ease I was impressed with her courage, open­ness and unwill­ing­ness to sur­ren­der. She has a lot to tell us not only of art but also of life…

You can find Sarah here:

Web site | Twit­ter | Face­book