The Importance of Collections

One of my favorite ways to attract people to my art is by creating collections. This means I take one subject and create as many variations of it as I can. I don’t always do this, as some paintings are just unique as an individual, but I feel it’s best to have a mix of both. This is also kind of a great exercise to finding your artistic style. When you create one subject and you try to create it again but you change something about it, you start to have a cohesive look to your storefront of original art. For example, when I was preparing to participate in the 101st Rose Show + Festival Rose Fest Market, they were looking for artists with a floral/natural/landscape aspect to their work. By the end of it, I had about 75+ paintings for my inventory for the show, and instead of painting 75 different floral compositions, I created 3-5 collections within those. I had lots of individual floral compositions, but I had a collection of hydrangeas that varied in size and color, a set of gold + blue landscapes that varied in detail and size, and then a collection of blue anemone flowers that varied in size and composition.

How to Create Collections of Art

So how do you create collections?? When you first start, go ahead and be thinking of a popular subject that would attract potential customers. For my landscape collection, I thought the Gold + Blue theme would be an interesting + contrasting color combination that would allow someone to feel something when they look at it and to have this feeling across several pieces in different sizes and different details. Here is an example:

You can see the concept of the dark mountains, the gold fields, and the light background + skies all portrayed in different ways by using different details and forms. There are color bleeds in the large one, whereas there are not in some of the smaller ones. There are more grassy details in the smaller ones and not the large one. This makes everything come together in an interesting way!

Your next step would be to ask yourself how you can change an existing piece. When I created a large blue hydrangea painting, I thought, “well maybe someone would want pink!” So I created the same concept of the art in different pink colors. That led to my creating a “replica” 8x8 to go with the pink one and a “replica” 8x8 to go with the blue one. I thought that maybe someone else would want a smaller version. So then, I had 4 paintings in a hydrangea collection that varied in size and color and everything looked like one style! So when creating a collection just ask yourself a few questions. When you ask yourself these questions, also think about potential customers.

“How can I make another piece like this but with different______?”

“What if someone really loves this piece, but they only need it in a size_____?”

“If this piece was part of a set, how could I change the composition to make this look like a set of #___?”