A Simple Guide to Photographing your Artwork

Art Business, Artlook, Equipment, Image Editing

An important aspect of your Artlook account is having images of your artwork ready and waiting to be uploaded to your database of work.  Your Artlook digital portfolio is also the source for your Artlook website … you can manage and change it easily by yourself as and when you want.

This is my super simple guide to photographing your artwork using just your mobile phone. This is what I do and it works very well for me.  For the purposes of this article I will focus on paintings, I will cover sculpture, jewelery and ceramics in another post.

First of all I hang my painting on a wall.  This is a wall in my studio, you can use any wall so long as it is not in direct sunlight, but what you do not want is strong shadows … like this!

Be careful to take the photograph with your camera/phone at the same angle as the painting, if either is tilted you will get an effect that I call tomb-stoning. It looks like this.

A good tip is to make sure that you have the grid switched on in your camera settings, that will help you get the edges as straight as possible.  The grid looks like this.

I take several detail shots as Artlook lets you have several images for each painting, as much information as possible is the best way to go if you want people to see and buy your work from your website.

If the painting is framed I take a detail of the corner of the frame, clients often want to see the frame.

Framed or not I take a photograph of the painting with something in the shot to give a sense of scale, see my handy studio fern!

When I have all of my shots I edit the one of the whole painting either on the camera/phone using the crop setting in the photo editing or I download to my computer and use the photo editing program there.

Once I have cropped it I then save it as a jpeg with the title and size and pop it into a folder on my desktop.  That way I have all of the information that I need to upload it to my Artlook digital portfolio/inventory.

Get into a habit of doing that every time you have a new work ready to meet the world and life is sweet!

 

 

 

Sarah

About Sarah

Sarah Wimperis is a professional artist and illustrator and also works for Artlook in Client Support and as our Artist Ambassador. Sarah's Artlook website is here.