This year BZ FurFur has moved from doing markets to doing a lot more art shows, art walks, and galleries. One clear thing from this move was that people attending these types of events are looking for something different than what people are looking for at markets. They don’t want the tchotchkes, the home goods, and the low-price items. They want to see fine art.
I anticipated this when I started doing Juried shows, that customers were going to want to see big beautiful pieces, visit booths with ample space to move around, and much fewer “lower cost” items. That leaves us in a bit of a conundrum, however, because not everyone is coming with the money to pay fine art prices.
Looking around at other booths we found that a lot of other artists are able to supplement their sales with lower cost versions of the art. This could be stickers, magnets, apparel, but, typically, it is through the sale of prints. Replicas of the art that people can buy for a fraction of the price if they want this particular piece of art in their house.
We have considered this before: how does wood translate to prints. The real beauty of the wood art is not just the etchings themselves but also the canvas they are drawn on. This can be the grain of the wood, the shape, the live edge, or the beautiful cracks in the wood that we get when we collaborate with Jessica Crowley. The question we always had was “how do we capture that in a print?”.
This year, we decided to hire a photographer, Liz from Northstar Creative Co, to come and take some professional shots of some of our most popular pieces. She took some beautiful shots of Seasons, Nocturnal Beauty, and The Beacon. Next week, after we get HER back from The Mint, she’ll be taking shots of that piece as well. So we decided to have professional prints made up of those pieces. The prints are not just of the etchings but of the entire piece. We spoke with several patrons at the recent art shows we participated in and the consensus was that they would want to buy prints. So that is what we are going to start to offer them.
The hope is that these will give those folks who are not prepared to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars for a piece of art but still appreciate the beauty of my creations. We’ll start selling them on our website and, in our next market, we’ll put them up for sale to see if people are interested. Given the beauty of these pieces and the excellent photography ,we have very high hopes for these prints. We’d be interested to know if you had any luck with prints of your wood art. Let us know @bz_furfur and, as always, stay unique.
