How I Finally Started Selling My Watercolor Art Prints as Postcards

Grass Padrique | The Fabulous Scientist

It took me more than two years to finally decide to sell my artwork as prints.

It’s not that I had never sold art before. I have sold a few originals and accepted commissioned work over the years. But if I were to count all the artworks I’ve made, the number I’ve given away would probably be much higher than the number I’ve actually sold. Giving my artwork to friends has always felt easier to me than putting a price on it.

I think the real reason is that I never quite believed that my artwork was good enough to sell.

I have always had a bit of low self-esteem when it comes to my art. When friends tell me that they like something I’ve made, I’m genuinely happy and grateful. But there is often another little voice in my head trying to explain the compliment away. Maybe they’re just being nice. Maybe they’re my friends, so they don’t want to hurt my feelings. Maybe they don’t really mean it.

In other words, I have somehow managed to turn receiving a compliment into an exercise in suspicion.

So I continued making art, giving pieces to friends, and occasionally accepting a commission or selling an original when someone specifically wanted one. But the idea of actually producing prints and making them available for other people to buy remained somewhere in the back of my mind. It stayed there for more than two years.

There was also a practical reason I kept coming back to the idea of selling prints: art materials are getting more expensive by the day. Watercolor paper, paints, brushes, inks and all the other little things that somehow find their way into an artist’s shopping cart are not exactly getting cheaper. I love making art, but it would be nice if the hobby could at least help pay for some of the materials that keep it going. Selling prints seemed like a way of doing that without having to part with every original piece I make.

Then, a little over two weeks ago, something happened that finally pushed me to take the idea seriously.

I gave some art prints to a friend. These were actually from the first test prints I had made months earlier. At that time, I had no plans of selling them. They were simply test prints that I intended to give away to friends. I thought that would be the end of it.

Instead, my friend looked at them and told me that I should sell my artwork.

She suggested that if I wasn’t ready to part with the originals, I could sell prints instead and keep the originals for myself until I actually felt comfortable letting them go. That made a lot of sense to me. I’m quite attached to some of my original pieces, especially those that took a long time to make. Selling a print felt different. The artwork could leave my hands without me having to say goodbye to the original.

But what really stayed with me was her insistence that my artwork was good enough to be out there.

And, perhaps importantly, she’s also quite good at marketing. She’s Chinese, and I say this with great affection and with full awareness that I am shamelessly invoking the stereotype here. She has a good instinct for what people might like and how something should be presented. So when she told me that my artwork needed to go out there, I found myself taking the idea more seriously.

Still, I didn’t immediately jump into selling.

I mulled it over for several days. Then, because apparently I cannot make a decision without conducting a small research project first, I started watching videos and following artists and printmakers on social media. I looked at how they produced their prints, what papers they used, how they packaged their work, how they photographed it, and how they presented it to customers.

I went down the rabbit hole.

The more I researched, the more the idea started to feel less intimidating. I realized that I didn’t have to immediately turn my artwork into a full-blown business. I could simply try it. Make a small batch. See what happens.

So I did.

I made a small batch of art prints to test the waters.

And they sold out almost immediately.

That was probably the first time I seriously thought, Wait a minute… maybe people actually like my work.

It was incredibly encouraging. After spending more than two years wondering whether anyone would want to buy my artwork, having the first small batch sell out was a pretty convincing answer.

It also made me realize that perhaps all those friends who complimented my work weren’t necessarily just being polite.

Maybe they actually meant it.

With that little bit of confidence, I decided to take the next step and buy my own printer.

Of course, I couldn’t simply buy a printer. I had to research printers.

Again.

I compared models, watched reviews, read specifications, looked at sample prints, and tried to figure out which one would be suitable for reproducing my watercolor artwork. I didn’t want to spend a considerable amount of money on a printer only to discover that it couldn’t produce the kind of prints I wanted.

So I took things a step further. I actually visited a photography booth where I could test the particular printer I was considering. And this is where my rather unexpected test subject came in.

Instead of testing it only with one of my watercolor paintings, I decided to print a photograph I had taken during our Photowalk in Taal Heritage Town. It was a particularly good shot of a butterfly hovering over a gumamela flower.

The photograph had vivid colors, and that made it perfect for testing the printer. I wanted to see whether the printer could reproduce the colors accurately, especially the little details and subtle differences in the flower and butterfly.

When the print came out, I was genuinely impressed.

The colors were vivid, and, more importantly, they looked remarkably close to the actual colors I had seen on my camera screen. It wasn’t one of those prints where you look at it and think, Hmm… that’s definitely not what I photographed.

Instead, I looked at it and thought, Yes. That’s it.

That was when I knew I had found the printer I wanted for my art prints.

It’s funny that a photograph of a butterfly and a gumamela flower ended up helping me make a decision about my art-print journey. But I suppose that’s how these things sometimes happen. You start with watercolor paintings, end up photographing a butterfly in Taal, print the photograph, and suddenly you’re standing in front of a printer thinking, Okay, I think we’re going to be doing this.

So I bought the printer.

After more than two years of thinking about it, researching it, hesitating about it, and occasionally talking myself out of it, I finally took the plunge.

It’s funny how the hardest part wasn’t really learning how to make prints or choosing the equipment. The hardest part was convincing myself that the artwork was worth reproducing in the first place.

I think artists can be especially good at seeing the flaws in their own work. We know exactly where we struggled, what didn’t turn out the way we imagined, and all the little things we would change if we did it again. Sometimes we become so familiar with our own imperfections that we forget other people don’t see the artwork the same way we do.

For years, I thought that when people complimented my art, they were simply being kind.

I’m slowly learning that maybe I should just accept the compliment.

Maybe they really do like it.

And maybe it’s okay to let other people have a little piece of something I made.

That’s how I finally arrived at the idea of selling my artwork as prints, starting with postcards. I’m still figuring things out, and I’m still a little nervous about putting my work out there for people to buy. But this time, I’m not going to wait until I feel completely confident.

Because if I had waited until I truly believed my art was “good enough,” I might still be waiting two years from now.

So I’m giving it a chance.

And perhaps, for an artist who spent so much time giving her work away, that’s already a pretty big step.

Besides, watercolor paper isn’t getting any cheaper. Might as well make the paintings pay for some of it. 😄 If you’re curious what my first batch of art prints look like, here’s the test batch. 🙂

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Thank you for reading this far.

xoxo,

Grass