Selling Fine Art at Art Crawls/Shows

[d2creative]

Hey, all... does anyone sell fine art prints at local art shows, studio crawls, etc?

The big Houston Art Crawl is coming up with the chance of having up to 10,000 people filtering through are studio space and I was thinking of taking advantage of that kind of audience by breaking away from my commercial work for a bit and seeing if I could sell a few fine art pieces. This would be a lot of work for me to go through my library, find pics, print them, mat them, etc. And I only have just over a month to prepare. So I would appreciate any and all tips and suggestions.

Some immediate questions i have are based on how far to take it (do i just make prints and mat them? Dont bother with the mat?
And how to display them... shelving? boxes? milk crates? lol
Of course i also have no idea how many prints to make but i guess everything that doesn't sell can just be stored until next time.
Oh, and while walking around bayou city art fest this weekend I saw some photogs had matted prints inside plastic bags. I like the bag idea but where do you get those?

Help!

Thanks!

[J Eddington]

Nashville wraps sells the bags. Eco Friendly Retail Packaging, Food Packaging, Gift Basket Supplies

First don't try to do this for a one time thing. If you only do it once, the cost is going to kill any sales. Make your space look KILLER. If not people will not come into to see and purchase your work.
Have some pieces hanging in different sizes on your "wall".
Others should be matted in plastic bags ready for them to pop into their frames. If your photos are not matted you should mount them so they do not get damaged. AND yes put them in plastic bags!

If you don't show it you can't sell it. Think big for display pieces.

[d2creative]

Thanks, J!

And ya, i was figuring this definitely cant be a one time thing. We also have open studio day one saturday a month. And eventually I want to put a cart system on my website too. But ya... I'm not expecting to really make money this time. Will probably be too much prep involved this time around. And will be a good learning experience I guess. But would like to try to not spend much money at all beyond the actual prints. Need to try to find a deal on some mat board too.

[Steelsun]

From doing some of the art/studio crawls (as a crawler), if your studio is not near some of the other ones, don't bet on getting gaggles of visitors (unless you have a big draw like you are already famous, will have a famous artist there, etc). Most of the crawlers go to where there will be clumps of places they can visit in one trip and don't want to drive out of the way for 1 place with no reputation to draw them. Last time I did a crawl the only place the group I went out of the way for was a studio that had some live demonstrations of street art (graffiti) and free beer.

On the other hand, if you have a studio you should already have a bunch of prints, etc up on the wall for many reasons: to show that you are busy, to give examples to clients, and for sale as incidental purchases. With a little more pre-planning you could also have made a wall available to other artists to sell their fine art prints (for a commission fee of course).

[d2creative]

Thanks, I share a space with another artist in one of the multi-studio spaces downtown.
All the advertising is in place and there will be a ton of people walking through.