After the first book (Paradoxical Vista – Mind-Bending Poems) a self-published achievement, I decided to play around with some of the paragraphs or sentences in my favourite poems. This really got my creative flair going as ideas started to manifest inside my mind. The lack of limitations I could achieve through creating some exciting wall art could, well, be anything.
Creating Poetry Wall Art
I wanted to showcase titles or some extracts from the poetry in a way that the reader also becomes the viewer. This also helps with a beautiful visual experience that can be enjoyed by the spectator. The first thing to do is to find some stunning imagery that is free to use in a commercial sense. Many websites charge for licensing; this means you have to pay a lot of money upfront for a potential idea that may not work. The best place on the web to extract high-quality images, free to use, is unsplash.com.
These images are 100% free to use for personal and commercial purposes. The best way for any designer, writer or developer to help these types of companies is to buy a little merch or upload your own high-quality images for other people to use.
You can use the search function to search out keywords that may highlight your wall art idea. Once you’ve seen something nice, download it. You may see several images you think you can work with, download them and save them for another day.
Wall Art Design Tools
My tool for creation is Photoshop, a tool that I’ve been using for many years now. You can also use Illustrator or a free open source program like gimp. Once you decide on the image to use, open it up in your manipulation program. I like to keep the image to its original size; this is because the quality is not messed around with. I normally set out my text which has been selected from the poem I have created. The text is the most important part of wall art for me; it has to be readable and easy on the eye. If it’s hard to read, it won’t feel professional and smooth to the viewer. This can be helped by lowering the opacity on the main image with a black or white background on a new layer. Depending on the colour of the text used, you want to reverse the background layer to suit.
I use a company called darkroom.tech which offers a professional finish for all your wall art. You can create an account and upload your finished picture using their CMS (Content Management System). This is why I keep the image constraints to the original size, once I’ve changed the design and added my text, save it out as a png. Upload the file to darkroom.tech and the rest is done for you.
Their frames and canvas are to the highest quality I’ve found on the web. They boast that their finish product is museum quality. This means you can offer a professional standard to your fans and customers.
Selling & Advertising
Getting a beautiful collection together, uploading them and creating a shopfront is the easy bit. Now you have to start thinking about selling them. You might be lucky and sell hundreds straight away, but this is like winning the lottery jackpot.
Here is a list of things you can do to get a little traction;
- Post your prints across all your social media networks
- Don’t forget to use relevant #hashtags and @ your friends and family
- Create some videos talking about them or video slide shows, again share these
- Blog about your creations
- Find relevant websites you can create articles for or share your work
- Try and get some links from other relevant domains pointing back to your work
- Write good metadata in the title and description tags of your blog, explaining what the post is about. This will help with Google indexing your work
- Create awsome mockups of your work being displayed
- If you have the money to buy your own work in bulk, start going to arts and craft fairs or other events where you can sell your work
- Talk to local shops or galleries and ask them to sell your work
- Place some adds in relevant magazines or papers.
These are a few simple ways to get going, you might sell straight away, or you might not sell anything. Another way you can make progress is through buying advertising slots through your social media accounts. These can be very affordable and build your brand into something amazing. Unfortunate for many new brand owners, paying is the only way to put content out there. Social media channels have become a difficult market place without paying for attention.
Just keep at it, and your designs will get better, remember, it doesn’t have to be poetry, it can be anything.