Learning to See

Inspiration and practical advice for aspiring realist artists

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Do artists still need websites?

March 15, 2019 By: Paul24 Comments

It’s accepted wisdom now that if you’re a business, you just have to have a website.

If you’re a professional artist, making your income from your work, or teaching (or more usually, both) then you’re a business too.

So do you need a website?

How to have a successful blog even when you think you have nothing to share

February 15, 2019 By: Paul14 Comments

By far the most common worry I’ve heard so far from people on my Threads program is that they can’t run a blog because they don’t have anything to share.

I think you have something very compelling to share right now.

You just need to be strong enough to do it.

Why You Need to Start a Blog Today

February 11, 2019 By: Paul11 Comments

How do they do it?

How is it that some people have managed to make the break from being:

a part-time artist who doesn’t sell their work and has a day job they hate

to being:

someone with a website that people actually visit and who makes some income from their art?

Why your website doesn’t work (and how to fix it)

January 31, 2019 By: Paul5 Comments

You’ve set up your site. It looks great.

But nobody is visiting.

It’s like you organised a dinner party, cooked your best dish, got all dressed up…

And no-one turned up.

21 excellent questions about auctioning your paintings online – answered

January 25, 2019 By: Paul19 Comments

It’s new, it’s exciting, more and more people are doing it. It’s nothing short of a new paradigm for artists, an entirely new business model for us.

It promises complete independence. No gallery cut. You get to choose what you paint.

What follows is just my take of course. But I’ve been doing this pretty successfully for a couple of years now, and this is what I’ve learned from the front lines.

What you might not know about selling your work online

January 17, 2019 By: Paul30 Comments

It seems like the dream to a lot of people.

You just paint what you want and sell it directly on your site. No galleries taking 50% of your work. No-one telling you what to paint.

Nice and simple.

But there are a few things you might not realise when you start out – or even before you’ve started setting it up – that you need to think about.

Threads: How to succeed as an artist online

January 11, 2019 By: Paul48 Comments

My heart was in my mouth…

I’d just set up the first auction of a piece of my work on my web site.

My mouse pointer was hovering over the “publish” button, but I just couldn’t seem to bring myself to click it.

Ashmeads Kernels, and why I’m Painting from Gratitude

December 13, 2018 By: Paul28 Comments

I must admit I was a bit excited. I’d never seen apples as beautiful, as interesting, as these.

I had so many bags of them in my arms that I kept dropping them.

And I’d never seen so many apples in one place. They were everywhere. And not the usual apples you see in the supermarket, grown for high yield and selected for uniformity.

These were real apples.

Hi, I’m Paul

I'm a (mostly) self-taught artist. I paint realism in oils, mostly still life. I share my work, my evolving process and what knowledge I've gained on my own learning journey here, in the hope that it might help you on yours.
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