Compiling a body of work and repurposing content

NEW LIFE FOR OLD WORK

Today we’re gonna talk about accumulating artwork into an official body of work and repurposing content to market this work. Making art is what being an artist is all about — obviously. But what you create isn’t always equal in quality, and it can serve different purposes. Some art is fit for your “body of work.” Others fit better into “promotional content” or scrap content.

It gets deeper. Let’s dive in.

Preparing to compile a body of work

A lot of artists have a vague goal of building up a large body or collection of works. A body of work can define you as an artist, and you can become known for a specific collection if it’s successful. If you only have one finished painting you’re still an artist, but not a very prolific one. And in this day and age of sharing things online every single day, a lot of emphasis is put on being prolific. 

Accumulating what people call a “body of work” can take a long time. Some artists can whip out a new illustration every single day and that’s great. But my process is long and in the beginning of my art career I was a little mixed up. 

For me, it took an extra long time because I was still majorly upleveling my skills as an illustrator and switching up my style a lot for years. So even when I liked my work, it didn’t feel like a “body.” It was hodgepodge. And then when I got my style down, my skills were still changing so rapidly that by the end of the year, I hated all the work I made at the beginning of that year. 

Before we get too deep into accumulating work, I wanna touch on style and skill for a sec. 

Because you can make 100 pieces in 100 days, but if you hate all of them, you don’t really want to officially present that as your body of work to everyone.

When you don’t have an art style, you’re developing a whole slew of different artistic skills. One day you’re practicing perspective drawing and realism and the next an abstract color study piece. Totally different artwork exercises — totally different skills. 

Finally I decided on my style: all the elements of the medium, color palette, line + shape, subject matter and texture — which I taught a mini class on this here and I have a worksheet where you can learn to develop your own style here, if you’d like to learn more about the elements of style.

When I decided on my art style, then the skills I practiced each time I made a painting were in the same skillset. Same style — same skillset. So my skills developed a lot faster since they were finally specified and not all over the place. Eventually, I felt satisfied with my level of talent too. 

After I got my style and skill to where I wanted it to be, I felt like I could finally start on accumulating my body of work. 

Accumulating work still takes time, regardless of how well you have your shit together. 

Let’s go over a few tips on accumulating work and how to reuse the work you’ve already made, which is equally important. 

Create art in a cyclical pattern

Use times of the year, times of the month, days of the week, or another cyclical measure to make work based on a theme. This helps you stay on track when you’re trying to build up a lot of artwork without overwhelming you. Like task switching or time blocking, it makes sure you don’t get burned out on one thing.

For instance, each holiday make one or two pieces that are relevant. This is what actually inspired me to write this article, because Christmas is coming up and right now I’m working on a snow-covered mountain type piece with a girl wearing mittens and holding a cup of hot chocolate. The holidays has been on my mind. 

Christmas time is not my fave for artmaking; I’m more of a Halloween gal. Throughout the year I make spooky or Halloween appropriate artwork, but I don’t sit around making reindeer or colored lights during the summer months. 

So every year when it gets cold, I make one or two new wintery holiday paintings. And then I repost the paintings I made in the previous few years. That way, it looks like I have a lot of holiday content on Instagram or in my portfolio, but really it’s just me accumulating my artwork and putting it to good use. And every year, I build a little bit bigger of a content collection for the holidays. 

Do this for every holiday or occasion that comes around once a year. Birthday themed paintings, make them around your birthday every year. Spring themed paintings make them in spring. 

That way the pressure isn’t too heavy to get it all done at once. Rushing makes for sloppy work. And while quantity is emphasized in the digital age, quality is always important too. Sacrifice quantity for quality if you have to, but never quality for quantity. 

Spread the workload out throughout the year, and repeat every year, so you’ll have more and more to post for each occasion every year. 

This strategy applies too if you don’t make artwork based on themes in the year or you only paint super niche subject matter. Say for instance you only explore themes of depression. Well to be honest you can add Christmas spirit to any painting, whether it’s about depression or not. BUT instead of alternating holidays or timely themes, you could alternate between sad portraits, messy rooms, unfinished dinner plates, growing distance between friends, therapy sessions, and other subject matter that has to do with depression. That way you don’t paint 16 therapy sessions in a row, you can rotate between all those sub-categories within your main category of depression. You can stay with the theme, but it prevents burnout and boredom and allows you to make more work in the long run. 

Stretch out the content you’ve already made

Let’s talk about stretching content.

During my creative process I incorporate things that create more content. Each painting creates 4 pieces of content: a WIP video, the final piece, a few close ups, and a picture of the print when it’s made.

• I’ll usually post a picture or quick sneak peak video of me painting while it’s still unfinished. Send it to your email list, Instagram stories, or wherever. People love to see behind the scenes clips and works in progress.
• I post the final piece everywhere online, text it to my friends, plaster it onto everyone’s eyeballs as much as possible.
• I use a photo editing tool on my phone called ToolWiz to crop the photo into little close-up images so I can post the details separately. I love showing the care I put into the texture and composition by zooming in on the painting, and it makes for good social media content.
• Then when I make prints of the painting, I’ll take a photo or short video to promote the art prints. 
• If you’re lucky, I’ll make a fifth long process video. I say lucky because most times I get in the flow while I’m making the piece and I forget to film little clips of the sketching, painting, and digital process. But if I remember, I can make a longer reel or TikTok or Pinterest idea pin in video form that I love rewatching and usually do well numbers wise.

So while it adds only one painting to my body of work, it adds up to four or five pieces of content for all my platforms I like to show up on. That’s great because it takes me at least a week to complete a painting and each painting can provide almost a week’s worth of content so my online platforms are never too dry. 

Reposting is your friend

I post all this stretched content on Instagram, most on Pinterest, some on Facebook, and I send finished pieces and long written details for my email list. My email list and my blog is where I write behind the scenes stuff just like we’re talking about now. I use the same photos and illustrations on my Instagram for my blog graphics and Pin images. Basically, repost the same artwork in different ways on all your platforms.

You can repost later too. I promise no one is paying that close attention or is getting annoyed, especially if you’re reposting last Halloween’s artwork a year later. They’ve probably forgotten about it and a repost will be a happy reminder, like oh yeah I remember that one! And you probably have a lot of new people in your circle that have never seen it yet so it’ll be their first time.

Also, reposting is marketing. Toot your own horn. No one else is going to toot it for you unless they’re a friend, fan, or you’re paying them! You have to be your biggest marketer. Talk about your art, share it often and multiple times. It’s not bragging it’s marketing. 

People love what they’re familiar with. New stuff is exciting but familiar stuff is comforting. I read a statistic that said people need to see something 7 times before they buy it. That includes your artwork!! You need to get somebody comfortable with your art before they buy. That’s why every year around this time I sell calendars, and every year I sell more of them. Because people remember me talking about them in previous years, they may have heard of someone who got one last year when they missed out, etc. Repeat yourself. I promise people don’t sit around thinking about how repetitive you are. They just don’t. 

Reposting gives you a break, too. It’s perfect for artists like me and maybe you, that can’t pump out a piece every single day. I love to be a part of social media and keep up with the constant consuming of media, but I physically have a hard time creating that much work. So I not only stretch one painting into multiple pieces of content but I also repost older work that people haven’t seen in a while. 

Build a house for your body of work

Where do you keep your body of work?

I see a lot of artists make the mistake of overly depending on social media, especially on one single platform. Yes, keep your art on social media. Absolutely. I do. But don’t let that be the only place you put it. 

People make this mistake because it’s easy. Most people check your social media accounts before they go poking around searching for your website, Etsy, or portfolio. Convenience is important, which is why you SHOULD keep your Instagram profile up to date. It’s a very public and searchable platform and you can form relationships and a semblance if a creative community on there, which is wonderful. I love social media. 

BUT — I had a Myspace at one point. And all the content I put there is now erased forever. All my cringey goth outfits and my juggalo highschool boyfriend, wiped. And Myspace is dead. Older people had Live journals and Periscopes and all those ancient social media sites. All that content is wiped. So what if Facebook gets hacked or gets sued for a trillion dollars or decides your art doesn’t follow their guidelines and they delete your account? So post on social media, but don’t rest your whole body of work there and only there, because it’s not a safe place. It’s just fun, public and convenient. And besides, most social media platforms compress the image files you upload there so the file size is smaller and it makes your artwork look shitty and the image quality is trash. 

Record your body of work in an online portfolio. It’s an easy place for all your best work. So while I post everything I make to social media, I only post my BEST work on my portfolio. This is my official body of work. This is what I show people when they ask me what my art looks like. I don’t send a link to my Instagram, where my work is mixed in with selfies and travel videos, I send a link to carolynwhittico.com. My portfolio website is professional, simple, and clean and only shows my best work. It’s literally just pictures of my work on a white background and you can click on each image to enlarge it. There’s an “about the artist” page where I have one image of me and my artist statement and a short bio. There’s a shop button that just provides you with a link to my A Cup of Cloudy shop. Simple, straightforward, pretty, and functional. 

With a portfolio, you have to do upkeep on it. When I add new paintings to my portfolio, I also look over the previous work. If I look at a piece and I think my skills have developed too far past it, I delete that painting. Or I ask myself this question: if I were to make this painting today would it look a lot different? And of the answer is yes I delete it. A lot of times it still only takes one year to feel like I’ve outgrown a piece. That’s okay. Your body of work doesn’t have to be huge, but it does have to be good. 

If you need to compare the difference of how to treat your social media account and your portfolio, check out what I do as an example. My Instagram is here and my online portfolio is here.

You can also print your work out, hardcopy style. I used to really advocate for hardcopy portfolios, because I was getting into a lot of galleries and art shows at the time and a lot of times the person organizing the event would be older and not tech savvy or they would request to see it hardcopy specifically. I wrote a blog post called How to Make an Art Portfolio and I went into this in depth.

But that was pre-covid era. A lot has changed, and everyone is a lot more comfortable doing everything online and digitally now, so I don’t really think a hardcopy portfolio is necessary anymore. But it’s a good way to make sure you never totally lose record of your artwork: you can always print an image out and keep it in your office files for safekeeping. Old fashioned, but it works. 

For safekeeping of all my old work, my favorite paintings, important business documents, logo images, branding photos, etc, I keep it on a flashdrive. You can get an external hard drive, upload it to a cloud (I save all my artwork in my Adobe Creative Cloud as I create it in Photoshop) or something similar if you want but basically keep multiple digital copies of your work. If you only have one digital copy on your laptop and you spill coffee on your laptop, say goodbye to your body of artwork. Maybe I’m a little paranoid on this topic because I’ve lost quite a few important photographs by breaking my camera, lost sentimental voicemails by flushing my phone down toilets, and once I lost weeks worth of a college research project when I stepped on my own laptop and broke it immediately. Pretty much it’s the worst experience ever and I would never wish for anyone to go through that regarding their artwork, so please save your body of work everywhere. 

Your body of work takes time

Remember it can take a while to accumulate artwork and that as new art is made, skills develop, art style evolves, and old artwork gets discarded. It’s a natural, always changing process!

That’s why as you take your time making quality artwork, you can use these tips to make it painless. Create themed artwork on a revolving basis. Stretch your content. Reposting is your friend. Keep your portfolio saved in multiple places for safekeeping. And lastly, keep creating!