Behind the Scenes: Building a Painting in a Collection

Happy Friday Everyone!

This is a follow up post to "How I am Building an Art Licensing Portfolio". In that post I talked about painting a lot of icons. This photo post will give you a better idea of how I do it. No worries if you pull icons out of your finished paintings. I am sure there are as many ways of doing this as there are artists :-)

This collection is acrylic paint on canvas panel.  Click images to view larger.

Above are a few of the icons in my "Pumpkin Snow" collection. I scan in the finished icons so I can easily use them in a variety of situations for art on products.

I have scanned in the barrel. I chose the highest dpi that the scanner will allow me to choose. For this image that was 1,800 dpi. That means this barrel can be almost 3 feet in size at 300 dpi.  Now it is time to turn it into a painting :-)

I like to leave some space in the painting so I can add other elements in Photoshop for variety.

Love how the blue makes this pop!

Notice the barrel on the flag - fun to change it up!

How do you create art for licensing?

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How I am Building an Art Licensing Portfolio

Happy Friday Creative Souls! (Click images to see them larger)

Before I start, there are always many ways to do something. I don't think my way is by any means the best way :-). Also, it is a safe bet in a year from now, I will be doing things differently. Based on feed back from my fabulous agent artsdg.com and a manufacturer, I just recently made adjustments! This is a great thing <3




I am heavily icon based in creating art. So what I mean by that is I only occasionally complete a painting with background and supporting images. Depending on the collection, I will paint a couple of different backgrounds (this one has some different color washes for backgrounds). I put the icons etc, together in photoshop. The upside is speed. I am just shy of creating a collection a month. The downside is I don't have a finished original painting to sell. Another upside is it is easier to isolate the images when their isn't a background to remove. The photo below was taken close to completion.

A collection for me means 4 - 6 central images. (There are 3 "images" above). 6 snowmen doing different things would be the main players of a snowman collection. For the above collection I painted supporting images: Swirls, 4 ladybugs, 3 dragonflies, 3 leaves and I think that was it. It varies with each collection. Some are much larger.

After I get the painting done and scan in all the art, next comes patterns & borders! In the beginning I would do fewer patterns. Now I am setting up a minimum of 6 patterns, with at least two colorways (I usually do 3-4 colorways). The patterns can take as long as the first stage of creating and scanning. I like to be sure to have some subtle and or small scale patterns to use as backgrounds/textures. Borders are great to set up. They can ad more interest to a product and make a stripe pattern or two.

Finally I set up a few product mocks and tear sheets. (Image at the top of this post). I like doing the mocks for a few reasons. It lets my agent know a few of the products I think the art will be fabulous on. It shows a few ideas of how to use the art. I like it because it makes the art 'real' for me and gets me jazzed to see it on all kinds of products. Something I have started more recently is setting up some 4" x 6" layouts (flags, greeting cards etc.) some 6"x4" (rugs, doormats, placemats etc.) and some Round designs. I am wondering if I should set up some squares too - Do any of you set up square designs?

The tear sheets are portfolio pages for me. I also use them to upload to ArtLicensingShow.com to speed the uploading of art. 4 or so tear sheets shows the majority of a collection, instead of taking the time to upload each individual image/pattern/mock.

I have a list of collection ideas. It is pretty long. For example, I have 12 ideas for winter/holiday. I may never get to them all, but I write ideas down when they pop in my head. Usually when I am wrapping up the patterns and creating mocks I am thinking about the next collection and sketching out what I will do next. If I don't get it down, it disappears from my brain :-)

How do you build your portfolio and any please share any tips you may have. Thank you for stopping by the blog. It really makes my day! Sign up for my newsletter if you don't want to miss anything.