Why I stopped selling Art Prints

“Stop selling your originals. Sell them as prints and get paid multiple times for the same artwork. This way, you can quickly generate five-figure revenue with your online shop and make a living from your art.”

Those were roughly the words of an ad that promised something that at first sounded very plausible and tempting: a step-by-step guide on how to build a lucrative side income as an artist through art prints, with the long-term goal of making a living from it.

The idea was simple: Digitise your art, upload it to print-on-demand providers, create a shop, run creative ads, offer special discounts, and over time it would pay off and the customers would basically come on their own.

Sounds pretty good, right? I gave it a try.

Me, in the middle of the night, working on my print-on-demand shop.

My Internship as a Print-on-Demand Entrepreneur

I invested a lot of time and built a shop, got familiar with the world of e-commerce, registered a business, opened business accounts... I took the idea from the ad a step further and came up with additional products I wanted to have printed, all suited to the theme of interior design. Full of enthusiasm, I worked on the shop every evening and spent extra time and money on good search engine optimisation (SEO). I learned a lot about ads, target audiences and conversion rates. Looking back, I can say: it wasn’t all for nothing, I learned a great deal. But things turned out differently than I had expected.

Weeks went by. Almost daily, money was withdrawn from my account for the ad campaigns. Then, after almost three months, it finally happened. The moment I had been waiting for: the first art print sale! And then another one! I was overjoyed – but I didn’t yet know that this would be it. Because what happened next would change my perspective forever.

The Awakening

I looked for support to boost my shop and came across an marketing coach whose statements unsettled me and which I didn’t want to accept at first: "This won't work. First build the foundation, build a community, develop your art further and if you do prints, only limited editions. Preserve the value of your originals. "

His words stuck with me. That explained everything. And the longer I thought about it, the clearer it became: I was trying to take the third step before even understanding the first.

This turning point wasn’t loud. No big bang. It was more like a quiet realisation: I had to return to the essentials. To what art truly means to me, and to what I really want as an artist.

A small canvas art print of “Night Sea”. The original measures 120×90 cm.

Why I See Things Differently Today

What I came to understand most during that time: without a solid foundation, without a community that already supports you, this model simply doesn’t work. The biggest mistake was believing that this shop would make me more visible as an artist, and that my visibility would grow through SEO and rankings.

Because without an existing reach, SEO is like running a marathon barefoot from the bottom of a mountain. Visibility comes from content first, not from products. And trust is built through relationships, not through a shopping cart. And even more important: I want to be seen as an artist, not as a decorator. Why should anyone buy a real painting if there are perfect reproductions available for a fraction of the price?

I realised I had unintentionally been undermining the value of my originals through my own reproductions. In a time when AI can generate images in seconds, anything that isn’t created through real time, dedication and craftsmanship loses its meaning. I want my work to remain a counterbalance to this throwaway culture.

What Remains

I learned a lot through the journey into art prints: about marketing, about visibility, and about building my own platform. But I don’t want to create images that just serve as decoration on a wall. I want to create art you can feel. And this new website is, in a way, the result of that journey.

The most important step was returning to the core: What do I really want to express? And how? The answer was clear: I want to create real artworks, not digital derivatives. Artworks that endure. Artworks that tell stories. Artworks that exist only once in the world.

And if I ever offer art prints again, they will be strictly limited or reduced in size to protect the value of the original.