How to Keep Art Fresh & New: Continually Evolve Your Work - Part 1

Your art needs to continually grow with the market or the consumer will lose interest in purchasing it.

by Suzanne Cruise

Suzanne Cruise Creative Service, Inc.

A thought to always keep in the back of your mind is to evolve your work. There is a fine line between evolving and changing your work/style. Over time, consumers who are buying your work will feel that the art is somehow fresh (by you evolving it) but still recognizes it as your work. If you just simply change your style and palette, you run the risk that your consumer will not recognize that new look and they will then move on to someone else's art. The achilles heel for any artist is when the same style, the same palette, the same everything is kept and never grows with the market and the consumer.

Sandi Gore Evans work is a great example of evolving your art. Many of you may or may not know, Sandi died in 2000. She always painted her art with tea stained backgrounds, a style that, at that time, was at the height of popularity. But for a period of time before she died, Sandi was doing her new work with lighter, whiter backgrounds and her color palette was becoming stronger, more vibrant, even though her overall style was the same. Her customers kept on supporting her new work because it was fresh and appealing, but was still done in Sandi's familiar hand. The examples of Christmas samplers show an early piece of art and one done a year later that are similar. Sandi painted the newer one with a white background giving it a fresher newer look. This shows how her work evolved by keeping up with the trends in the background color that was going whiter.

For a related article, read "How to Keep Art Fresh & New: Continually Evolve Your Work - Part 2" and "How to Keep Art Fresh & New: Reworking Old Art for Today's Greeting Card Market."