Marketing and Art

It's been a long time since I published my thoughts here :)

I really wanted to, but to my regret I couldn’t find the time until now.

Today I want to think in text form about the fact that in any creative activity, marketing is very important if you want your efforts to generate income.

For a long time I didn’t want to accept this, thinking that since I made something and published it, for example on CGTrader, that would be enough, because people themselves would find what they were looking for. But now I am beginning to understand that I was very mistaken. It is important to show your work to as many people as possible, since someone may be looking for the 3D model he needs, for example, but he will not see my work or he will find someone else and it will suit him. Or someone will see my 3D model and will not understand what it is for :) In this case, I need to demonstrate as clearly as possible what my model looks like.

Now I'm starting to understand that all art needs good marketing because it exists to be shared with other people.

For my work, marketing is:

-creating renders of a 3D model and modifying them in a graphics editor (adding inscriptions and informational text to the render, so that by looking at the image a person can understand what it is and what to do with it). When making a render, I set the light so that the shape and surface of the model is clear and make different angles so that everything can be seen from as many sides as possible, trying to make the final picture as close as possible to the fact that it is a photograph of the finished product.

- coming up with text for the description. I usually try to think in advance what questions people might have when they see my 3D model on any stock site or on Instagram, and I try to give as much information as possible in the description text. For example, what size printer can the model be printed on or that the cut version (if provided) has grooves for ease of assembly.

- maintaining a Patreon account. This is the most important thing for me now. I want you to be interested in reading my posts and watching the process of work, so that you feel that you are involved in everything that happens and influence my work. Therefore, I try to communicate with you, find out your opinion, this is important and interesting to me, for example, what 3D model would you like me to make next.

The end result is that quite a lot of my work requires marketing. Of the total amount of work on one model from scratch to publication, the marketing part takes up a third or even half of the time.

I still sometimes don’t feel like making renders and coming up with a description, or uploading my models to stock. But I’m already starting to accept it and try to find interest and beauty in it, to captivate myself, because I understand that this is important.

Sometimes thoughts come to my mind that, if possible, I would delegate the marketing part to someone else, but I still don’t know what to do with it and how to implement it if I decide to do it. This could be another worrying point for me, in the event that if I hand over all the post-production work to someone (renders, publishing on 3D stock), I need to be able to trust this person, and it is very difficult for me to do this since I have problems with confidence. Or it could be a very positive thing in my work and life, since I can free up my time to create even more 3D models or other activities :)

Each of you encounters art in this world, and in connection with this, I’m wondering what you think: does marketing destroy art or, on the contrary, help it?