Signed up for another year at minigallery

Thursday, December 01, 2005
Signed up for another year at minigallery

Last year, tired of selling paintings on ebay for peanuts, I thought I'd try a different online gallery. There are lots of them out there, so I did some research. Looking through art magazines and papers that I found, one name seemed to crop up a few times - Minigallery. I figured that if they were spending money on advertising, they were serious about promoting their gallery, not just on conning artists into paying a registration fee to be part of a website that never gets visited. It's so important that if you are going to sign-up to an online gallery that you know there are going to be enough people visiting it that some will see your work and buy it.

I signed up on an intro package for 10 paintings at any one time. Within a month I had sold 2 and made my money back. I got 2 commissions and sold another few paintings on it before slacking off after the new year ( I was slacking off, not the website).

While I was active on minigallery, there was a lot of buzz, so when renewal time came around this month, I decided to pay up again. This time I'm set for 25 works and it's got me excited about painting again, so I'm knuckling down to get some new stuff ready to upload. If you think about it, the only way you're going to get 25 works hung in a bricks'n'mortar gallery is if you are already a celebrated artist. Anyway, we'll see how it goes this year, perhaps next year I'll be requiring 50 paintings displayed at one time if things go well.
www.minigallery.co.uk

Posted by bigcrags @ 10:37 AM

Comments:

So will you be signing up for another year come december then. I hear they have changed a lot of the way the gallery works and are becoming less "user-friendly".....have you found this to be the case?
Was thinking of joining, but not so sure now....

# posted by Anonymous : 9:42 AM

They are tightening the screws at minigallery now, with a tick list of things that you have to do before you can renew (e.g write a profile of x number of words). I can understand the site wanting to improve standards, but their expectation wrt quality of photographs made me lose patience. I got a new 3 megapixel camera and tripod, took countless pictures of my art and had numerous rejected as substandard (even though taken in even light, best quality). I tried enhancing with photoshop, and in the end managed to get 14 at "orange" standard (none at "green" and all others at red). I needed 15 to qualify for my standard membership renewal, but threw the towel in because I could not see how this quality system worked - many "accepted" photos to my eye were not true representations of the work and often didn't look that good, while other perfectly acceptable and often rather good images (at least to my eye) were rejected. I suspect they are using some form of automated image quality assessment software that is not doing that good a job, and they are deferring to this software to make the decisions.

# posted by Anonymous : 11:24 PM

To be honest, I've decided not to bother this time round, not because I don't like the system, but because I've not been painting anything I want to sell.
To anonymous comment 2 I'd say - drop a line to Chris and Hazel at minigallery and tell them your concerns - they are very approachable and might be able to help get you back in the gallery again.

# posted by bigcrags : 10:55 AM