Achieving Success by Combining Art with Storytelling

Morning artrepreneurs! Welcome to another edition of the Stay Sketchy newsletter.

🤩 Just a reminder that if you’d like to be a Featured Artist in the Stay Sketchy newsletter, use the “Be Featured” form on our site’s Contact page!

This week we’ve got:

Will Rochfort - Oil Painter, Narrative Artist

Will Rochfort has had a fascination with people ever since he was little.

He spent much of his childhood drawing cartoon characters and making cardboard figurines. In his teenage years, his creations focused even more on the human figure and portraiture before he eventually moved on to painting with watercolors and acrylics - his subjects still always people.

Will was studying Illustration and Fine Art at university when he tried oil paints for the first time.

From there, he never looked back.

After completing his first large oil painting as part of a final project one year, his tutor asked him what he planned to do with it now that it was finished. After confessing he wasn’t sure, she suggested that he sell it.

It was like a lightbulb had suddenly gone off in Will’s mind.

He had immersed himself so deeply in the study of art and its various forms, that he completely failed to consider the fact that his skill with a paintbrush could earn him a living.

That summer, he managed to sell the painting - his first sale - and it changed everything for him.

One might say that Will takes the old saying “a picture’s worth a thousand words” more seriously than most (just swap out “picture” with “painting”).

He cherishes being able to tell an entire story within each of his highly realistic and detailed pieces without ever having to utter a word to the person that views it.

On his website he says:

Over the past 10+ years, Will has made a big name for himself in the art world.

His work has become highly collectable and is in a number of private collections around the world, including those of Holywood film makers, famous musicians, and high-profile figures in both journalism & politics.

Will’s original pieces are greatly sought after and are created almost exclusively as private commissions.

Mini Gallery

To see more of Will’s work, visit his website or Instagram account.

Artist Insights

Will’s meteoric rise as a successful artist didn’t happen overnight. There were bumps in the road and lessons he had to learn before becoming the professional he is today. Below are some of the insights he shared with us.

🔹 Consider Creating Familiar Faces

Will had success growing his follower count on Instagram when he began a self-imposed challenge to create 100 small portraits during the first COVID lockdown in 2020.

He shared photos and timelapse process videos of these paintings almost everyday that summer, and his engagement went through the roof.

Creating artwork that features celebrities and other well known faces is a great way to reach a larger audience.

People are more likely to share your social media content if it contains one of their idols. Popular personalities from TV and film are bound to get shared between like-minded friend groups more often than art-related content featuring more common subject matter.

This concept is similar to creating art around subjects with cult followings which was discussed in an earlier edition of the newsletter.

🔹 Be Adaptable

Will typically creates large commissioned pieces that take a long time to create but can sell at a high price.

When times were tough and work slowed down, however, Will managed to stay afloat by creating smaller, simpler pieces that were quicker to paint and sold faster at lower prices.

Having that level of flexibilty allowed Will to pay the bills until bigger commissions picked up again.

If each of your pieces typically takes 10-20 hours to create, what’s something similar you could make in just 1 or 2 hours without sacrificing quality?

🔹 Productize Your Creative Process

If you think you have a unique way of creating artwork, or you’re often asked how it is you do what you do, why not consider creating a tutorial?

Will currently sells a 3-hour painting tutorial on his website for £14.95. In the video, he paints a portrait from start to finish and discusses everything from his color palette to mapping out the face and tackling all aspects of portrait painting.

Creating this product allowed him to answer the questions people kept asking him on social media as well as generate some income in the process.

🔹 Maintain Control of Your Business

For nearly the first 10 years of his career as an artist, Will partnered with a gallery that helped him with art sales and marketing his work to prospective clients.

After much consideration, he decided to go it alone and left the gallery. He took full control of his own social media accounts and began to focus more energy there than he (or the gallery) ever had before.

His following began to grow significantly as a result of the effort he put it, and he began having amazing conversations with members of his audience that loved his work.

While maintaining social media accounts can be tedious at times and outsourcing some administrative tasks is likely a smart move if you can afford it, Will found he had inadvertently outsourced his connection with his audience by allowing the gallery to handle nearly all of his marketing.

Since he’s re-established this connection with the people buying his work, he’s never been happier. Additionally, having that sense of ownership of his own social accounts, incentivizes Will to create and share the best, and most informative, content he can.

🔹 Say “Yes” to Everything (Early On)

Initially, Will said yes to every commission inquiry that came his way. He painted hundreds of portraits of people’s children, pets, cars, motorbikes, boats - anything and everything.

It wasn’t necessarily what he wanted to be doing, but it meant that he was painting and earning money from it so he didn’t mind.

Over time, he began to showcase more and more of his personal work, and after a (long) while, commission requests began coming in for pieces in his “signature style.”

When we asked what his art journey looked like in the early days, Will had a nicely worded response that we’ll convey directly below:

Will’s Tech Stack

• iMovie - Video editing for social media posts

• Squarespace - Website design & hosting

• All of Will’s printing and shipping needs are fulfilled by local businesses in his area.

Suggested Resources

• Will said that when his growth on Instagram seemed to stall, the course, “Instagram for Artists” by artist Dina Brodsky, made a huge difference and was like a “shot in the arm” for his account. It’s worth noting that Instagram is always changing and this course may be slightly outdated, so be sure to perform some due diligence before purchasing.

Wanna Create Pixel Art?

For artists looking to take a slightly more retro approach to their next artistic endeavor, you may be interested in creating pixel art.

There are dozens of web applications and software packages that will help you create your next Pac-Man-esque masterpiece, but here are some of our favorite free ones:

• Pixilart - A pixel art web tool that doubles as a social platform

• Piskel - An easy-to-use web app that allows you to create animated sprites and other forms of pixel art

• Colorcinch - a web-based photo editing tool with a feature that allows you to pixelate existing images

While the free tools are enough to get your feet wet, you may want to consider buying a pixel art software that offers more features. The top paid tools are the two below:

• Pixelorama

• Aseprite

While neither are particularly expensive, do your own research to see which of the two products best suits your needs. Each has a number of different features and capabilities.

Art Business News (that isn’t a snooze 😴)

• Olympian Artists 🏅 - In case being an Olympian isn’t hard enough, a subset of these world-class athletes are also successful artists. This year, at the Olympic and Paralympic Games Paris 2024, 37 new artworks created by 7 Olympian artists were unveiled the day before the Opening Ceremony. In the coming weeks, some of these former and current Olympians will act as resident artists that will share their experiences as artist-athletes and host collaborative art projects & educational workshops with the public.

• Right place, right time 📸 - Perfectly timed photos never get old. This past Monday, French photographer, Jérôme Brouillet, snapped a photo of Olympic surfer, Gabriel Medina, levitating 10 feet above the water as if he were standing on thin air. Although Medina scored the highest in the Olympics so far as a result of that heat, Brouillet seems to be getting more attention for having taken the unreal photo. It just goes to show that being an artist in the right place at the right time can have its benefits.

• Right place, right time (Pt. 2) 📸 - Want another example of how you can go viral as a photographer? Take a photo of the full moon perfectly aligned with the central Olympic ring as it hangs from the Eiffel Tower. That’s exactly what photographer, Greg Martin, captured. Martin originally thought the photo, which he shared on Instagram, would only be seen by friends & family. Now, a series of posts he shared featuring the image have pulled in nearly 20K+ likes.

Thanks for checking out another edition of Stay Sketchy. Catch you next week! ✌️

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