Artist Cbabi Bayoc lives in St. Louis where he’s making a name for himself painting murals in schools and doing portraits. He started his art career doing caricatures, which he taught himself by studying other artists. His own style has evolved as he uses vibrant colors to bring movement to the piece. He often paints families and music, and he even created the cover art for an album by Prince. As Cbabi says, he is painting a world where his and your children can thrive.
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Cbabi Bayoc
Cbabi’s website is cbabibayoc.com.
Here are some great takeaways from our conversation:
- No matter what stage you are at in your art career, you should think about creating a body of work. If you want your artwork to sell, you need to make, make, make, so that you are ready for opportunities that will come your way.
- When creating a body of work, also known as a collection, create so there is a common theme to your work. You can still have individual series, but overall, your artwork should look cohesive. What I mean is, people should be able to identify that you’re the artist by looking at any of your pieces. Even if some are portraits and some are abstracts, they should have something that tells the viewer they are yours, like a color scheme or a style.
- I’ve said this many times before on this podcast and I’ll say it again: Diversify your art offerings in type and price range. Cbabi offers large paintings, but he also said that one of his biggest sellers is 5×7 prints. He also does murals for schools. One of the things we’ve seen from last year’s shutdown is that you can’t rely on one form of income, because you never know if or when that might be taken away from you.
- The best kind of art that provides word of mouth business is murals. They act like a public business card because people will see them and tell others or contact you to do more.
- When using a third-party platform to sell your art, you might want to direct sales there even if someone comes into your studio to buy. The more traffic you get on that site, the easier it will be for others to find your art there.
- If you use more than one platform for sales, do different collections on each platform so there’s no overlap. Also, consider which price range would make sense for each platform.
- Get creative in what you post on social media. Cbabi likes to do a little dancing in his posts, so he’s going to do some in front of his murals or in his studio so that they will be fun and also promote his business.
