I spent a year making prints of paintings nobody asked for, then stopped
I bought a decent printer last year thinking prints would be my side income. Got the good archival paper, color calibrated everything, spent way too many evenings fighting with it. Sold maybe six prints total, and two of those were to my mother in law.
Meanwhile the original paintings sit in my booth at fairs and people keep asking about those instead. The overthinking it took me a full year to figure out: people buy the thing in front of them, they don't buy the reproduction of it.
So I stopped pushing prints entirely and just started starting more originals at lower price points. Smaller 8x10s I can finish in two sittings now sell faster than anything I've ever made prints of. Sold nine of those in the last two months at the local craft market alone.
Wish somebody had told me that a year and about 300 dollars in ink ago.
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The funny thing is you probably learned more from that year than from any of the paintings that sold. That's usually how it goes. I've spent decades building big installations out of salvage and I can't tell you how many times I chased the wrong lead because it looked like the sensible one.
The observation about people buying what's in front of them is sharper than you might realize. It took the art world proper centuries to figure out that the aura of the object matters, that a reproduction is a ghost no matter how good the paper is. You got there in a year with a printer. Good going.
Smaller originals at lower prices is the right instinct. People want to own the thing, not a record of it. The mother in law purchases are a rite of passage by the way, everyone has those, don't hold them against the prints.
Ha, "the aura of the object", you just made my whole printer saga sound fancier than it felt at the time. But you're probably right that it was a better teacher than the paintings that actually sold. I've got a couple of those originals that paid for themselves hanging in strangers' living rooms, and I honestly can't remember what I learned from them. The print failure I'll remember for years.
The salvage installations sound fascinating, by the way. How do you even start something like that? I can barely wrangle a canvas and you're out here building whole pieces out of other people's junk.