Welcome to part 2 (of 4) on my art fair prep info dump extravaganza! I'm going to be covering everything I did to get ready for my fair in three weeks and, in today's article, I'll be covering inventory!
Click here to read part 1, if you haven't already, in which I cover content selection.
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Intro to Inventory: What space was I trying to fill?
Now that I've gone through the painstaking effort to discuss content without bringing actual numbers into the equation, I'm relieved to finally break down my inventory purchasing. As I mentioned before, content and inventory are intertwined issues. You need to decide how many unique art pieces you'll want before you order quantities, but how do pick how many art pieces when you don't know how many total prints you want to have? Very deep chicken and the egg stuff going on here.
I also mentioned in the previous article, my goal with content and inventory was "variety". As a new fair participant, I really had no idea what would sell best, so I wanted to get as many pieces out there as possible.
For space, here's what I was trying to fill (see diagrams below):
Wall space:
1 "L-shaped" wall that was 14' long x 6' high (4.3 m x 1.8 m)
1 panel wall that was 2' x 6' (0.6 m x 1.8 m)
Table space:
1 8' (2.4 m) long table
Below is what's called a "craft booth design". They are are almost always shown in bird's eye view, i.e. looking down at your booth from above, like the benevolent god on high I'm sure you would be if you were to attain deity status in another life.
You might be wondering why I'm showing you layout designs in the inventory article. I'll get into specifics of how I set these displays up in the next article, but it's important to at least show my booth area for this topic because you can't select inventory until you know how much space you need to fill!
Ultimately, I had to fill:
~96 square feet (~8.9 square meters) of wall space and,
~16 square feet (~1.5 square meters) of table space
Large Format: Wall Inventory Selection
In the previous article, I walked you through how I ended up selecting 13 art pieces to display in "large" canvas/metal print format. For me, this was anything that was larger than an 11" x 14" print (~A3 print). I also mentioned how I didn't entirely plan this out before clicking buy, so I got lucky. I knew I didn't want to spend ALL my money buying a huge amount of wall inventory when I wasn't even sure I'd sell any of them. So, I basically said "okay, ~1/2 of my booth will be wall space and ~1/2 will be table space". That math ain't going to win me a Nobel prize, but it was actually a pretty good starting point.
You'll see seasoned boothers (that's what I'm calling them now) fill all 3 walls, floor to ceiling, with their art. That's great for them. They know what they can sell so they don't mind holding onto a lot of inventory at once. I, a non-boother, did not have that confidence, so halfsies it was.
When planning out my large inventory, I skipped the digital mockup step. This wasn't because it's not helpful, but more because of my time issue, namely that I didn't have any! If I'd had all the time in the world to prepare, you bet your bottom I would have doodled around in Adobe Illustrator 'til the cows came home. The other issue I ran into was that I couldn't find a universal recommendation on how low art should be displayed on a wall, so I didn't want to go down a digital mockup rabbit hole only to find that I didn't like how close to the ground said art was.
To be honest, "distance from ground" seems largely a personal preference. I saw some booth images that had art almost tickling the grass, and I saw some that had 1 neat row of art hanging at the "optimal distance from ground" height. In case you're wondering, there isn't even a clear answer on this issue, as I've read that the center of a piece should hang anywhere from 57" - 62" (145 - 157 cm) off the ground. The idea is to get art at "eye level" but.... obviously eye level isn't a universal number. However, an eye roll is a universal sign for how I feel about these vague recommendations 🙄.
Even if people could agree on an optimal distance from the ground number, that number wasn't going to be very helpful to me since I was trying to create a gallery wall. I had to acknowledge that a lot of my art wouldn't be hanging optimally. My grid walls were also only 6' (1.8 m) tall so that was also going to limit me since I could only hang so high.
Even though I didn't have time for digital mockups, I'm going to walk through how to use these for the purposes of this article. They won't answer all your questions but they're a good starting point in figuring out inventory count. To start, you'll be able to eliminate the extremes as options: you don't want to carpet bomb the space, nor do you want to underfill it to the point where your art starts breaking out into renditions of "All By Myself". Leave the booze-filled karaoke sessions to Bridget Jones.
Check out the diagrams on these examples. The first is the dense extreme and the second is the bare extreme. Look, I don't want to tell you what to do but....yeah, don't do either of these setups. Even if you don't create fully baked digital mockups, these displays should help bracket the total number of art pieces you'd want to have. In my case, I needed to be somewhere between 4 and 24. Okay...so maybe that's not super helpful, but the next few steps will be!
If you want to play around with digital mockups, my recommendation would be to start "hanging art pieces" to scale on your wall using a software (Adobe Illustrator, PowerPoint), or graph paper and a ruler. I would begin with whatever your "standard" large print size is likely to be. For me, I chose the 16" x 20" (~A2) range. From there, I just started plopping.
In this example below, I started playing around with several 16" x 20" pieces. I "hung" as many that seemed to reasonably fit the space.
There aren't any hard and fast rules in art placement, but here are a few guidelines I tried to follow:
Keep variable top and bottom heights. Don't place all your top art pieces on the same horizontal line. You want the eye to move up and down as it surveys the wall
Maintain roughly equidistant space between art
Scattershot display: there shouldn't be any large missing areas
Keep your art off the ground
To my eye, this looks ok, but it was challenging to get a "dynamic" looking display with art that was all the exact same size. While putting this example together, it felt like a fight to keep the display from essentially reverting back to 2 bland rows of art.
From the above exercise, it looks like 16" x 20" (A2) is a good size for the wall. It's not getting lost in the surface area. But, we want to punch up the variety. For me, this meant I needed to order prints of different dimensions. However, I was limited in what was available to me since I usually paint in either 1:1 or 4:5 aspect ratios. So, I used those ratios (plus a few pieces I was able to crop to other dimensions) and was able to gather together the following collection of 13 large prints.
Print Dimensions | Canvas Print Count | Metal Print Count |
12" x 18" (~A3) | 2 | 0 |
16" x 16" (~A2) | 1 | 4 |
16" x 20" (~A2) | 2 | 1 |
20" x 28"** (~A1) | 3 | 0 |
**Note: these canvas prints had floating frames, giving them a slightly larger final dimension
With this collection of art, I was able to put together a display that looked roughly like this. I used 11 prints for the main section of grid walls.1 print was a stand alone on the single wall panel that was behind my table, and I had 1 spare print.
If you compare this to the first pass I made, you might be thinking that this final version looks too high off the ground. It's 24" (61 cm) on this, vs 12"(30.5 cm) from the first pass. The first pass looks more evenly distributed....at least on paper. And this is where we get to why it's important to trial and error wall displays in person, and not just digitally. When I put my grid wall displays together, I realized very quickly that the threshold for the lowest I wanted to display my art was quite a bit higher than I'd anticipated. When you're looking at it on a computer, you don't realize how low 12" off the ground is. It's basically shin height, and I didn't want people bending down to view my art. Even 24" felt like I was getting dangerously low, but I had to display more than 1 row of art so I had to make do. In future, I think I'm going to look for 7' walls to help move that median height higher off the ground.
Small Format: Table Inventory Selection
Ok, onto the realm of 11" x 14" prints (~A3 print) and smaller. The decisions I made here were similar to the ones made for large prints, i.e. I'm trying to pick the right amount of inventory to fill the space I have. Up above I told you I had 8' (2.4 m) x 2' (0.6 m) of table area. I'll get into how I designed the table layout a bit more in the next article, but for the sake of this article, here's what I had to fill.
3 clear acrylic print bins (small)
2 layered print display racks
1 sticker display rack
Now, I had a LOT more on my table that just those items but, as far as volume to fill, I just needed to make sure I had enough prints so that the bins didn't feel too empty. Again, I was trying to avoid buying too much inventory to start, so less is more here.
Here's what I ended up purchasing:
Print Size | Total Prints | # Unique Prints | Display Location |
Sticker | 362 | 11 | Sticker Rack |
5" x 7" (~A6) | 30 | 10 | Print Display Racks |
8" x 8" (~A5) | 30 | 10 | Bin 1 |
8" x 10" (~A4) | 48 | 16 | Bin 3 |
11" x 14" (~A3) | 30 | 11 | Bin 2 |
What I ultimately went with was 30-48 prints per bin, 30 in the layered display rack, and ~360 stickers in the sticker rack. Now, those bins can hold a LOT more than 30-48 prints but here's my PRO TIP: I cut print dividers from foam board. So, while I only had 3 prints per art piece, I had ~10-15 foam dividers in each bin which really helped fill out the space, and made navigating way easier. Fun fact: because people are often described as "pawing" when they're flipping through prints, I've dubbed all my small prints "Paw Prints" and I'm quite proud of that one 😊.
All of my stickers had a maximum dimension of 3" (7.6 cm) which, for the rack I bought, was admittedly small. I also only had 11 unique stickers and could not fill out the full 16 spots. The site I used for stickers restricted minimum orders to 30 each, so I didn't want to just keep spending money on stickers to get to a full 16. I had a few empty spots, which wasn't the end of the world.
Well, I think that about covers the decisions I made on inventory selection. In the next part (part 3) of this fair prep series I'm going to cover how I set and decorated everything up!
tl:dr (aka the summary)
Large inventory
Print Dimensions | Canvas Print Count | Metal Print Count |
12" x 18" (~A3) | 2 | 0 |
16" x 16" (~A2) | 1 | 4 |
16" x 20" (~A2) | 2 | 1 |
20" x 28" (~A1) | 3 | 0 |
Small inventory
Print Size | Total Prints | # Unique Prints |
Sticker | 362 | 11 |
5" x 7" (~A6) | 30 | 10 |
8" x 8" (~A5) | 30 | 10 |
8" x 10" (~A4) | 48 | 16 |
11" x 14" (~A3) | 30 | 11 |
Product Links:
Canvas/Metal Prints
Framed 20" x 28" (~A1): https://www.canvasworld.com/
The reason I ordered these specifically from this site is because you can add a floating frame for only $50-$60 extra. In the framing world, that is really hard to beat for a canvas of this size.
I ordered standard depth (3/4") thickness with the black floating frame
All others: https://www.mpix.com/
Mpix is SO good, especially on the metal prints. It's like looking at an OLED TV vs the old LED ones. The contrasts and color matching are just *chefs kiss*
I ordered the gallery wrap 1.5" canvas prints with black solid color edge design
I ordered my metal prints on "Matte with White Base". I also added the float mount + hanging plate.
Giclée Prints (aka the Paw Prints): https://www.mpix.com/
I was gobsmacked when I saw these prints. They were so gorgeous and the paper texture was incredible. Cannot recommend these guys enough.
I ordered Giclée Prints on"Fine Art Photographic Paper"
Stickers: https://stickerapp.com/
Really impressed with the quality and I barely even scratched the surface with material options that they provide
I ordered Die-Cut stickers on vinyl
One thing to watch out for is that they do struggle with dark artwork. Most of mine turned out beautiful, but one image was darker than I realized, and it was hard to translate that to sticker format
Clear Acrylic Print Bins: https://www.etsy.com/listing/1281344262/clear-acrylic-art-print-display-bin?ref=yr_purchases
Sticker Rack: https://www.etsy.com/listing/1130858981/16-pocket-5-width-sticker-display-rack?ref=yr_purchases&variation0=2375630359
The one I used was borrowed from a friend, but this link is pretty close to what I used
Great job! You really planned well and brought it all together. So much work!