Preparing to Ship Your Artwork with Julia Badow

Artist Julia Badow in her studio. Image courtesy of Julia Badow.

Julia Badow is an abstract expressionist painter from Berlin, now living in Seoul, South Korea.

Julia's fascination with color is what initially motivated her to become an artist and she continues to explore her world through vibrant, saturated hues. With work rooted in female empowerment, she tells visual stories with abstraction using acrylics on canvas and paper. Her work is unique; every painting has its own origin story and her works range from the whimsical to the investigative.

Her final works are what her viewer remembers and what she identifies with as a creator, but behind the awe of her art is an equally impressive career methodology.

Being an artist is not just about creativity and inspiration. To have a successful artist career, you also need to have a talent for managing your art and business.

If you dissect an art career, you’ll find more than tubes of paint, long studio hours, and brushes. You will find business strategizing, marketing, shipping, and client relationships. You will find failed attempts at growth and overcoming those failures with new approaches. You will find missed deadlines and rejected applications, but you will also find the resilience to keep going and to find ways to overcome these obstacles.

No one is more familiar with this persistence to chase her passion than Badow, who shared that she applied for, and was rejected from, art schools for three years before finally being accepted to a prestigious university.

She now uses her personal experiences to uplift, encourage, and educate others on how to approach all aspects of an art career.

One way to navigate these possible pitfalls of an art career is having a structure in place your career. Once you spend one too many hours searching for where an artwork is located, you will want to have a system in place for tracking your work. Once you miss an important deadline to drop off an artwork, you will want to have a reminder system for your artwork. And, once an artwork breaks or is damaged in transit, you will want to have a better system in place for shipping your artwork.

Julia Badow walks us through how she prepares to ship her artwork.

Before Julia Badow prepares to ship art she...

Updates her inventory of works.

Badow includes artwork details like where her work is currently, its inventory number, and its status (sold, available, gifted, etc.). With Artwork Archive, Badow can update if her work is submitted to a competition, if the work is on loan, and see it’s exhibition history over time.

Registers a work as “sold.”

When Badow sells a work, she registers the work as “sold” in her Artwork Archive account. She includes sale details, and who the work was sold to. Once she registers a artwork as sold, she can then create an invoice for her work and send that invoice to her client.

Tracks and updates client records.

Badow’s Artwork Archive account helps her organize and remember details about her clients and see their purchase history. She can add not just logistical details about her contacts, but notes about who the client is and why they are purchasing so that she can more easily follow up with her past clients.

Keeps her Artwork Archive Public Profile active.

Badow uses her Artwork Archive Public Profile as another tool to showcase her art. Online viewers can see Badow’s portfolio all in one place and even broken out into collections. Viewers can click into an artwork and send Badow a purchase request to buy an artwork. The Artwork Archive Public Profile is easily embedded onto a separate artist website and is an extra SEO boost as a stand-alone feature.