GB Pictures - a non profit company, dedicated to empowering greater involvement in collecting and enjoying art

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Information for artists and artistic photographers

Now covered over five pages, see buttons above

This section includes how you can have your work selected for either marketing the originals or publishing as a limited edition or of course both, as well as a club for those artists and photographers that would like to exhibit their work. We also now cover details on creating your own brand and explain the rewards available as a part of this exciting project. The downloads page allows you to access PDF files that you can print out on your own printer.

There is no cost to artists in the majority of the routes involved. You retain the copyright of your work, receive greater royalties than usual, and make use of the expanding franchise network to get your work seen.

On this page, and others in this section, we refer to artists, this is artists of all types including photographic artists.

Artists briefing on the GB Pictures project

GB Pictures promotes the collecting and enjoyment of fine art. It does this in a number of ways including being a part of a joint venture involving many people including art publishers, local franchises, and of course artists.

Part of the growth plan over the next year or so includes starting to directly market art from artists through the franchise network, plus exhibitions, competitions and more.

This briefing document is designed specifically to assist artists to see how they can become involved, the requirements and what you can do next.

Lets start by saying that there is absolutely no up front cost to you in many of the routes we have available for you to market your work. We have a number of routes for you, and we give you the choice as to which parts you wish to take advantage of.

Sale of limited editions

As we have a need to maintain the highest quality and make sure that all limited edition works are printed in fully colour managed systems, with materials that will not fade when put on display, and framed using archival materials, as well as being chipped for identification and to eliminate counterfeiting, we cannot do this by using work published by others. It is only possible by having partners in the project that can produce the work to the very high standard we require.

While we want the very best possible, and above the standard that most artists would choose to produce work to, if they were paying the bills involved, there is no cost to artists involved. The publishing partner undertakes the photography, proofing and production, mostly by commissioning other partners to undertake this for them.

While we produce work to a far higher standard than is generally available, the prices that the works go out from us is no greater than others, and in most cases the end client will get the superior product at a lower cost than they would normally get an inferior product. Artists like authors and some others receive a royalty on their work based on a percentage of the receipts of the publisher relating to their works. The percentage is very similar with most art publishers, and the publisher involved in our project is in line with others. While some publishers may deduct some elements towards production set up before royalties there are none of these in this project.

Your original artwork remains your property in most cases, but the publisher does put some restrictions on it, for example that no other limited editions are produced from it and that it is sold for a minimum agreed price. In other cases some special arrangements may be made to either sell it for you or to put it into a collection, and reward you in some way. This can often be a very attractive deal.

If you want to market limited editions of your own work then these are usually available to you at a very special rate. You may also be able to become involved in joint ventures with local consultants and attend events or exhibitions with them.

Sale of originals

GB Pictures as a brand will be directly marketing originals through the local consultants, this will be done in several ways, some will be bought and then sold, others will be taken on the agreement that you are paid less a percentage when they are sold. Others will be offered by us, and purchased initially by the local consultants to market on. Some may also be either bought and added to the collection brand or you may have works selected that you can have added to the collection but you still own, but is marketed then for you through the brand. Although we have set up the model with a wide range of options, not all are applicable in each case.

In many of these options, at some point the works need to be framed, and chipped, and again there are a variety of ways to achieve this.

Exhibitions

Many of the works included in exhibitions will have already been covered in the above, but we also want to give artists the chance to become involved in exhibiting a wider range of their work where they would like to.

In part this will be covered by holding local competitions for artists living near to where the exhibition is being put on. As we will need to put geographic and numeric limits this is not going to allow as many opportunities as some of you would like.

If we had an open exhibition and allowed anyone to exhibit we might well have 10,000 or even 100,000 images entered, and we just could not handle this. In most places we can’t hang images on walls, so we need display stands and the like to support all the images we have on show. We wanted to avoid having to make a large charge for exhibitions and also provide other support to some artists, and to allow this to be done we have developed a completely optional club for those artists that want to be involved. This is covered in an additional handout.  You don’t need to be a member of this club to be involved in the limited edition side above, or to sell editions through us, or to take part in local competitions that are in the area that you live.

How to get your work selected or become involved

As explained above we have two routes the completely free one and the optional club route.

The route that involves you in absolutely no cost up front

You tell us that you have work that you would like us to see, and we will pass this on to H3 Search Ltd who have been commissioned to look at, select, sort out with those where work is selected how it is published or sold, the advantage is that they can do this on behalf of the many partners involved rather than you needing to see each one separately. They can directly make arrangements and agreements on behalf of the brands, but may in some cases want to photograph it and seek further guidance from the brands, this is better than just rejecting it because it does not fit the specification. The other reason why they want to do this is to be able to view it under different lighting conditions. 

You can arrange for them to see your work, which is often possible at one of a number of points around the UK, but you will need to be able to turn up when requested with your work. They ultimately will not agree to anything until they have seen the work. If you wish however you can send them a photograph via either post or email, but it needs to be a good photo, perfectly in focus and sharp, and with the colours not far from real. The easiest way if you are not a photography expert is just to take the work outside and photograph it by daylight on a bright day.

The events where work is looked at is not generally advertised, and people cannot just turn up, this would be chaos and you would feel that your work had not got the consideration it deserves.  These events are free, and after either you have sent in a photo that looks interesting or said you have work you would like to bring along, you will be invited to call and book a time slot.

Some of those seen will be later invited to show their work at some exhibitions, or to groups of local art consultants.

The club route

The optional club, is not a way for us to generate revenue, but of funding a means to empower those who wish to get wider exposure, without necessarily having to have their work selected.

Club members pay a monthly subscription, and this is used to cover the cost of putting on exhibition events for the clubs members. The club is planning to hold two major art exhibitions a year, one in the spring and one the autumn, with moving locations so each place it comes to is really exciting and newsworthy. The exhibitions will be on for a number of days in each case. At these there will also be some trade stands, and seminars put on, so we are talking about a sizable event. The exhibitions will have a pre show review session for the GB Pictures brands, and for us to also check that everything is as it should be, this will be followed by a special VIP session, allowing local art consultants and VIP’s they have invited along with them to tour the show, prior to public opening, it is likely this will be the afternoon before its open to the public, and we may have an evening social event for those attending the VIP session and members in the evening. On each public day, club members will have the opportunity to enter before the public, via a special entrance or arrangement. The exhibition work that is marked for sale will be able to be sold, but also we will have an arrangement where offers can also be submitted. Club members will not have to pay to exhibit or for entry and will be able to show a range of work, currently we are thinking of about 5 or 6 works, if we put on the evening social event there may be a charge for attending this, but we may be able to get this sponsored or cover it within the general budget. Works that are sold at the exhibition will have a commission charge, but this will be far lower than a gallery would charge.  We estimate that the club subscriptions will cover under a third of the cost, with about an equal amount coming in from commission on sales and the remainder coming form sponsorship and the trade stands. The events will be the two major GB Pictures exhibitions, and as such get a lot of interest. There will be some restrictions on the work that can be displayed, it has to be your own, you cannot enter others work, we will have a maximum size and a few other restrictions on safely grounds. We still have to sort out the full details, we are hoping to be able to give members a number of options.

Types of work that is able to be marketed through the GB Pictures Brands

It may help you to have some idea of the criteria used to select work for inclusion in the brands.

Work where originals are being sold 

Originals have to be permanent, made of material that has a reasonable life expectancy of over 50 years or where lower this is stated. It must be able to be moved, installed and routinely maintained without the need of specialist technicians, normally it will not contain parts of people or animals.  It has to have perceived value and we have to feel there is a demand for the type of work.  It also has to be suitable to be photographed and that photograph to be made available on publicly available websites etc without causing offence to reasonable people, and while we appreciate that you can’t please all the people all the time, we don’t want to set out in any case to upset or alienate any group, care has to be taken when touching topics including religion, race and national identities.  You also need to consider the effect on the person seeing an image, while you may be balanced and see nothing wrong with an image, others may have problems, or problems in the way they view the subject, and this may be particularly relevant to images of younger people, or images although not representing human children may involve images of smaller scale items.  We will look at each image and situation separately.

Work where limited editions are being sold

Much of the above still applies, but the original does not necessarily have to be permanent.  It needs to be an art form that is suitable for representing as a limited edition work, initially this means photographing, but later will include moulding and other forms of duplication.

With limited editions we are interested in what is happening to the original,  and we may want to put some restrictions on it, for example the minimum price it can be sold for, and that no other limited editions or copies will be allowed from it without our agreement. You need to appreciate from an art collectors viewpoint the fact that it is a limited edition and will eventually become unavailable and therefore scarce, increasing its value. In part this is what they are buying. We also ask you to agree not to produce a nearly identical copy that would get around this.

Sponsored artists

We are not yet able to sponsor or commission artists, but hope to in the future. We would like for example to select a small number of artists that are just getting going and to cover their costs, promote them and assist them to become more widely known. We have been looking at business models to allow this to happen, and discussing the possibilities with a number of others.  A number of ideas are still being considered and we haven’t yet decided on which one to implement first.    

We are also looking to see if we can put together a project that will sponsor  small groups of artists of various types to go as a group to other countries.  The idea revolves around them spending 75% of their time out looking or creating art works, and 25% in media and similar projects to both promote their work and the whole GB Pictures project.

Also see

Events being organised across the UK, often the first session of the day is one aimed at informing artists about this project. You can learn far more by attending an event and will also be able to ask questions.

Exhibition Club

Your Own Brand

Downloads

Reward

Progress

Selection of work to include has already started.

GB Pictures is a non profit company, a company limited by guarantee with no shareholders.

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Registered Office: Condale House, Eldon Road, Cheltenham GL52 6TU (Callers by appointment only)

Images on this website are from one of our brands - Camera-Images.