Selling Stone Art

Stone Art sells. They are unlike your regular canvas paintings who are rectangular or squared and are 2 dimensional. Stone art is mostly unique as the stones themselves are each uniquely shaped by nature. They are also 3 dimensional and can be painted to be very lifelike. If you Google “stone art” you will see many designs that follow the shape of the stone to create a 3 dimensional image.

Stones Can Almost be Found Anywhere

One advantage of stones is that they come from nature and if you are very close to nature you will have plentiful supplies of them. People living near places not yet paved with concrete can definitely find them. Of course if you intend to collect stone commercially make sure that you are legally allowed to do so.

This means that you do not collect stones on someone else’s property unless you get their permission. You can buy them for cheap if you wish or you can act as a seller of the owner’s stones and split the profits. Believe it or not selling items online takes a lot of time and knowledge and there are even people who hire other people to sell their products online. This could be a business for you as well.

You also have to be careful when collecting stones from the jungles or greenery you pass by. They could be protected nature reserves and you might land in trouble if you are seen by anyone especially forest rangers. First research and know which areas you can reach where there is no restriction for you to collect stones.

Why Stones Have Value

The environment of people is fast being taken over by concrete especially in big cities. In most areas of cities the only semblance of nature can be seen in home gardens and in plants planted in pots. There are many people who lived their entire life in concrete surroundings that they barely see any stones at all.

The stones they see are usually very small pebbles or the big ones are found in parks and more often than not there are none. The usual buyers of these stones are not people living near nature where there are plentiful of them and are free but people living in concrete environments where nature has been paved over with concrete.

Selling Blank Stones

The first product you should be selling even before making art from stone and selling it is to sell the stones as they are. There are many people who buy blank stones and create art from them. This is like being a supplier instead of being a manufacturer. You can sell any stone you have whatever the shape, colour, texture and so on.

There are also stone collectors so you should study the stones you intend to sell. Some of the stones you might collect might seem insignificant and deemed good only to be used for stone art but could turn out to be a collector’s item. You could also bundle different kinds of stones and market them as beginner’s set to stone collectors.

You could also cut and polish the stone and sell it without having to create art for it. They sort of become flat painting canvas themselves. If you get lucky enough when you cut the stones there would be unique patterns or mineral deposits in them which could art or collectables pieces on their own. You can also sell these.

Selling Stone Art

After you have determined that your stone is best only for stone art then determine through market research which kinds or subjects for stone art sell well. You could research e-commerce sites such as eBay or Etsy to see how other sellers of stone art are doing and which one of their products are doing well as well as the price they sell for.

One thing of note is that selling stone art is like selling cars. There are stone art made of medium quality that sell at good prices and there are stone art that are of high quality that sell also at expensive prices. Choose the market price range you intend to sell to and experiment which one works for you. Just like any business the start is a learning process.

One YouTube video I can highly recommend for you to watch is a video by Mike Wood titled: How To Make Money Selling Rocks On eBay. I must warn you that there would be a part of the video where the narrative would not be in sync with the video but nevertheless the video is very informative in how people make money on eBay by selling rock/stone art.

Judging from the looks of the stone arts in eBay you could easily determine that the stone art making process can be easily outsourced to other people who could do the work faster or cheaper and all you need to do is to become a curator for them and split the profits with them. You could for example encourage your children to do stone art and sell it for them.

Be Creative

With your stone materials literally free or almost very cheap to buy what would sell is your creativity. For example you can create board games whose pieces are made out of stone. You could sell for example a chess game where the pieces are made out entirely of painted pebbles.

You could create variations of your stone chess game by piling the stones on top of each other to create a more 3 dimensional look to your game. You could also cut and polish the stone pieces to create a modern stone chess look. The beauty of this is that each stone chess piece that you would be making is unique and could be a collector’s item in themselves.

Conclusion

The stone art business is a cheap business to start especially if you have access to free or very cheap stones. Since this is a subjective product just like buying canvas paintings you must first do market research which particular market you will sell your stones too which is just like any business. Since it can be done cheaply it is a very scalable business where you can outsource the sourcing of the stones and the art making process itself.