Selling art today goes beyond acquiring a beautiful object: it’s about creating an experience, telling a story, and helping people imagine how a piece will live in their world. Whether you’re closing a sale, preparing for a show, or pitching to a gallery, visuals that show your work in context make all the difference.
That’s where ArtPlacer’s Personal Spaces comes in, by allowing you to digitally place your art in real spaces (like a collector’s home), this effective, easy-to-use tool enables you to build relationships, elevate your business, and close more sales. Keep reading to learn more about what Personal Spaces is, why it matters in the art world, and how you can use it effectively, from advisory services and exhibitions to commissions and artist proposals.
Upload your room, define the wall area, and add your art: simple and effective.
Contents
What is Personal Spaces?
Personal Spaces allows users to make a real-world image interactive and use it to display pieces of art at scale.Gallerists, artists, and collectors can upload a photograph of the room where they want to display an artwork (a bedroom, an office, or a gallery wall) and digitally place artworks onto it by dragging and dropping them in.
Just upload the photo of your desired space, define the wall, add dimensions to establish scale, and then drag and drop the artworks. Personal Spaces also allows you to edit the frames and lighting of your mockup, crop the image, and then save it, download it, and share it.
As a gallery or advisor interacting with remote collectors or an artist preparing proposals for upcoming exhibitions, using Personal Spaces to offer a visual representation of how artworks will look in a given space helps eliminate guesswork and uncertainty, two of the biggest obstacles to finalizing a deal.
Create images of real-world rooms to display your art and share with collectors and colleagues to foster conversations and close more sales.
Help collectors picture your art in their space and close more sales
Personal Spaces removes barriers, sparks conversations, and turns hesitation into excitement. Whether you’re curating a show or closing a sale from across the globe, it makes many facets of the art business much simpler.
•Help collectors visualize artworks in their own space. Envisioning how a piece will fit into their space is one of the most common hurdles for art buyers. Personal Spaces helps you address this with high-quality mockups of your clients’ actual rooms where you can portray your art at scale. Easily share your visual assets from within ArtPlacer or download them for email exchanges.
•Close more sales by removing guesswork. Is your collector interested in a particular artist or style? Put together proposals guiding them through custom-curated options and use Personal Spaces to show them how the pieces will look on their walls, in context, at scale, and with different framing options. This solves common questions like ‘will it fit?’ and ‘will it match my style?’ and removes uncertainty, leading to more sales.
•Foster conversations and build relationships. Selling art is about connecting with people. Personal Spaces allows galleries, art dealers, and artists to customize visual assets for each client or collector, showing genuine care for their preferences and environments. These mockups can be complemented with ArtPlacer’s other features, like a Portfolio Presentation of an artist a collector loved, or an Inventory Report to easily show all of the available pieces of that same artist.
Steven Koppel’s pieces installed in a collector’s home. They worked together using Personal Spaces to choose the right photos for the space.
•Save time and money by planning digitally. Curating a show or planning an installation often involves physically moving pieces around, which can be costly and time-consuming. With Personal Spaces, you can play around with organizing your pieces to get the best curatorial experience without the cost of moving the artworks around.
•Create polished, persuasive pitch documents. Creating materials that make an impact makes all the difference in a pitch process. Featuring your art in a mockup of a client’s space (like a hotel lobby, a conference room, or a gallery) makes your proposal stand out.
•Use easily, no technical skills required. Navigating and using Personal Spaces is simple and intuitive, and ArtPlacer guides you through each step, making it accessible even if you have minimal tech experience. Can you send an email? You can use Personal Spaces.
Steven Koppel provides a rounded experience for visitors by incorporating Personal Spaces into his gallery sessions.
How galleries and art advisors are using Personal Spaces to support collectors
Art collecting has many reasons, from the desire to bring beauty into the home to the pursuit of long-term investments. Galleries and art advisors play an essential role in this journey, offering expertise that not only curates a client’s approach to art but also guides them in making thoughtful, informed decisions. The challenge lies in communicating that knowledge and expertise in a way that feels accessible, insightful, and tailored to each collector’s needs.
That’s where ArtPlacer’s Personal Spaces becomes an invaluable tool for art advisory: it helps galleries and consultants remove uncertainty from the buying process by giving collectors a clear idea of how a piece will look in their space. By asking for photos and dimensions from clients, you can digitally place artworks and frames into those environments, offering scaled, true-to-life mockups that inspire confident decisions.
Pro tip! Ask your clients to send multiple angles of the same room and place the artwork into each picture for a more complete, realistic sense of how the piece will interact with the space.
Visitors to your show or gallery might get excited about a certain piece or artist but hesitate to purchase due to common questions around size, placement, and style. Personal Spaces can help you get around this hurdle. Once you’ve started a dialogue with would-be collectors about their interests, you can ask for pictures of their home and nurture the conversation towards a sale: they don’t have to imagine how the piece will look, because they can see it. Photographer Steven Koppel introduced this approach in his gallery:
“With ArtPlacer, I can show them how the picture will look in a room in its real proportions. We can show them different sizes of the same image so they can pick the one that’s best for their space. We’ve recreated the specific frames we use in the gallery on the ArtPlacer webapp, so when working on a client’s room, we can show them those exact options and create a mockup that’s true to life.”
Share your design with just a couple of clicks directly from the ArtPlacer app. Easily send via email to anyone in your existing contact list, or add new recipients and save them to reach out again in the future.
Visitors will often have pictures of their home with them. If a piece catches their eye, you can turn this into an opportunity for a custom session done in situ, with a computer or tablet. Steven had a clear vision of how to do it:
“We wanted to do this interactively while someone’s here, actively contemplating a piece for their home. With ArtPlacer’s features, we can say, ‘Let’s take a look at how this would look in your family room.’ Customers tend to have pictures on their phone, even a family photo, where you can see the wall they’re considering.”
Collectors might be interested in a specific artist but hesitate when it comes to choosing a piece. With Personal Spaces you can create several mockups of the same room with all their favorite pieces so they can make an informed choice. Because there’s an emotional component to art buying, spending time with your clients and listening to their wants and needs can be the thing that tips the scales towards a sale.
“I’ll often sit with them for an hour or more as we explore different images, sizes, and frames, toggling between options. This is a significant decision, not just financially, but emotionally, because it’s about what they’ll live with and see every day.”
Your finished Personal Space can be sent directly to clients, collectors, and colleagues as an image through email and messaging apps like WhatsApp and Facebook. Or make them a part of a larger presentation to elevate your visual materials: advisors often work closely with decorators and architects to bring a client’s vision to life, and Personal Spaces can streamline the process. You can upload sections of renderings and elevations, drop the artworks in, and easily share mockups with the team to facilitate communication and speed up decision-making.
Personal Spaces makes it easy to curate collections digitally, too. You can upload images of the gallery space, add artworks, and experiment with different display arrangements. It’s a simple way to plan, adjust, and refine exhibitions in advance, saving both time and resources.
Planning your show with ArtPlacer lets you bring your vision to life while saving time, effort, and resources.
Plan, preview, and curate exhibitions with ease
For galleries curating shows or artists preparing for fairs, Personal Spaces is a practical tool for putting together in situ exhibitions in advance. Galleries often send photos of their space (or you can find them online), and using ArtPlacer, curators and artists can test different layouts digitally.
Doing this work ahead of time helps save time and money and makes the prepping stage of a show much less stressful. Some of the most common issues artists have when curating an exhibition are how to present the pieces, what frames to use, and how to make the best use of the space given. Photographer Rob Strain solved them all with Personal Spaces:
“I visited the gallery where my show would be held and took pictures of all the walls, and used Personal Spaces to try out my ideas. The result was finding out that the show looked much better if I removed six pieces of art. Printing and framing them would have cost me at least $1000, I was delighted with my savings.”
But it’s not just about financial savings. For artists, incorporating Personal Spaces to your art business creates a much more polished presentation of your work and your services that can make all the difference when it comes to selling your work and pitching yourself. As Rob puts it:
“Anyone whose art is good enough to sell needs a way to help the potential buyers visualize their art in a home or business. I believe that adding ArtPlacer images to my website presents me as a professional artist to be taken seriously, not just another amateur.”
Bringing collectors into your artistic practice fosters a fluid relationship and can kickstart conversations.
Make commissions more personal and professional
For artists working on commissions, clear, personal communication with clients is everything. Being able to show a piece in a client’s space can make all the difference, not just in closing a sale, but in making conversations about ideas and adjustments much easier.
Artist Wendy Sharpe used Personal Spaces to try out different canvas sizes and color palettes when working with her client, suggesting various options and deciding together what the best canvas size was for the collector:
“I always ask the collector for pictures of their room and of the wall they picture the art on, and use the Personal Spaces tool to start the conversation. With one collector who lives far away, I used ArtPlacer to virtually hang a series of my pieces on this giant wall she had, and she decided to go with an eight-foot painting”.
Inviting people into your artistic process builds excitement around your work, and seeing those pieces in a real-world setting adds a whole new dimension to the business side of your practice.
Wendy Sharpe and her client tried out several pieces on the destination wall to come up with a commission that made them both happy.
Art buying is personal. There are emotions and feelings tied to it, and people want to feel confident that what they’re bringing into their home will work. Personal Spaces becomes part of that conversation. It helps create a more tailored, collaborative experience that clients remember long after the sale is made, building a relationship that goes beyond the transaction. As Wendy puts it:
“People are not just collecting your art. Every time they look at the painting on their wall, they’re going to think about the whole experience they had with you. My business coach once told me, “Stop thinking about it as sales”. Of course, you’re selling something, but above all, you’re building a relationship with people.”
On the left, the gallery photo; on the right, Sergio Gomez’s art displayed with Personal Spaces in the same space.
Craft proposals that stand out and win more
When it comes to drafting a proposal, it’s all about your concept and your visuals. Whether you’re pitching to a gallery, art fair, or event, you want to make sure the people reviewing your proposal can actually picture your work in their space. Personal Spaces makes that possible by letting you create mockups that show how your work would look in a real exhibition setting. Artist and gallerist Sergio Gómez explains how he uses ArtPlacer to pitch:
“Let’s say you want to present your art in a certain gallery. You can get pictures of that gallery (online or you can visit), upload them to the ArtPlacer app and select the area of the walls: when you lay out the pieces they will appear in their precise scale, so we’re actually gaining a real-life representation of your idea and how it will look. You can add framing, mats, and tweak the brightness and shadows so it matches the lighting of the real space so you know how the pieces will interact with the actual room.”
Creating a pitch deck that’s truly representative of your work and your story is a key part of growing your art career. The mockups you build with Personal Spaces can also be used to create moodboards that help explain your concept, or to show the proposed layout for a specific collection, giving galleries a clear, accurate, and polished view of your vision. As Sergio puts it:
“As a curator myself, all I have to do is look at some images of the artwork on display, even if it’s just a mockup, to know exactly if this is something I can envision in my gallery.”
You can also round out your proposal with visuals created using ArtPlacer’s blank Room Mockups. These provide you with a blank wall with a white background that allows you to display your art consistently and with dimension, while keeping a sense of scale and including any planned frames or mats. It makes your proposal feel complete and well thought out, showing galleries that you’ve considered the details and have a plan that makes their job easier. And when you take the guesswork out of how things will look in real life, you’re far more likely to get a yes.
Digitally hang your art in your collector’s home and show galleries what your collection looks like in their space.
Getting started with Personal Spaces
Personal Spaces is easy to use and requires no previous tech knowledge… just an eye for art! Here’s a quick step-by-step to get you started on displaying your pieces in your client’s rooms.
1. From the Personal Spaces section of the dashboard, tap “NEW” to create a new space and upload the picture of the room you want to use.
2. Define the wall area where the pieces will hang, and add the wall height. This is very important because the art will adjust to scale.
Protip! As a reference, gallery walls tend to be between 11-14 ft. Apartments and skew lower, around 8 ft, while newer and luxury builds are close to 10 ft and above.
3. Drag and drop the artwork you want to display, and play around with the settings. Adjusting brightness and shadows helps the piece blend with the lighting in the room, making it even more lifelike.
4. Adjust your frame. You can change the material, color, and mat, and even the light refraction on the glass!
5. Once you are happy with your design, make sure to save it! That way, you can reuse your settings.
6. Share it: on email, on socials, via text, your Personal Space is ready for the world.
