Best hashtags for artists on Instagram: tags that reach collectors
What are the best hashtags for artists on Instagram? The ones browsed by people who might buy, commission or follow your work: fans of your style, collectors of your medium, people looking for a portrait of their dog, and neighbours who could visit your next open studio. Giant tags like #art or #artist move too fast for a post to stay visible, and most of the people scrolling them are other artists posting their own work. Instagram now caps a post at five hashtags, so each one has to point at a buyer, a client or a fellow maker who cares about this exact piece. This guide shows how to build a pool of art tags, how to pick five per post, and how to check each month which ones bring real interest.
Why art hashtags work differently
A café posts the same kind of photo every day. An artist posts a finished painting on Monday, a time-lapse on Wednesday, a sketchbook page on Friday and a print drop once a season. Each of those is found by a different person:
- Style is how collectors browse. Someone who loves botanical line art or dark surrealism follows that tag. Nobody opens
#artlooking for your particular hand. - Medium tags reach makers first.
#gouache,#linocutor#procreategather people who work in that medium. That is good for community, tutorials and material brands, and weaker for sales. - Subject tags reach buyers with a reason. A pet owner searches for pet portraits. A hiker looks at mountain paintings. Subject is often the tag a buyer is closest to.
- Commission and shop tags have a short job. A tag for an open commission slot or a print release matters in the week you announce it and very little after.
For the general method (broad, mid and niche tags, with a worked example), see best hashtags for Instagram. If you sell prints, run workshops or keep a studio, best hashtags for small business adds the local customer angle. This article applies both to art.
The best hashtags for artists on Instagram, by type
Every artist, from a hobby watercolourist to a working illustrator, draws on the same seven kinds of tag. What changes from post to post is the mix.
| Kind of tag | Example | In your pool | Per post (of 5) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Medium | #watercolorpainting, #linocutprint, #digitalillustration | 4 to 6 | 1 |
| Style or movement | #botanicalart, #popsurrealism, #urbansketching | 4 to 6 | 1 |
| Subject | #petportrait, #landscapepainting, #birdart | 3 to 6 | 1 |
| Process or format | #wip, #sketchbook, #arttimelapse | 3 to 5 | 0 or 1 |
| Sales and commissions | #commissionsopen, #artprints, #originalart | 2 to 4 | 0 or 1 |
| Place | #bristolartist, #austinart, your gallery or fair | 2 to 4 | 0 or 1 |
| Your own tag | #yournameart | 1 | 1 |
Medium and style tags put a piece in front of people who already like that kind of work. Subject tags reach someone looking for a picture of a particular thing. Process tags match how people like to watch art being made. Your own tag gathers everything you post, and it is the one buyers use when they share a piece hanging in their home.
Five tags is the ceiling, so the pool matters more than the post. Keep a pool per group and choose five for each post. Pasting the same block of thirty tags under every piece no longer works at all.
How to build your art hashtag set
You need the Instagram app, a list of what you make and sell, and a notes file. Plan on about half an hour.
- Write one sentence about who you want to reach. “Dog owners in the UK who would commission a painted portrait.” “People who buy small botanical prints for their kitchen.”
- List your medium words from narrow to wide. Start from the most specific name for what you use, then its parent.
#gouacheillustrationbefore#painting,#risoprintbefore#printmaking. - List your subjects and styles. What is in the picture, and how would a fan describe the look? Keep both, since different people search each way.
- Open each candidate tag in the app. Are the recent posts work like yours? Is the tag taken over by something else, such as tattoos, nail art, a brand or a meme? Drop anything that means something different from your work.
- Check how busy each tag is. A tag with a handful of posts in the last month has almost no audience. One flooded every minute buries you. Keep the ones with steady recent posts where your piece could stand out.
- Read your comments and messages for words. “Do you sell prints of this?” “Could you paint my cat?” “What brush is that?” The words people use point to your subject, sales and process tags.
- Look at what artists one step ahead of you tag. Pick a few people in your style with a slightly bigger audience. Treat their tags as candidates rather than a finished set, and check each one yourself.
- Make your own tag and use it on every post. Put it in your bio and on the back of every print so buyers tag you when they post.
- Save the pool in groups, one per kind of tag, so choosing five for a post is a quick pick across groups.
If you are not sure how to search a tag or read its page, how to search hashtags on Instagram covers the phone and the web. To catch an art challenge that is rising right now, see how to find trending hashtags on Instagram.
Choose different tags for each kind of post
A finished piece, a time-lapse and a commission announcement are found by different people. One fixed block under every post wastes most of your five.
| Post type | Lead with | Add | Skip |
|---|---|---|---|
| Finished piece | Style, subject | Medium, your own tag | Process tags |
| Work in progress or time-lapse | Process (#wip, #arttimelapse), medium | Style | Sales tags before it is finished |
| Sketchbook page | #sketchbook, style | Medium | Commission tags |
| Commissions open | Sales tag, subject | Place, your own tag | Tags you have not checked in months |
| Print or shop drop | #artprints, subject | Style, your own tag | Medium tags buyers never search |
| Art fair or open studio | Place, the event’s own tag | Style | Worldwide tags, since nobody abroad can come |
Rotate within each group. With six style tags in the pool and one per post, each tag gets tried on several posts, and you learn which one actually finds people who care.
Joining art challenges without losing your five
Art challenges are one of the more fun ways to use hashtags. A month-long prompt list like #inktober, or a weekly prompt run by an account in your niche, gives you a reason to post often and a tag full of people looking at exactly that kind of work.
- Use the challenge tag only on challenge posts. It is a slot in your five, so spend it where it fits.
- Pair it with style and subject. The challenge tag brings other participants. Your style and subject tags bring people who might buy.
- Check the prompt account is still running it. A challenge tag from two years ago can still have posts while nobody runs the prompts anymore.
- Save what worked. If a challenge post earned saves and profile visits, the style and subject tags on it are worth keeping for normal posts too.
Common mistakes artists make with hashtags
- Spending the five on giant tags.
#art,#artist,#artworkand#drawingmove too fast for anyone to see a post who is not also posting. - Tagging for artists when you want buyers. Medium and supply tags are full of makers. They are great for community and weak for sales.
- Tags that mean something else.
#flashis tattoo designs,#piecescan be almost anything. Open the tag before using it. - Keeping a sales tag forever. “Commissions open” on a post from last spring confuses people when your slots are full.
- Copying a famous artist’s tags. Their block works because of their audience. It will not create one for you.
- Unreadable joined words. Capitalise each word in long tags (
#BotanicalWatercolor) so people and screen readers can read them.
How to tell which tags bring collectors
Instagram shows this on a professional (business or creator) account. Open a post, tap View insights, and see how people found it. Then once a month:
- List your last 15 to 20 posts and the tag groups each one used.
- Note which posts reached people who do not follow you, and which earned saves, shares, profile visits or shop link taps.
- Keep the groups that keep appearing on the posts that did well. Replace tags that never do.
- Before a print drop or an open commission round, reopen your subject and sales tags and check they are still active and still about art like yours.
Judge a tag by what buyers do, not by likes. A save, a message asking about a print or a tap on your shop link means the tag reached someone who wanted the piece. A wave of likes from other artists does not pay for materials.
When the manual way is enough
For an artist posting a few times a week in one or two styles, the routine above is all you need. It is free, it takes half an hour, and you know your niche better than any list.
It stops being enough when:
- you run social posting for several artists, a gallery or a print shop, each with its own styles and subjects;
- you are planning a run of art fairs in cities whose local tags you do not know;
- you want to compare many candidate tags at once instead of opening each page;
- you want to see which creators keep posting under a style or subject tag, to find collaborators, curators or accounts that feature artists (see how to find influencers on Instagram);
- you want the research written down so it can be repeated before the next drop.
A faster way to plan the research
The slow part is deciding what to look at: which tags, how far back and what to compare. Hashtag Ninja takes that as a sentence. You write something like “hashtags a watercolour pet portrait artist in the UK should use to fill commission slots”, and the free planner returns a research plan: the tags to look at, how many posts per tag, over what window, and the assumptions it made. You can correct an assumption, such as the wrong medium or country, before relying on it. It needs no account.
To be clear about where it stands: running the plan, meaning collecting the posts and returning a written report and a CSV, is open, on the 500 free rows a signed-in account gets every 30 days. The pricing page says what that will cost and what state it is in. The plan on its own still replaces the first step of the routine above, since it is the tag list and checklist you would otherwise write by hand.
| Step | By hand | With the planner today |
|---|---|---|
| Pick candidate tags | Medium, style, subject, comments, other artists | Suggested in the plan from your sentence |
| Decide what to check | Your own checklist | Window, post count and what to look for, in the plan |
| Read the posts | Open each tag page | Collected for you, with a CSV |
| Keep a record | Notes file | Copy the plan out as plain text |
A short checklist
- One sentence describing the buyer or fan you want to reach.
- A pool in seven groups: medium, style, subject, process, sales, place, your own.
- Five per post, chosen for that post.
- A different mix for finished pieces, work in progress, commissions, drops and fairs.
- Every tag opened and read before you use it.
- A monthly look at insights, keeping the tags that bring saves, messages and shop taps.
Start with the narrowest honest name for your style and the subject you paint most. That alone puts you ahead of every account pasting #art under every piece.