What Hashtags Work for Artists Trying to Grow on Instagram

The short version: most hashtag advice for artists is five years out of date, because Instagram now cares far more about your reels, your captions, and your first three seconds than it does about a wall of tags. Hashtags still help, but only a handful, used as search terms rather than a spray-and-pray list, and only if the rest of your content earns the reach in the first place.

Why your old hashtag list stopped working

If you've been posting the same 30 hashtags on every piece since 2021, I understand the confusion. That advice used to work. Instagram's own head, Adam Mosseri, has said openly in interviews and on his own account that hashtags are not a major ranking signal any more, they're closer to a light dusting than the main course. The platform now leans on its recommendation system, similar to how the app has evolved since its 2010 launch from a photo diary into a video-first discovery engine that behaves a lot like TikTok.

That matters for artists specifically because so much of the "how to grow on Instagram" content aimed at you was written for lifestyle influencers, not painters, illustrators, potters, or tattoo artists. The advice gets copied and pasted across a thousand blog posts without anyone testing it on an actual art account. I have. Repeatedly. With clients. And the results don't match the folklore.

A real example, with real numbers

Last year I worked with a watercolour artist based near Manchester, I'll call her Dee since she'd rather not be named in a marketing post. She had 1,900 followers and had been faithfully using the same 30-hashtag block copied from a Pinterest graphic for two years. Reach was flat, around 300 to 500 accounts per post, mostly her own followers.

We stripped it back. Instead of 30 mixed hashtags, she used 4 to 6 specific ones per post, changed to match the actual piece, plus a caption written like a search query rather than a poem. Within 9 weeks, average reach on her reels went from around 400 to just over 6,000, and she picked up 340 new followers in that window. The hashtags didn't do that on their own, the shift to posting process reels instead of static final images did most of the heavy lifting. But the hashtags stopped working against her, because they were finally specific enough for Instagram to know who to show the post to.

That's the bit nobody tells you plainly: a bad hashtag set doesn't just fail to help, it can actively confuse the algorithm about what your account is for.

What earns reach now (hashtags are the seasoning, not the meal)

Before we get to which hashtags to use, be honest with yourself about the format. Instagram's own data, shared repeatedly in Mosseri's Q&As, shows reels and video get pushed to non-followers far more than static images. If you're an artist still posting only finished, static shots of your work, no hashtag list will fix that ceiling. Film 15 seconds of the process. Show the mixing of paint, the correction of a mistake, the messy stage before the pretty stage. That's the content Instagram wants to hand to strangers.

Once the format is right, hashtags do three useful jobs:

• They help Instagram's search function match your post to someone typing "watercolour tutorial" or "linocut print" into the search bar
• They put you in front of a smaller, more targeted community than the main feed algorithm would
• They give you a rough read on demand, since Instagram shows you related-tag follower counts when you type into the tag field

None of that requires 30 tags. It requires the right 5 to 8.

The actual hashtag categories that work for artists

Rather than handing you a copy-paste list (which is exactly the mistake that got Dee stuck for two years), use this structure and fill it with your own specifics:

• Medium tag: #watercolourpainting, #oilpaintingartist, #digitalillustration, #stonecarving. Specific to your actual medium, not "#art" which has over a billion posts and zero chance of surfacing you.
• Style or subject tag: #botanicalillustration, #portraitartist, #abstractpaintings, #petportraits. This is where you get found by people who want exactly your thing.
• Process tag: #wip (work in progress), #artprocess, #sketchbookpages. These pull in other artists, which matters more than people realise since fellow artists share and comment far more than passive followers.
• Community tag: #artistsoninstagram (around 90 million posts, big but still artist-specific), #dailyart, #femaleartistsofinstagram. Use one, not five, since these are broad enough to bury you if you overload on them.
• Local or niche tag: #manchesterartist, #ukceramicist, #israeliart. Small numbers, often under 20,000 posts, but the people finding you there are geographically or culturally close, which converts to real sales and studio visits far better than a stranger in another country liking your post once.

Five categories, one or two tags each, lands you at 5 to 8 total. That's the number Dee settled on, and it's what I recommend to every artist client now instead of the old maximum-30 approach.

How to test which ones work for your account

Here's the step-by-step version, and it takes about 90 days to do:

• Week 1 to 2: Pick 3 different hashtag sets built from the categories above, one per post type (process reel, finished-piece post, carousel). Don't mix them.
• Week 3 to 6: Post consistently, minimum 3 times a week, keeping each post's hashtag set consistent with its category. Log reach and non-follower reach percentage from Instagram Insights after 48 hours, not immediately, tags take a day or two to fully play out.
• Week 7 to 8: Compare. Which set brought the highest percentage of reach from non-followers? That's your working formula, not the total number, the percentage that came from strangers.
• Week 9 to 12: Drop the weakest set entirely, refine the strongest by swapping one tag at a time and watching what changes. This is the same discipline you'd apply to an outbound sales campaign, testing one variable, measuring, adjusting, and if you ever get serious about turning followers into buyers you'll want the same rigour you'd use with proper prospecting and outreach tools for finding galleries, collectors, and commission clients rather than waiting for the algorithm to hand you everything.

Ninety days sounds slow when you want it to work now. It's still faster than another two years on a hashtag list that was never built for your account.

The part most hashtag posts won't say out loud

Here's the uncomfortable bit. If your account has under roughly 1,000 followers and low engagement, the best hashtag set in the world will barely move the needle, because Instagram is still deciding whether your content is worth testing on new audiences at all. Hashtags help an account that's already getting some organic traction reach a bit further. They do not rescue a dead account. I've had artists send me screenshots of meticulously researched hashtag sets on posts that got 40 views, and the honest diagnosis was never the tags, it was that the account hadn't posted in six weeks, or every post was a static photo with a caption that said nothing more than "new piece, link in bio."

Fix the posting rhythm and the content format first. Hashtags are the last 10 percent, not the first.

Sound and video matter more than the tag box

One more thing artists tend to skip because it feels unrelated to hashtags but isn't. Reels with trending or popular audio get pushed harder by Instagram's discovery system than silent or off-trend clips, the same logic driving discovery on TikTok, where trending songs shape what gets seen far more than any caption tag does. If you're filming your painting process, pairing it with a currently trending sound, even a quiet instrumental one, will do more for reach than adding three extra hashtags ever will. The tag helps people search for you. The sound helps a stranger get shown you in the first place.

A simple weekly system you can start this week

Skip the debate and just do this:

• Pick your 5 to 8 tags across the five categories above, written down, not reinvented each time you post
• Post one process reel and one finished-piece post per week minimum, using trending audio on the reel
• Write captions as if someone typed the words into search, "how to blend watercolour skies" rather than "feeling inspired today"
• Check Insights after 48 hours, note the non-follower reach percentage
• Swap one weak tag every fortnight, never the whole set at once, so you can tell what changed

That's the whole system. It's not glamorous and it won't turn 300 followers into 30,000 overnight, but it's what moved Dee's account, and it's what I'd tell any artist starting from scratch in 2026.

I have written more around this on the site: The Best Sales Prospecting Tools: Over 300 Tools to Increase Your Outbound Sales, Most Popular TikTok Songs You Need to Know in 2026.

If you want the full set, start at the Instagram Help: 81 Guides to Followers, Hashtags, Money, Accounts and Fixes. Test your set first with my free Instagram hashtag checker.

I go deeper on this in Facebook Reels hashtags that work.

Related: lifestyle (this site).

Related reading: block certain words on instagram.

Related reading: best friends hashtags for instagram.

Related reading: does instagram only allow 5 hashtags.

Frequently asked questions

How many hashtags should artists use on Instagram in 2026?

Between 5 and 8, split across medium, style, process, community, and local tags, is enough. More than that dilutes the signal Instagram uses to work out who should see your post.

Do hashtags still help Instagram growth or are they dead?

They're not dead but their job has changed. They now mainly help people find you through Instagram's search bar and give you a small boost within a niche community, rather than being a major driver of overall reach, which is now dominated by reels and video content.

Should artists put hashtags in the caption or the first comment?

It makes no measurable difference to reach. Put them wherever keeps your caption readable, most artists put them in the first comment purely to keep the caption clean for people reading it.

Why is my art hashtag reach so low even with good tags?

Usually the tags aren't the actual problem, posting frequency and format are. Accounts posting fewer than 3 times a week, or using only static images instead of reels, will see low reach regardless of how carefully the hashtags are chosen.