A Note About Design

If you’ve been reading the previous posts here, you’ve learned to make working with you, reading your promo pieces, etc. easy for others.  This is the biggest obstacle we have as artists: not understanding when we are making it hard for others to view and appreciate our work or extract the story we’re trying to tell.   I see this issue over and over again.

Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymous Bosch

Check out the painting here.

This is a famous painting by Hieronymous Bosch (pronounced Her-on-uh-mus  Bosh).  There are so many things going on, where does your eye stop? Does it stop?  What is the story being told here?  This painting is extremely busy and it was meant to be to convey the frenzy of an orgy (that was the story), but I don’t think you want to do this with promo pieces for your art, do you?

Now look at the next piece here.

Clouds and 'The Giant' by N.C. Wyeth (that would be Newell Convers Wyeth)

There are fewer elements to look at so it immediately tells a story – not a story of chaos like the Bosch painting.   This one is easier to read and extract a story from because the elements are easily read.

When the story is hard to extract, we don’t read the book.  This is huge for our art, websites, promotional pieces, you name it.

What story do you want to tell?  What story do you want people to read in your website, postcards, or business card?

Simplify so the story can be read.

Promotional Postcards for Artists

We live in an amazing time.  We can make our own promotional pieces to do our own marketing and even print them.  It used to be that you had to hire a graphic designer to do these things for you.  They were trained in all methods of reproduction, how to prepare camera ready artwork and get things produced for you the way you wanted them.  Now we can do this for ourselves.  BUT, one rule I learned in school for graphic design was that you should never do your own promo work.  It’s hard to be objective with your own stuff so be smart:  put something together and then pass it around to people, even people you don’t know (OH! another way to develop your market!).  Ask them what they see first and what they most remember about it after you take it back from them.   Hopefully you get answers like:  I see there is a show of art at blah blah on such a date;  I like the blue piece or something like that.

Effective marketing pieces stick in people’s minds.  Remember the point of a marketing piece is to communicate that this work is showing at some place on some date.  Don’t throw in 5 pictures where one or two would have more impact.  The point isn’t to exhibit all of your work on one postcard!  This same rule applies to websites, flyers, brochures – anything to do with marketing.  Again it comes back to: if you make people work to extract the info, they’ll just throw it away.  Don’t make it difficult to find out about your work.

Keep like things together.  For example, don’t “sprinkle” your work around the promo piece or web page as if it is a spice or sprinkles on a cookie.  Make it easy for the viewer to SEE as a body of work, not a spice.  This means have areas for each type of information being presented.   Think about it: what makes more impact on you when you look at a webpage or a postcard?  Is it all that text or is it the visuals?   Make the most of each element so that they’re actually seen.  Too much text is never worth the space it takes up because people tend to look at visuals rather then read. Use your space wisely, make it easy to read, use one or two visuals with high impact.  Don’t overfill the space because eyes need a place to rest.  Think of it this way: if you have a cluttered room does your eye land on any one thing?  Not when everything is competing for attention.  Do you really see one picture amongst 12 on the wall or is it better to see a picture when it is by itself on wall?   There’s your answer to design!

Tomorrow we lighten up after all of this business of art work but talk a little more about design.  =)

Getting Your Work into a Gallery, Part 3

A good way to get your work seen at a gallery you have your eye on is to contact them for an informational interview.   An informational interview is solely for the purpose of meeting with a gallerist to find out what they look for particularly, learn what they expect and to ask questions.  You call them and let them know that you’re interested in an informational interview to learn how gallery representation/exhibition works and to understand better what their expectations are.  Consider this a free lesson, so to speak.  You will be surprised at how many people will have time for this!  They’re always interested in educating artists so that their job will be easier.

Of course you take some of those postcards that you’ve made that have a sample of your work on them to give to the gallerist and ask what they would do differently for such a promotional piece…see where this is going?  They will see your work on the postcard.  Maybe that will stick in their brain and then when you start sending them announcements (via other postcards) of where to see your work (on telephone poles, in a cafe, on your wall by appt. only, etc.), it will be familiar to them and perhaps at some point, they’ll put it together that they want your work for a specific show.

You’re creative right?  So now instead of just using my ideas, get creative and make a list of your own.  Really – get to it now!

Tomorrow: more about those postcards

Getting Your Work into a Gallery, Part 2

So staging your own show can be as easy as using the telephone pole idea and then spending a little money to get some nice announcements with a great visual to send out to the galleries that you want to exhibit in.  Pretty postcards are inexpensive at VistaPrint (www.vistaprint.com) where there is always a special going on and you can get the first 50 cards free, etc.  Yes, you have to pay for shipping and then of course, postage to send them out but that is less expensive then putting together a bunch of mailable portfolios and mailing those for someone to throw away, right?

Now let’s back track here a bit.  Make sure you research those galleries.  If you’re trying to get your jewelry work into a strictly Fine Art gallery, that isn’t going to happen.  So the second rule is: don’t waste *YOUR* time!  It’s valuable.  This research will help you to find the venues that would be a good fit for your work and therefore might actually be interested in having your work.   It makes sense when you stop and think about it, yes?   See? It’s not so hard.

Okay, so still back tracking a little here: why do you want your work in a gallery?  I used to ask this all the time and then a good friend of mine said “why do you make all this stuff if no one is going to see it?”.  Hmmm, good point.   I know I make it for me but it would be nice to cover my expenses so I can make more.  There’s the answer right there.   See tomorrow for more gallery ideas!

Getting Your Work into a Gallery, Part 1

Sequin Girl doll pendant by Meredith Arnold

One of the things I hear most from gallerists is that they hate it when people send them CD’s of images and mailable portfolios unsolicited.  They don’t have time to look through all of the stuff they get especially when most of it isn’t what they’re looking for anyway.

Having curated shows for a gallery for a few years, I understand this competely.  I think one of the best learning experiences as an artist that I have had is curating those shows.  Pulling together exhibit after exhibit, even on a two month rotation is a lot of work all by itself, not to mention there is the hanging of the show, promotion of the show and then all the little details that go sideways: artists bring in their work not ready to hang, neglect to submit info for labels of the work for the gallery to use, artists don’t title the work on the back so you have an inventory sheet of titles and dimensions and a bunch of work that you have to figure out which one is which… See what I mean?  Who knew that curating a show included such a scavenger hunt?

End of story: the bigger headache you are, the less people/galleries are going to want to deal with you.  They have a business to run and are busy.  Don’t waste their time.

So if nobody looks at portfolios that show up out of the blue what do you do?  Remember the telephone pole idea in the previous couple of posts?  Stage your own show and send out announcements about it.  I know it sounds crazy but why not?  It works.  See tomorrow for more!

Developing an Art Market, Part 2

Okay, so we have the concept of why hype works (the radio station model) and that sometimes things have to grow on people before they get it or decide whether they like it or not.   Let’s explore some ways to do that with art.

In my post a couple of days ago, I mentioned using telephone poles to staple a series of art to so it would get seen.  This isn’t a bad idea actually.  Guerilla tactics command attention and demand awareness.  Imagine painting a bold series of 4 paintings on unstretched canvas and taking the canvasses and tacking them around 4 telephone poles in a row on a busy street, near a bus stop.  Say your website is across the bottom of each canvas.  Watch the numbers of visits to your website for the next two weeks and see how they differ from the previous two weeks prior to posting those paintings.

What about making a bookmark out of a slice of your art with your website on it.  Make 40 of those on a color copier (ten to a page and cut them apart), then leave them lying around in four different libraries.

I once had a plan to do this in a methodical way.  I would pick 4 libraries in one region and seed my bookmarks there over a period of a few months and then switch to 4 different libraries in another area and so on.  By rotating venues, I am expanding the exposure area.  What about doing this in the cafe of a book store?   You never know who will see one of those bookmarks, like what they see, visit your website and suddenly someone wants to display your work or maybe own a piece or something.

This is how you develop an art market: MAKE people notice your work.

Developing an Art Market, Part 1

Check out what sorts of venues there are that you would think would be good for your work to be in.  Make sure these are viable places to get your work seen.  In other words, yeah, we all would like to have our work in a museum or some other place we deem has cache but what about places where it will really be seen?

Remember in the old days of radio how they would play a new song to death?  Maybe the first 4 times we heard it we didn’t actually care for it but after the 5th or 8th time we heard, we found that this was good music.  What is that?  It’s developing a market.  Yes, really.   People are funny about new things when it comes to the arts.  They like to see the same ballet or play every year (think Nutcracker or Hair).   It takes awhile for people to see a thing, register it into their awareness and then make it part of their world.

If you had the interiors  of your home completely re-done by a professional while you were out of town and came back, it would be so different that you wouldn’t know whether you liked it or not.  That’s what happens when people are subjected to art.  It’s completely new to them and they don’t quite know what to do with it.   Now that you’ve got this concept, tomorrow we’ll explore some ways to grow your market.

 

Subterranean Art Fears

What is subterranean fear?   You know:  ‘I can’t seem to get into the studio’, ‘I can’t find what I need to do something’, etc.  This is all self sabotage and part of subterranean fear.  It’s so down deep that you don’t know it’s even there but it comes out in ways that don’t make sense.  Once you know that this is going on it’s a little easier to resolve.

When I found I couldn’t seem to get into the studio, I fooled myself into it.  If I planned to work on polymer clay the next day, I would go into the studio and prep my clay for the next day.  I would always leave it out on the table with the area ready so that the next day I could just walk in and go to work.  Hey it works!  I would look into the doorway of the studio, see all those colors ready to go and viola, I’m sitting down and doing something with it.

It’s one of those times that you have to go through the motions even if you don’t feel like it.  If you go through the motions, you find yourself doing the deed.   It ’s like getting past the thoughts of beating yourself up because you didn’t paint today, didn’t take that walk today or whatever.   Over thinking a thing is a sign of fear.  Relax.  It will all work out.  I tell myself this all the time and it really does all work out.

 

Get Past Your Art Fears

If no one knows about your work how do they know they want it?  So this is really the nut, isn’t it?  So how do you get it out in front of those that would want to buy it?  Either we make it too hard or we don’t go for it because of fear.  I have been known to tell my students that everything you’ve always wanted is on the other side of your fear.  So look at it because it will get in your way.  If you are in your own way, you will mess things up again and again.  So the plan here is two fold: deal with your fear and get your work out there any way you can with taste.  THAT IS THE KICKER:  with taste.

What does that mean?  Well, don’t tack your paintings up on bulletin boards – though a good guerilla tactic would be to make a series of work that you staple to telephone poles.  Bulletin boards are schlocky, telephone poles could be cool because outsider art is often found there.

Starting at the beginning: don’t let fear stop you.  All those thoughts running through your mind like ‘what if…’.  Here’s an example: what if people like my stuff and I can’t make enough?  What if no one likes my work and I sell nothing?  What if…?’   Okay, you get the idea.  Throw those all out of your head or ignore them.  Do whatever it takes to shut those thoughts down. Just know that you must make your art to be you.  Isn’t THAT enough to do it?   If it feeds your soul and floats your boat, what is to stop you?   This is dealing with blatant fear.  Tomorrow: subterranean fear.

 

Pricing Your Work, Part 2

There are two prevailing philosophies for pricing a thing for sale.  One is to sell an item on the expensive end of the range for that item.  This way with each one sold you have a larger return but may not sell as many items in total.  The other way is to price the items lower, make less return but sell more items.

The first way requires that the items for sale can command that higher price and that you can float between sales without generating income from those items.  The second way requires that you can produce enough to keep up with demand.

What’s important about knowing this when you price your work?  Here’s a real life scenario:

I have arthritis which limits how much I can produce in a given time period.  This means that I make fewer items overall compared to someone without any hand issues.  If I were to sell my items at the lower price range and have them all sell in a short period of time,  I would have nothing to sell until I can make more.  Since it takes me longer to make enough to sell this would cause a supply/demand issue.   It’s best to be able to keep up with demand so that you aren’t re-inventing your entire inventory all the time (unless you have the ability to do so).

Keep your eye on the prize, as they say.  If the goal is to sell things, see where you fit into these equations, figure out what is realistic for you and your plan will be clear.   Sometimes the plan is to have your work seen and gain exposure, maybe not so much sell it.  This is how you develop a market.  But that is for another post!