Art Play Time vs Art Promotion Time

When I began selling my art, I had no idea how much time I would spend promoting my work! Here's a quick breakdown of how I spend my time:

Online
At least 2 to 3 hours a day.

This is surprisingly good fun. I have met some lovely people through the Folksy forums, and get a lot of support from fellow artists here. Whether you paint for pleasure, paint to sell or are just interested in art I encourage you to visit the daily "art and aceo thread" on the folksy forum. Each day we share and comment on new work, new ideas, tips and techniques. Sometimes we have an art thread challenge where we all paint along a theme - great fun and produces an amazing variety of work.

This link will take you to the folksy forum - just look for the latest art thread, it will be named something like "aceo and art thread" Folksy Talking - look for the Art and ACEO Thread

I also take part in some of the mutual promotion threads on Folksy, where we all tweet and pin each others work to Pinterest boards. Today I also created a Pinterest board of all my paintings in my folksy shop. This link will take you to my Pinterest boards where you will find work from fellow folksy artists and a catalogue of my own paintings. Pinterest - FlowaPowa Art and Other Folksy Art and Craft

I also promote my work through my facebook page FlowaPowa Art on Facebook

And I mustn't forget writing my blog! This one has probably taken me an hour to write and check.

Bricks and Mortar shops
I spend around 2 hours trawling around shops whenever I have new cards, plus monthly follow up visits to shops that take my cards.

I get a lot of positive comments on my work, however because production costs are high for someone like me, and shops take between 60% to 100% profit on cards, it's very difficult to get cards into shops. I do have my cards in one local shop, and am still waiting to hear from a national chain.

Photographing my Work
This is quite quick - it takes around 10 to 15 minutes per painting to photograph, upload and crop, and resize ready for uploading to Folksy.

Uploading to my Folksy Shop
This is SLOW! It can take as much as half an hour per item to upload to my Folksy shop. I have learnt to upload "internet ready" pictures - I resize them on my pc to the "medium" size setting, and this helps considerable with the upload speed. Folksy does say that you can upload up to 6mb per image but I think I'd still be here next week waiting for the upload to finish!!

Art Play Time
And time spent actually painting? Probably an average of one hour a day! Much less than I would like!  I go to two art clubs each week which are very supportive, and I run a community facebook page for one of these groups. If you're local to Ormskirk, take a look at this facebook page Aughton Artists on Facebook





Thanks so much for dropping by, I do hope you enjoy reading my blog. Why not leave a comment to say hello so that I know you called? Feel free to link back to your own blog too.

Stephie

Folksy Plus Account

I have just come back from a lovely relaxing holiday in Cornwall, where I spent most mornings painting while the family were still in bed - what bliss!

Inbetween the the obligatory washing and putting holiday gear back in the loft for another year, the last week has been spent on-line, listing paintings and cards on my folksy website and generally promoting my work.

Since I had at least 20 items to list, I decided to pay for the Folksy Plus account. It costs £30 upfront, and then all listings are free for a year - worth a go for at least one year - and this way I have the artistic freedom to list items that might be less popular. I still have to pay the standard folksy commission when items sell, but it's still good value.

Here are some of my latest listings





You can see more of my work in my shop at http://folksy.com/shops/FlowaPowa





Thanks so much for dropping by, I do hope you enjoy reading my blog. Why not leave a comment to say hello so that I know you called? Feel free to link back to your own blog too.

Stephie

Greetings Cards

I recently had some of my paintings made into greetings cards.

http://pinterest.com/flowapowaart/greetings-cards/

I decided that I would start with my local art paintings - The Liver Building in Liverpool,  Ormskirk Clock Tower, Ormskirk Bandstand and Lathom Park Chapel in West Lancashire, thinking that these would be nice to send to friends and family around the world.






After much um-ing and ah-ing, I plumped for www.moo.com. They were running a free business card promotion at the time, and they had good reviews from fellow crafters on the Folksy forums.

My cards arrived within a week, and were on very high quality card stock...however I was horrified to see white lines across the top of some of my cards. Fortunately Moo have excellent customer service. They explained that I had not allowed enough extra image at the top and bottom of the cards to allow for slight cropping differences. To Moo's credit, they do explain this on their website - I was just too eager to get going to read it all properly! And Moo then offered to reprint the whole order with faster shipping for free. Yay!

I was so pleased with the resulting cards that I decided to try a few local stores. To my delight, an independent newsagents / card shop, and a chain book store both said they would take my cards! The independent shop bought 15 cards on the spot - and the thrill of seeing them in pride of place as you come into the shop was amazing - I was ginning from ear to ear!

The book store, being part of a national chain, is a much slower process - they have to send them off to head office for approval. The shop manager was very optimistic that they would be accepted, but warned that it might take a couple of months.

I have created a pin board to display my cards http://pinterest.com/flowapowaart/greetings-cards/

They are all available in my Etsy shop www.FlowaPowaArt.etsy.com





Thanks so much for dropping by, I do hope you enjoy reading my blog. Why not leave a comment to say hello so that I know you called? Feel free to link back to your own blog too.

Stephie

My First Oil Painting Lesson

On Tuesday I the first of two oil painting lessons. I've had a set of Daler-Rowney Georgian oil paints in my loft for 20+ years, and never really known what to do with them. Amazingly they are still in good nick, and all I needed to buy was a pad of paper - I went for Daler-Rowney Georgian.

The technique we used was surprisingly similar to watercolour - a medium I am very familiar and happy with.

The first thing to do was tape the paper to a board and get out my Burnt Umber paint and a rag.

First we applied a wash of oil to the paper. Dipping the rag in white spirit and then a dab of paint, we used a sweeping side to side motion from top to bottom. If you've ever applied a watercolour wash this was just the same, using a finger in a rag instead of a brush.

Then we lifted out the areas we wanted to stay white, using either a hog hair brush or a finger inside rag. We were working from a very poor photocopy of a painting by Mona H....(the photocopy was too bad to read the name) - however working from a poor photocopy does stop you from slavishly following the original.

Next was simply to add the paint, using it exactly as watercolour paint but instead of water we used white spirit. Simple!

Here is my work in progress. I need to do more, but since husband and son both have asthma, I have to wait for a sunny day and work outside!







Thanks so much for dropping by, I do hope you enjoy reading my blog. Why not leave a comment to say hello so that I know you called? Feel free to link back to your own blog too.

Stephie



Exciting news - I have had my first commission!

Exciting news - I have had my first commission! Woohoo!

After two and a half day's procrastination, it really is time to buckle down and get on with it.  The commission I have been given is to paint two separate watercolours of two local pubs. The first is the Buck I'th Vine Inn, Ormskirk, a grade 2 listed building and one of the town's oldest buildings.

So that my final piece will be a really good painting, on larger works I always do at least one smaller painting first, concentrating on each section that I think might be tricky. Being a poor penniless artist I have to make every stage of the painting process work for me, so my smaller paintings are complete works in themselves that I can market separately to the final piece. In this case my final piece is already sold - lucky me!

Here is my first finished piece, measuring 5" x 7".


I'm happy with this, and don't think I need to do any more smaller paintings, so the next stage is to sketch out the whole pub and get to work painting!





Thanks so much for dropping by, I do hope you enjoy reading my blog. Why not leave a comment to say hello so that I know you called? Feel free to link back to your own blog too.

Stephie

My community page www.facebook.com/AughtonArtists

My community page www.facebook.com/AughtonArtists is beginning to take off, and over the next few weeks 2 more artists will be joining me, taking the total to 4...great news! So now I think it's time to create a page just for me.

Creating facebook pages is quite simple...on the top right hand side of you facebook home page you will find a link to the "Help" facility. Type in "create page" and it will give you the link. I tried to post a link here but the URL looked specific to me, and that wouldn't help you at all!

From then on facebook gives very good prompts to tell you what to do. TOP TIP, when you are asked to like your page, do it! I didn't, and am having a terrible job trying to like my page afterwards.

I used my folsky shop avatar as both my profile pic and my cover story pic for continuity.

It's still very much work in progress, I have to upload all the  photos of my work yet...but here is my new page:

https://www.facebook.com/pages/FlowaPowa-Art/397251977002164

If you have time, please like my page - when I have a few followers I can change the name to something easier to remember!

Have a great day!




Thanks so much for dropping by, I do hope you enjoy reading my blog. Why not leave a comment to say hello so that I know you called? Feel free to link back to your own blog too.

Stephie