More product

Funny thing - this morning I made a connection in my head between selling my artwork and the work I do with my team at the office. By day, I work for a consulting engineering company - they design and construction roads, bridges, light rail lines, pipelines, restored streams and wetlands, etc. - I help them sell their services and win work. (It's a great job and I work with wonderful people.) At home, in my down time I design and sell artwork on an Etsy site. http://www.redwingblackbird.etsy.com/

In both instances, the classic seller-doer model is in play. You have to sell and do at the same time. At work, for the past 16 years, I've worked only in the seller mode as a marketer. I've watched my engineer and environmental scientist friends struggle with balancing selling (talking to and convincing their clients to use their expertise) and doing (once, sold - designing the project). I never really grasped why its so difficult for them to do both.

Today, my Etsy site is down to a bare minimum of "product," only 9 pieces when I usually strive to have a good 15 - 20 pieces on display. I was so foucsed on selling, that I stopped doing all together. This same thing happens in the office. I find it really hard to be creative, when I'm focused on being a seller. Does selling shut down the creative side? It shouldn't and in fact, it really cannot.

Besides a whole new appreciation for what I'm asking my cohorts to do every day, I have to wonder if there isn't a better way. Bringing a sense of creativity into selling and a sense of selling into the creativity is real the challenge, both in my studio and in my job. Any ideas?

Material inspiration

Caught a fantastic estate sale today and walked away with several very cool pieces of inspiration. My favorite piece is a book titled "The House of Chan Cookbook" by Sou Chan (Doubleday, 1952). It's a wonderful little book of recipes for Chinese-American cuisine. The paper it's printed on will be perfect for decoupage and the recipes are spaced perfectly on the page to allow for interesting paste-ups on the wood pieces. I'm super excited.

Also found some wonderful turn-of-the-last-century maps from old Europe and Africa, a cool book of quotations and proverbs, some great old comic books, and several "Flower and Garden" magazines from the late 50s/early 60s. Really great ads in the old mags, beautiful colors on the old maps, and really fun artwork in the comic books. My exacto knife will be busy over the next few days!

Finishing up, posting and moving on

Yesterday I photographed the frames. This sounds like an easy part of the process, but it's tricky. I built a simple lightbox from instructions on the web. This time I had abundant natural sunlight to light up most of the box, so the pictures turned out a little different. I usually snap about 25 or 30 pictures per piece, in order to get five good shots that I can use on the Etsy site.

Once the pictures are taken, there is a little photoshop enhancement involved. Mostly that's cropping, resizing and adjusting colors, but sometimes it's completely re-doing the shot. With five good images, I move on to writing the descriptions. In these two cases, I went with simple descriptive sentences and a little fun.

Posting items on Etsy is incredibly easy. Each item gets about 28 words worth of "tags" that help people find the art. Some are materials and some tags are just simply key word tags. I've found that the more creative the tags, the easier it is for other Etsy retailers to find my pieces for Etsy treasuries.

With these two new frames posted, and two pieces of art sold today, I'm turning my attention back to the headboard, mirror and one custom ordered piece. It will be a fun summer. :)

Progress

Well, two things finally got me off my butt and back to work on these frames. First, I had a buyer give me some amazing and glowing praise for some work. It is amazing how kind words can really motivate you, isn't it? Second, I made a check list and this is the last thing on the list "finish nat park frames and post them." I'm headed out of town for a conference next week and my studio is a mess. I need to complete at least one project before I head out, these frames are it. The picture shows them coated with polyurethane and drying nicely on my picnic table.

I've also started a quick additional series of frames with some old vintage dominos, playing cards and some vintage Vegas postcards. So much for a tidier studio next week. :)

Stalled

June is always a crazy month for me - my birthday, my garden, my job, my life... it all collides. I think it has something to do with sunny days and warm weather. I have several pieces of frames that I have every intention of completing today. Tomorrow, my "Obbligato" piece will be showcased on Etsy's Art Showcase and I need to add to my stock before then.

On the list of "excuses for why art has stalled" I can add the fact that my miter saw is broken. Well, the all important safety mechanism is broken. The parts to repair it cost nearly as much as a replacement saw. That really bothers me. The old saw was bought for projects around the house and probably wasn't meant for the volume of work I've put it through. I'm thinking that I need to invest in a more industrial miter saw.

Watch for more posts later today.

Picture holders 2

Stumbling on the notion that the face of the stair tread could be covered in printed material instead of leaving the natural wood exposed was an interesting twist. I started sorting through the collection of vintage print material I've stockpiled. I came across an atlas of the United States compiled by National Geographic and copyrighted, 1960. Towards the back were a couple of pages of wonderful maps of our National Parks. The maps have a beautiful lemon yellow color to them. (I've been drawn to this shade of yellow a lot lately. I bought two shirts in this same hue last weekend. I think it's a classic June color and it probably reflects my ache for more sunlight. We've had 20 consecutive days of rain in Portland - very wet, even for the Pacific Northwest.)

Using maps from Grand Teton and Yellowstone as the base, I started building the collage in a little more intentional/less random way than usual. On the Teton frame, I found the words "adventurer" and "such" from my old dictionary and stuck a little string of music between them. Using "adventurer" is an obvious choice for this amazing landscape, but the phrase "Of a quality that has been or is to be specified" in the definition of "such" really struck me as a personal note, a piece of one's own interpretation, on their experience in Grand Teton. As a bow to randomness, I slipped in the music and a small vintage postage stamp on the larger bottom rail. On the Yellowstone frame, I went with an intentional international flair. Yellowstone National Park is arguably the most well-known national park in America, second only to Yosemite perhaps. I've layered a series of colorful international stamps on the righthand side of the map and dropped the word "find" on the lower rail. I'm hesitating on gluing this one together for some reason and I think it's the lack of randomness in the layout. When this gut instinct kicks in, I tend to trust it and leave the piece on my drawing board for a day or two... until the mood or muse finds me.

Picture holders 1

On Monday, we finally got a stretch of warm sunny weather and I ripped apart sseveral pieces of stair treads to create some new picture holders. Several buyers have requested larger picture holders than what I'd had recently sold on my site, so I put the Romeo & Juliet headboard on the back burner for a day and started these frames/holders. (And yes, I still got a lot done on the headboard!)

The picture holders begin with large stair treads (the big wooden piece that you actually step on in a staircase) that were rejected for any number of reasons, but most often because the unusual grain pattern in one doesn't match the other 14 in the package. I have A LOT of pieces of treads in all sorts of wood; everything from red and white oak to fir, brazilian cherry, and something from South America called ipe (pronounced e-pay). The process begins with a template for a photo. People asked for larger frames, so I found a wonderful vintage picture of my Grandfather and Grandmother from January 1965.  I like using this picture of my grandparents, I like to think my Grandfather's spirit (he was carpenter) is a part of the process. Oddly, my grandfather is my current age in this picture. The photo measures 3.5 inches square. I made a little paper template that size.

I took the paper template to my wood pile and pulled out about 20 pieces of tread. Since I'm working on the Shakespeare pieces, I sort of cheated and went the easiest route. I picked pieces of tread that would need minimal trimming and sanding. That narrowed my pile down to about 12 good pieces. I pulled out my table saw and miter box. The table saw is used to rip the larger pieces into managable smaller pieces. The miter box trims the managable pieces into nice square or rectangular shapes. This shaping process narrowed my pile down to a select 8 pieces.

Finally, I selected the rails for the frames. The rails are the little beveled wood pieces that actually hold the picture to the tread. Again, I had A LOT of strips of interesting wood to pick from - these strips of wood are usually scrap pieces of flooring used to separate and protect finer-grade molding in shipment. I eye-balled several little strips and chopped them down with the miter box. I chose some larger strips to decoupage with images and some finer wood to leave is more natural state.

Pictured are some initial layouts. This week I will determine what images to cover which pieces. I'm thinking about changing it up a little this time and decoupaging the tread, while leaving the rails natural. I have some wonderful vintage materials to use including a driving guide to France from 1955 (also used in the Indochine artwork), a great map of San Francisco from the 70s, a wonderful book in German with cool illustrations, a zillion odd old stamps, and a great old book of music. More coming soon...