Friday Thoughts (Ep.32)

Hello hello lovely patrons, another happy Friday to you!

November is over, can you believe it? I'm normally connected enough to the present that it doesn't feel like time is whizzing by, but that's not the case with this season. It's been a busy busy month, and I'm excited to tell you all about it!

The biggest mountain I climbed this month has been the Holiday Commissions that I had on sale! I limited myself to 20 commissions and told the customers it would take around a month to complete and mail out. The last two weeks have been consumed with sketching these orders, emailing back and forth with customers (not to be underestimated), painting, and mailing out them as they were finished!

This year I made digital sketches of the portrait before I did the finished painting. After my customers approved them, I printed them out to scale and used my iPad as a lightbox to transfer the sketches to the finished watercolors.

Above you can see the digital sketches followed by the finished portraits!

Whenever I wasn't working at the cafe I was sitting at my kitchen table surrounded by portraits, with Gilmore Girls playing in the background. Having a show I've already seen or a podcast playing in the background helps keep me sitting in my chair working for longer, rather than getting distracted with snacks or surfing Instagram.

It was also helpful to paint the portraits in big batches like this. I finished 10 paintings in one day by switching between paintings. It lets one painting dry while I'm working on another one... and feels very productive!

I loved working on these portraits, I always do. But I learned a few big things during this sale.

20 portraits at this detail level in ~2 weeks is way too many. Give yourself a longer amount of time, have more frequent sales with fewer openings, 10 or MAX 15. I don't like the look of more realistic watercolor paintings, experiment with further stylization in portraits. Don't be afraid to use brighter colors in the portraits. Double the price, even for the sales. Zoom in closer on the characters, especially the 5x7 size portraits.

Biggest takeaways are that I NEED to charge more for the portraits, and I need to develop a portrait style that I feel reflects myself as an artist, rather than what I imagine the client wants.

This month I also had my first Black Friday/Small Business Saturday/Cyber Monday experience as a serious business, and I am pleasantly surprised! I had a 25% off sale, offered free shipping to orders of $30 or more, and released a couple of new items. I felt relatively unprepared for these events, not exactly knowing how much work I should put in or expect to get back. It ended up being my biggest boost in sales in the entire year! On one day I had 30 orders to pack, which felt like a huge boost from my regular batch of 2-3 orders. And that didn't even include the portraits to be mailed out!

It was so exciting to see my numbers climb higher than they ever had, and satisfying to see packages being delivered to strangers and friends all over the country. I see more established artists shipping out orders by the hundreds, and I'm reminded of where I want my business to be in the future. But I'm reminding myself to stop and pat myself on the back. I'm extremely proud of my first Holiday sale.

To prepare for the Black Friday craziness, I had a couple of items that needed to be photographed and listed. I wanted a bit of holiday color for these listings, unlike my standard white. This red backdrop is from a roll of wrapping paper that I found in someone's recycle bin on my walk home the other day. It worked perfectly in my messy kitchen photography studio! The garland was bought from the party section of Target for use at my markets, and I think added a festive touch to my listing photos!

Another big milestone that I'm so happy to have reached this month was 10,000 followers on Instagram! I'm amazed to have reached this within a year of my business beginning, amazed that more than 10,000 are looking at me and my art, amazed at how constantly kind and supportive people have been! 

To be honest I still can hardly process this. My brain says to just move on to the next thing, okay next 20k, next 50k, next 100k. My mind says don't talk about these successes too much, be humble but also be proud, it doesn't actually mean anything. My head is kind of spinning this month. I think I'll need a holiday break to process further, plan my future, to remind me to stay myself. I was intimidated when 500 people where watching my art, not to mention 10,000. Anyway...

I'm also proud that I've made time to make some fun little satisfying personal art during this month. Including this cute little vegan Thanksgiving illustration. It was meant to be your wallpaper for this month, but considering I didn't make it until the day before Thanksgiving, I figured you all have moved on past this holiday to others.

 Would you all like this little self-portrait as a wallpaper? Let me know and I'll get it goin for ya!

Non-Art Life:

 I have so many little personal things that I want to do that I haven't made the time for at all: getting a haircut, donating extra things to goodwill, doing yoga, journaling, playing the guitar or video games, organizing the craziness of my business/art supplies. Every evening I've been eating dinner (a little too often its been a can of soup with extra water and fresh greens added) then immediately falling asleep on the couch. It's felt like go go go, and I keep going because I imagine that a break will be in the near future.  I feel like I'm hanging on, but just barely! And I keeping going so fast because I remember the times over the summer where it felt like nothing was moving or happening, and I'm afraid that if I don't take advantage of this busy time then everything will grind to a halt.

I think I need to be better at balancing this work/life balance. I think I just hope that I can push this business far enough that I'll be able to drop my part-time job again, and then have enough time to balance the business and all of the other things I need to do to stay healthy.

Hm.

This looks concerning, but I promise I'm taking care of myself! It's just a busy time of year. I've had totally dead periods where it feels like nothing is ever going to happen, and now I'm having a busy period where it feels like it will never end. But it will either way, that's just the nature of life, not to mention business.

Okay, my little rant is over.

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If you stuck around long enough thank you, and I have an idea for you all! I wanted to send you all little surprise gift packages in the mail to say thank you for being my patron! It'll have a few goodies from my store, and a little card and note!

Email me or message me your address if you'd like one of these little gift packages! I'd be happy to send them to you! If no one responds maybe I'll post a reminder.

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Alrigty tighty, that's going to be all for today! I have a few more portraits left over to work on today, and tomorrow I'm going to take a little time for myself to decorate for Christmas!

Thanks for listening, you're amazing, I hope this had some small nugget of interesting or helpful. Reach for your dreams, take care of yourself, and have a great week!

xoxo

Ragon