Friday Thoughts (Ep. 18) Art Walk Edition!

Hello Patrons, happy Saturday! I decided to share this a day late so that I could update you all on my first show at Fremont Art Walk!

It’s been quite a whirlwind week preparing for my first show/market/Art Walk. I knew it would be busy but I didn’t anticipate so much detail work and errand work that would come up to prepare. I learned so much about planning, printing, packaging, and pricing that I know will carry over into the other market opportunities I have coming up in the next few months.

The first step to prepare for this show was to plan all of the things that needed to get done by Friday, breaking the steps down in to smaller steps and organized by what day they needed to be done. Beginning of the week priority, ordering everything I forgot to order before I left and framing the original paintings.

I found it comforting to set up the whole show before taking it, to make sure everything looked nice together. But one of the first things I learned during this show was to be flexible... because whatever you’re picturing is not necessarily what reality becomes.

The location for the art walk and show is in an office building, essentially a VERY long skinny hallway. I had had no idea how much space I was going to have, and when we arrived with my rolling suitcase full of what I’d worked on for the past month I suddenly felt very small and underprepared. The above photo was one third of the hallway. I pulled out all of my work and said ‘is this all I made?’ The scale of my art also felt tiny.

But we shrugged and hung up my art in what we felt was the most presentable way for the Art Walk.  As I worked I recognized something I hadn’t realized I was learning at art school, the value of presentation. At school the professors would comment on the smallest details, including labels, framing, quality of print, and consistency. I felt like I subconsciously used this skill for my show.

I’m pretty proud of my labels.

So we hung the show. Exciting! Now it was back to work on my “sellables”.

A few things I learned while preparing for the show that might seem obvious to most artists but I still had to learn:

1. Work in CYMK when preparing art for prints, RGB for web. This has to do with the way that printers lay down color, and saves a lot of unexpected color surprises. I would have saved a lot of ink had I known this. Similarity...

2. Always do tiny test prints so you avoid those color surprises without wasting a lot of ink.

3. Print using PERCEPTUAL rendering intent rather than RELATIVE COLORMETRIC. At least test to see which works for your piece. I kept having this issue where my yellows where printing with a hideous green tint, and I did all this extra work to try to change the color on photoshop, before I found that this was the problem. As far as I understand, printers dont have the same span of color printing as a computer image, so if a print has a color the printer can’t create, the software will adjust to the closest color it can print. Relative colormetric will change ONLY the unprintable color and leave the rest, making the changed color looking out of place. Perceptual changes all the other colors as well. I’d recommend doing more research if you plan on making your own prints.

4. My final lesson is when doing big batches or prints like this for  festivals or conventions, find an online source for printing that will cut and print for me. It will save a ton of time and possibly money. The printer should be fine for individual orders.

So obviously I learned a lot about printing, and I can see how in the future when my business has a little more money I’ll be able to outsource a lot of this hand work. Like hand cutting cardboard backing for all of my prints (thanks Zach.) Or hand drawing, cutting, and labeling  earring and pin packaging because I didn’t want to use anymore ink. 

All of the little hand made details that took forever and could have been skipped with machines or more money or both, remind me of when I use to hand make little things like this for my American Girl dolls when I was a kid. For FUN! That’s not to say I’m going to hand make all these tiny details forever for my business (packaging, stickers, labels, business cards, price labels, signage, banners, EVERYTHING) because hopefully my business will outgrow that ability. BUT, it did remind me that I LOVE this job. I love that I am making this business for myself.

So after all of the month of preparation and painting and stressing and spending money, I finally came to the night of my first show. A quick talk with my mother reminded me to enjoy the procreas, remember that this is a goal that I’ve always had, and the bar will continue to raise so just savor this now. And I definitely did.

We brought a box of wine from Trader Joe’s. The grocery store was out of cups so we borrowed tiny soppy cups from an artist upstairs and served our boxed wine in those. (Turns out people don’t really care what they’re drinking wine from.) I met my goal of selling at least one item, and then another, and another, and another! A few groups of my wonderful friends came and circled through, leaving behind their love and taking a few of my prints and jewelry pieces. Strangers came and introduced themselves. It wasn’t busy, wasn’t completely dead. I watched in amazement as people browsed through my items and decided to buy a few with smiles on their faces. I played oldies on my iPad and used my first POS (point of sale) and made and used my first inventory spreadsheet,

It was surprising and happy and inspiring and felt easy and natural and good. It even felt interestingly good to have all these expectations, good and bad, to be broken or changed. It felt like rolling with the punches, and I liked it.

It was a small thing in the scope of the art world, in the scope of all that I plan to do, or even in what I thought it would be. But it was exactly what I needed. It was perfect. And there’s many more to come.

Well that was a lot! I hope you all enjoyed a few weeks of insights in to my first in person public display of my art! I feel like a weight has been lifted off of my shoulders and I’m ready to spring in to whatever the rest of the year has to offer!

I hope you all are having a wonderful weekend. Your support on here continuously inspires me to soldier on in this field, and I thank you! And love you!!

I’ll close this weeks update with two pictures of my studio manager sitting in small containers.

Have a great week! xoxo,

Ragon

P.s. Special thanks to Tori Sharp for a lot of the pictures from my show! She has an awesome Patreon that you should check out!