Monday, 4 July 2011
Thursday, 30 June 2011
Money-saving Tips for Artists
I’ve spent most of this month putting together a group of new greeting card designs to submit to publishers. I’ve found it quite a scary process so, to get me started with some enthusiasm, I paid a visit to the treasure chest that is our local Art Shop* and stocked up on some lovely new art supplies.
As any artist will know, the price of a new pad of good quality paper, a watercolour brush, a bottle of acrylic ink and one or two minor items made quite a dent in my bank balance that would need a lot of cards sales to fill. It made me wish, not for the first time, that I was a writer so that I could manage on just a notebook and pencil!
Art materials are invariably expensive, especially in comparison to what most of us earn from our art. The term, ‘starving artist’ wasn’t coined without good reason.
But there are ways to economise without jeopardising the quality of our work and I thought I’d list a few of my little money-saving tricks and hope that you will share yours –
1. Save unused paint. At the end of a painting session, you may be able to salvage unused paint by wrapping the palette loosely but securely in cling-film or a sealed small plastic bag.
2. Save on sketch pads. Make a pad of paper for trying out ideas by saving any sheets of A4 paper – junk-mail letters and so on – that have a clean side. Use a bulldog clip to fix them to a firm surface such as a rectangular place-mat, if you have one. If not, save the firm cardboard back of a sketchpad or any pad of art paper and use that for the backing.
3. Save on expensive watercolour or pastel paper. Sometimes it’s perfectly possible to use the back of a ‘failed’ painting.
4. Paint smaller. If, like me, you like to paint big, this will be quite a challenge but designing greeting cards at 5” x7” (or more often, 7.5” x 10.5”) has shown me that it’s possible to adjust.
5. Save on palettes. There are many items of packaging, especially in boxes of chocolates or biscuits, that make excellent paint palettes and, as they don’t cost anything, you can throw them away when you’ve finished and avoid all that tedious palette-washing.
6. Make collages! This is the cheapest way to make art that I’ve discovered. I often use remnants of gouache that have dried on the palette for painting the paper. It gives some interesting paint effects as well as cleaning the palette for me!
The only materials/equipment I need for my collages are:
- glue (an ordinary glue stick is fine!)
- a packet of coloured tissue paper from the stationers
- some backing card (I use some 300 gsm printer card that I bought that my printer wouldn’t accept)
- a sharp craft knife and spare blades
- scissors
- cutting mat
- tracing paper
7. Use every ounce of your creativity to utilise what you already have! For instance, when I blew up my expensive A3 scanner – oops! – a neighbour kindly and ingeniously converted it to a light-box! But if you need a light-box but don’t want to spend the money, you’ll find plenty of instructions online for making one more cheaply. For years I happily used a desk-lamp underneath a glass topped coffee table.
I’m sure there are plenty of other ways to save money on art materials and equipment.
What are yours?
* Our local Art Shop and Gallery now has an online shop, with very reasonable prices. Just click on the line drawing on the home page to enter the site.
Monday, 27 June 2011
Thursday, 23 June 2011
A Fish out of Water!
I can relate all too well to this ‘feeling weird’ - feeling 'different' from the people I knew. When my children were young, we lived in a very nice village in the South East of England, in ‘commuterland’ ie within commuting distance to London. I had lots of friends, made mostly through shared activities with our children, but I didn’t know one single artist.
As our children grew up and reached school age, most of the other ‘mums’ went back to work. Their jobs were often part-time, so were sometimes referred to as ‘a little job’ – mostly in some secretarial, administrative or receptionist field. I didn’t go back to my teaching job. I began a correspondence course in Interior Design.
It was fascinating and I threw myself into it wholeheartedly. I learnt technical drawing, colour theory, all about building materials etc and I wrote mammoth essays for the ‘History of Design’ module. But, even though the course was somewhat on the outer fringes of ‘arty’, I was still met with puzzled looks whenever I replied to the question, ‘What do you do?’
I felt altogether like a ‘fish out of water’!
Luckily I found my fishbowl full of water when we moved to Norwich. Not only was there an Art School in the city but the Adult Education centre had a thriving Art Department, which spawned a kind of ‘cafe society’ social life. But that aside, Norwich is the sort of place where you wouldn’t be surprised to hear that your cleaning lady paints mandalas or the surveyor you employed for your house refurbishment dabbles in watercolours.
But then again, in places where I’ve lived since, it’s been back to the ‘feeling weird’ though it has come to matter less to me as time goes on.
It seems as if there are still remnants of the notion of ‘artists’ colonies’, where artists gathered to live together, outside of the mainstream of society, thought of by the rest of society as ‘weirdos’ because of their unconventional ways of dressing and behaving. In the fifties, my mother wouldn’t allow me to go to Art College because they were ‘full of beatniks’!
But the internet has changed all that! Once you become aware of just how many people are pursuing artistic careers, it seems as ‘normal’ to be an artist as to be anything else.
Another factor has changed that ensures that an artist feels like a part of society as a whole, not separated off from the mainstream, either as an individual or as part of a community of artists. Nowadays, in large measure because of the internet, artists need to be business-people as well if they are going to earn a living from their art.
When ‘bricks and mortar’ galleries were the main source of sales, a lot of the business side of things could be left to the gallery to take care of. Not any longer! We have to learn about marketing, promoting, networking, Search Engine Optimisation...all of which brings us into contact with non-artists. Although we might not necessarily enjoy this side of things, it does seem to have blurred the dividing line between ‘artists’ and ‘others’ and chances are we are feeling at least slightly less ‘weird’ than in times past!
But I still struggle to explain to friends that my 'work' as an artist/designer is NOT something I look forward to taking time off from at the end of the week; nor do I look forward to 'retiring' - quite the opposite, in fact!
Anyone else have that problem?
Monday, 20 June 2011
Thursday, 16 June 2011
Wordpress or blogger - which do you prefer?
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| Morning mist over the River Usk obscuring the Blorenge Mountain |
Is Wordpress better than blogger?
When I decided to start a blog, the question was: should I use Wordpress or Google’s 'blogger'? Both had their devotees, with a slight bias towards Wordpress. I finally decided to plump for blogger for the simple reason that I already had a googlemail account so I felt I’d be ‘keeping it in the family’, so to speak.
But since I joined Twitter last year, I’ve been reading a great many blog posts about blogging and there often seems to be an assumption that any serious blogger (in the sense of a person who blogs!) will naturally be using Wordpress - and I’m wondering why. It almost seems as if there are first- and second-class bloggers but perhaps I’m attributing a kind of technological snobbery to this, that exists only in my slightly befogged mind.
It’s true that blogger does have its occasional ‘mad moment’ and recently I’ve been getting ‘error 503’ rather frequently. But refreshing the page seems to solve that error quickly and effortlessly and on the whole I rather like using blogger. It mostly seems to do ‘what it says on the tin’!
Content aside, I have quite strong negative feelings about Wordpress. When I visit a Wordpress blog, my first visual impression is generally less ‘user-friendly’ than a blogger blog. It often takes just that important fraction of a second longer to locate the actual blog post on the page. With time and attention at a premium, that matters.
And then there’s the business of commenting. Many a time, I’ve decided not to bother with commenting because there seem to be more boxes to fill in – email address, website URL etc – than with blogger. And if I want to be informed of follow-up comments, emails arrive which require me to ‘subscribe’, not just once, but for every set of comments.
But probably the feature of blogger that I most appreciate is the ‘follow’ button. Just a couple of clicks and a small adjustment to my bloglist in the sidebar and I can easily see when the blogs I follow are updated. No need to bother with RSS feeds, Google Reader and the like, which I have to contend with if I want to know when a Wordpress blog is updated!
There is a huge amount that I don’t understand about computers and the internet – is there a person alive who knows it all? So it’s likely that I am missing something about Wordpress, due to my lack of knowledge and understanding. But when I start to read about the wonderful ‘plug-ins’ and ‘apps’ that are available with Wordpress, my mind seems to turn into something resembling the mists that often obscure the Blorenge Mountain that I can see from my upstairs windows. I believe the correct term for this is ‘cognitive shock’ and it’s not a condition I enjoy!
So, please, if there are any Wordpress advocates out there, is it possible to explain the advantages to someone who is not entirely technologically challenged but who likes to keep things computer-related as simple as possible - to free up as much ‘brainspace’ as possible for the important things in life?
Monday, 13 June 2011
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