Woods Working
One December day, I was captivated by a mid-morning snowfall, and when the sun came out on the backyard trees loaded with snow, I just had'ta snap a photo, don't-cha-know. Then I just hadta paint it. And I got to thinking as I was working, "Hey this is a small painting, I could do a lot of these," and started thinking about the general idea of what I could do with a pile of these.
There was a movement, I guess you might call it, that was started back in about 2001 by a guy who decided to produce a paintng a day, and market them online. He was fairly successful. I poked around a bit more in some old art magazines, and online and turned up a half dozen "marketing your art' articles that became the bones of my business plan to do that. I noodled through them, took some notes, nosed back through a copy of 'Art Marketing 101" by Constance Smith (artmarketing.com), made an appointment with some good people at the univeristy Small Business Development Center, and with Jill Berryman, Executive Director at Sierra Arts Foundation, valued friend and tireless supporter of all things art. Now I'm legal, with the appropriate licenses and permits, a domain name and a business plan.
So this is where I start. This website, and the images in the Painting A Day gallery are the first real step in this project.
I did a painting a day, more or less, for about a month and a half, with a full 31 little gems finished as my starting stock. I skipped a day here and there, a couple of days I did two. That might have been a mite ambitious with all the other projects left undone, so I've scaled back a bit. Several a week seemed like a more reasonable long-term goal. Nine years later I'm still at it.
The Process
I'm mining subjects from my loosely organized (Hah!) trove of travel photos in albums, file boxes, slides, computer images.
I do some plein aire work from time to time, and and take a lot of photos of scenes that catch my eye. One of ten maybe makes it to the thumbnail drawing stage.
Right now, I'm doing commissions for a few people, working from photos and their rough sketches.
Hoping to sell more work, I'm doing what the art making business gurus say and putting in some regular time marketing my stuff, like updating the statement.
But I'm still a sucker for a bright group of flowers against a shadowed wall, a spray of autumn leaves in afternoon light, a vista of the town in morning fog. These gifts may generate just a quick snap of the smartphone camera, others might get the full plein aire treatment, still others a group of detailed photos for a full composition later in the studio.