Thursday, May 24, 2012

So What the Heck am I Doing Anyway?

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It may seem like I am having a non-productive, lazy week, but the truth is I've been busy and excited about the idea of finally putting together a real website with my own domain name! I'm a little scattered all over the internet as you can probably tell from all the big links in the sidebar (portfolio here, shop there, videos somewhere else...).

I've been using my blog as my "central hub", but don't really want to have blogger links on my business cards, you know?

I'm currently trying out Weebly because it is popular and free, and so far I am getting a kick out of it. If you know CSS you will have an advantage. I don't, so it took me all day and a LOT of trial and error to get something I liked! The drag & drop feature is lovely, however limited. For the cost, it's quite fantastic as far as I can tell.

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Okay, here's the other thing.

If you follow me on facebook,  you might have noticed that I have also had pricing on the mind this week. I have been in "research mode" (before the website play distracted me) because I was beginning to think my pricing is off.

It's not a good thing to stick out of a gallery show in terms of pricing, you kind of want to be in the same range as others in your group. Your "group" being artists who have similar work and similar experience as you.

I have to say that researching pricing has been one of the most frustrating searches I've had to do. There are no concrete answers, and sometimes it feels like nothing is correct... that's normal. But there are some straight forward guidelines out there that really help, even if they are just guidelines.


What does all this mean?

It means that I'm not pricing myself for the market, which does a disservice to my local artists and, of course myself.

It means that some time soon, I'm going to have to raise my prices on my original artworks (I haven't decided on the journals yet). I still want my work to be available to as many people as possible, so I will make more 8x10 reproductions available of recent work (I've been a little behind on that, sorry).  I won't be increasing the price of those.

I'm telling you this ahead of time just in case anyone is waiting to purchase later on. I haven't figured everything out yet, but I can agree not to make any changes until at least June 1.

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Whew! Hopefully when I get all of this fun stuff settled I can go back to painting! And start a new art journal too. :)

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