The hapless quartet's adventures in Australia steam into the top spot, shoving Guardians of the Galaxy into second
More UK box office analysis Continue reading...
SOURCE: Film | The Guardian - Read entire story here.
Commissions for artists are limited only by one’s imagination: people, house, and pet portraits, funerary urns, custom jewelry, garden sculpture, and more.
Regardless of the commissions you might be offered, use these pointers to make sure you pull off your project with flying colors and enjoy the process.
Create a special section on your website for commission information. Include steps for commissioning a piece and testimonials from happy patrons alongside images of the finished work.
I snapped this photo in the garage of the Milwaukee Art Museum and I’m happy to say that, according to her site, Susan Weres is still doing her thing. And she’s probably surprised to see this photo. I wonder how many commissions this tire cover has landed her.
See that your marketing materials have both an email address and a phone number.
At least one artist has lost an opportunity for commission because she didn’t have a phone number on her site and her email was down. How do I know? Because I was the person looking for an artist to help a neighbor with her project.
Absolutely you should turn down a commission if you can’t give it your best effort.
I heard of a muralist who behaved from the start as if she didn’t want the commission.
When the patron contacted her, she whined about what her commute would be, and her daughter’s school schedule, and, and, and. Then she had the nerve to ask her potential patron if he would get the paint and trace the design if she were to accept his offer.
Talk about poor customer service!
If you ask potential patrons to do half the work, why would they need to hire you in the first place? No one should have to endure this game – and it is a game. If you can’t do the work, just say so.
©2012 Ruth de Vos, Can You Catch Them. Quilt, 160 x 87.5 centimeters.
It’s perfectly okay to turn down projects that don’t align with your situation. Better that than wasting your time and someone else’s.
Don’t hesitate to share the name of an artist you think would be a better fit for the project. This is excellent customer service and may save you frustrations that are the result of over-promising.
If the commission seems like a good fit for you, show the patron why you’re the best person for the job.
Prove that you can deliver what they’re asking for and that you can meet any deadlines.
Write a proposal that spells out all of the details. Offer two or three options, keeping in mind that people tend to pick the mid-priced option.
Commissioned artwork should be priced higher than your other work. Some artists charge as much as 50{b29860ee6b7af5bf99d3058cca3182816eed414b47dab251265e93b8c00e69b1} more for commissioned pieces. This covers the PITA (pain in the you-know-what) factor that often enters into the commission process. Even if your patron is a dream, you still have to schedule it in with your personal projects, and personal work is what most artists prefer attending to. If you aren’t getting paid enough to take a break from your other work, you’ll be tempted to procrastinate.
Commissions aren’t for everyone. You must be willing to work as a collaborative partner and learn to enjoy the process.
How about you? What have you learned about doing commissions?
Want more commissions? My Art Biz Makeover event will help you present yourself in the most professional light.
SOURCE: Art Biz Blog - Read entire story here.
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Hughes’ first solo show in Toronto in 10 years opens TONIGHT at Division Gallery. Our Sarah Letovsky brings you a sneak peek at this epic new body of work.
By: Sarah Letovsky
It’s with both a sincere and ironic nod to traditional Canadiana that Manitoban artist Simon Hughes presents his latest body of work, “The Central Region,” at Division Gallery. The show’s primary component is a series of large-scale watercolour paintings, a fact that’s incredibly hard to believe, given the painstaking accuracy and geometric precision that characterizes the work.
It’s immediately obvious that Hughes is working in a language defined by both early Modernism as well as Group of Seven legends like Lawren Harris, by abstracting the Canadian landscape into a series of shapes and flat colours. A broken-up patch of ice becomes a crowd of triangles; the aurora borealis transforms into a hanging chandelier of orderly geometric shards. Hughes’ work has always focused on our collective relationship to the landscape – but this is a marked departure from his more narrative scenes of condo-like log cabins and architectural structures interacting with human figures. In fact, a human presence is noticeably absent from this show – although we do see glimpses of civilization represented by cookie cutter houses and trucks spread out under the northern lights in works like Orange County, Alberta (2013), which Hughes mentions is inspired by the virus-like suburban sprawl he experienced in California. In this new work, Hughes turns the telescope around to experience the bigger picture, and the results are truly enchanting. The once outright narrative quality of his work has been subdued into subtle traces of human presence that produce a unique sense of (dis)quiet.
“The Central Region” feels both familiar and playfully experimental. In a somewhat tongue-in-cheek triptych, Red Studio (2013), Hughes presents us with a Matisse-like studio interior where a prototypical Canadian landscape painting hangs on the wall while a snowy urban landscape can be seen through the studio window. This contrast not only highlights a growing tension between the urban and the natural, but also makes a subtle comment about our changing relationship to (and perhaps fetishization of) traditional Canadian iconography.
While the show does, in many ways, question our own fascination with a landscape that we may or may not experience in a genuine way, and even goes so far as to imply that the landscape itself is changing because of our own encroachment – it also pays homage to the pure aesthetic pleasure to be found in nature, with iridescent dancing colours, sensitive gradients, and seductive geometric surfaces.
“The Central Region” is on view at Division Gallery from February 27–April 5, 2014
Sarah Letovsky is a Toronto-based artist, writer, and arts administrator.
SOURCE: Art Bitch | Toronto art review and blog - Read entire story here.
Read MoreI was just speaking at SoulFest (August 7-9). It's a music festival with evangelical roots. The band Switchfoot played. I'm several things but not...
Read more: L'Abri, Religion, Rock-N-Roll, Jerry Falwell., Religious Right, Music, "Fading West, Faith, Spirituality, " Switchfoot, Soulfest, Francis Schaeffer, Religion News
SOURCE: Music on Huffington Post - Read entire story here.
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A glance at the lineups of the major film festivals reveals how strong a year 2013 was for cinema, though the most important films, as is usually the case, wouldn’t see the light of day until about a year or two later. Personally, even more than it did in 2012, cinema took a back seat for various reasons and I could see only a fraction of what I wanted to this year. (Favorite discoveries this year include Douglas Sirk, Harun Farocki, Ernst Lubitsch and Samuel Fuller.) This post lists my favorite films that premiered in 2013. Other films I really liked were Asghar Farhadi’s The Past, Richard Linklater’s Before Midnight, Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color, Andrew Bujalski’s Computer Chess, Steven Soderbergh’s Behind the Candelabra and Andrzej Wajda’s Walesa: Man of Hope. Hope that 2014 will be a much better year on all fronts.
“Religion is the opium of the people” wrote Karl Marx. Leonardo DiCaprio’s Wall Street evangelist and stock market prophet, Jordan Belfort, might just agree, even though the kingdom of heaven he promises is very much of this world. Martin Scorsese’s loud, unhinged and debauched portrait of the rise, fall and resurrection of the loud, unhinged and debauched Belfort is the anti-Christ story of our age: a man who lets others suffer for his sake and for whom every object, experience and sensation in the world is worth commodifying. Scorsese’s presents late capitalism in all its rapaciousness and vulgarity, as a force which appropriates pretty much everything in its way, including criticism, to gain momentum, as a psychosexual space in which the id is given free rein and libido finds an outlet in the act of moneymaking and as a state of perpetual sensory stimulation where wealth accumulation for the sake of it becomes as addictive as sex and drugs. Rife with film references and genre games, The Wolf of Wall Street is as much a duet between Scorsese’s spiritual concerns and the topicality of Terence Winter’s adaptation as it is a soaring, endlessly fascinating example of commercial filmmaking that witnesses a veteran craftsman at the top of his game.
Irrationality is also at the heart of Alain Guiraudie’s simmering Stranger by the Lake, in which the object of fear is also the object of desire and where death and sex– la mort et la petite mort – are inseparably intertwined. Like Tsai Ming Liang’s quasi-phantom protagonists and their deserted habitats, the ghost-like characters in Guiraudie’s film haunt the lake by the day and vanish by night. And like Tsai’s cinema, Stranger employs a repetition of similar shots, spaces, movements and perspectives that both imparts it a structural simplicity and makes the gradual deviations from them even more pronounced. Marked by three distinct spaces – the woods, the beach and the parking lot – that trace the Freudian topology of the human psyche, the film presents a homo-normative world in which heterosexual presence is literally pushed to the margins, resulting in a level playing field divested of the problems of male gaze. More importantly, Stranger is perhaps the most visually accomplished film of the year and its handling of the interaction between Caucasian bodies and sunlight, foliage, twilight sky and water surface recalls the finest Impressionist works, especially those of Pierre-Auguste and Jean Renoir.
An extremely inspired piece of filmmaking, Park Chan-wook’s brilliant Stoker contains some of the most exciting cinematography, editing, sound and production design seen this year. Like Polanski’s movies, Park’s film is about the gradual induction and eventual decimation of Good by Evil. As in Stranger by the Lake, what is most seductive is also the most frightful. Fear and desire are enlaced together and embodied by the figure of Uncle Charlie, who is both an instrument of death and object of sexual desire. Stoker is evidently the result of synergy between a strongly authorial filmmaker who thinks primarily in terms of images and a rich, meaty script that draws as much from horror cinema and literature as it does from Hitchcock’s body of work. Park’s erotic, alluring economy of expression distinguishes itself from the self-congratulatory shorthand of ad filmmaking in the way it establishes subtler association between images and sounds in the film. Strikingly directed with strongly vertical compositional elements and an eerily accentuated sound palette, Stoker is a glorious return to form for Park, who is among the most remarkable visual stylists working today.
Takashi Miike’s juggernaut of a film, the proto-dystopian Shield of Straw, works off a premise familiar to Western movie audience: a group of cops have to transfer a pedophilic killer from the city of Fukuoka to the police headquarters in Tokyo. But there’s a problem. A multi-billionaire has announced a bounty on the guy so massive that it overshadows any fear of imprisonment. What’s more, the killer is such a despicable figure that any residual moral compunction about knocking him off is eliminated. The cops, as a result, have to protect him from not only the entire Japanese population but also themselves. A distant cousin to Scorsese’s film, Shield of Straw imagines a society where both moral and legal obstacles – the superegoist constructs of sin and crime – to Darwinian social-climbing are eliminated or, worse, justified. More impressive than the demonstration of how such an economic system becomes a perfect incubating ground for greed is its central existential dilemma, in which the obligation is on the individual not only to do the right thing, but to understand what the right thing is.
How do you represent history on film that was never documented visually? This is the question that to which Rithy Panh’s highly original, challenging and affecting work responds. Seeking primarily to be a document of life in the Khmer Rouge concentration camps, the film uses neither fictional recreation, which might end up graphic and exploitative, nor animation, which lacks the material presence that photographs offer, but hundreds of meticulously hand-made clay dolls that stand in for people who are to be represented, the concept being that clay would symbolically contain the remains of the camp victims. The resulting film places the audience at a distance from the horrors being described while always retaining a space for empathy. A densely detailed voiceover , on the other hand, recounts Panh’s personal experience at the camps, his lament about images that should or should not have been made, the way cinema had become a tool for totalitarian oppression and reflections on the wacky “Marx meets Rousseau” ideology of the Khmer Rouge that justified the camps. The outcome is a thoroughly thought-provoking essay film that has both the simplicity of a historical document and the ambitiousness of a deconstruction project.
One of the regrettable things about Nana Ekvtimishvili’s and Simon Gross’ absolutely heartbreaking debut In Bloom is that it is being promoted and received merely as a coming-of-age film set against Soviet collapse. Though the film is certainly that, it is grossly unfair to pigeonhole a wrenching portrayal of female camaraderie on par with anything that Pedro Almodóvar has made into a convenient marketing category. Two 14-year old ‘women’ Eka and Natia, superbly played by debutants Lika Babulani and Mariam Bokeria, in the process of transitioning to adulthood, negotiate the social and cultural problems that plague a country in transition and quietly break patriarchal norms. Dysfunctional families, street violence and the war with Abkhazia are all definitely forces that shape the young women’s lives, but they reside on the periphery of the narrative, which, like the finest Italian Neorealist films, does not underestimate the power of individual agency while acknowledging social constructivism. There is as much truth in Natia acceding to be married to a guy she does not like as there is in Eka tossing the Chekhovian pistol into a lake.
Trust a wild music video director like Michel Gondry to come up with the zaniest, trippiest, most imaginative film of the year. Adapted from Boris Vian’s (apparently unfilmable) book L’écume des jours, Mood Indigo is escapist cinema in the truest sense of the term and presents a universe free from the laws of physics and logic. So you have the Pianocktail which concocts a drink based on the notes you play, a rubbery dance form where legs wobble and sway with the woozy jazz soundtrack, split-screen weather conditions, a doorbell that needs to be squashed every time it is set off, a star philosopher named Jean-Sol Partre discoursing from inside a gigantic pipe and a floor full of stenographers writing in chorus the film they are in. Mood Indigo’s gently satirical tale of downward mobility embodies the spirit of the best musicals, producing a strange, unwieldy yet alluring film that combines levity of form with the somberness of its story. Rivaling Terry Gilliam at his surreal best, Gondry’s ceaselessly inventive film is something of a descendant to Georges Méliès’ and Émile Cohl’s cinema of dreams.
Ben Rivers’ and Ben Russell’s hypnotic tripartite work presents a single nameless character, played by musician Robert A A Lowe, living in three different social setups: as a part of a commune in Estonia, as a loner in the Finnish woods and as a member of a Norwegian Black Metal group. Specifically, the film shows the character in three states of being, in which the identity of the individual is subordinated to larger ones – the New Ageist assimilation of individual into the community, the Tarkovskian oneness with nature and the Black Metallic transcendence into the realm of the occult. These, on a more general level, are also the three avenues through which men create meaning in their lives – purposeful communal living, Thoreau-esque simple life in harmony with nature and creation of art. Although Spell’s significance arises from the interaction between its three parts, the individual segments themselves contain enthralling passages, especially the trancelike last section, made almost entirely out of the close-ups of performers’ faces and the discordant soundscape, transports the viewer to an experiential plane far removed from his mundane corporeality. It reinforces what André Bazin said of cinema: the Real can be arrived at only through artifice.
A decidedly worn-out premise is at the origin of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Like Father, Like Son: two babies are swapped at the hospital at the time of birth and end up in different social strata. What could have been an exercise in broad comedy or, even worse, class stereotyping – though the film is a comedy and does double as a fine comedy of class-bound manners – is instead transformed into a piercing examination of parenthood, in which bringing up a child becomes a process of coming to terms with one’s own flaws and insecurities. Through turn of events the film undermines the perspective that men look at their offspring as a continuation of bloodline and women view them as the recipients of their care and affection, While, on the surface, the film seems to be merely a cautionary tale about the perils of spending too little time with your kid, on careful unraveling, it reveals itself as a much more delicate look at the tradeoffs one has to make in bringing up a child, at the question of where to interfere and where to let go.
With Drinking Buddies, the insanely prolific Joe Swanberg, who wrote and directed a modest three films in 2013 and acted in five, has made a work that might well situate him in the line of filmmakers like Eric Rohmer, Richard Linklater and Hong Sang-soo in both its structural simplicity – marked by numerous small symmetries – and its fine observations on human relationships. The terrific ensemble is as much an author as Swanberg is and the actors evidently draw from personal experience. A naturalistic depiction of the lives of two friends at a brewery, the film treads the ever fuzzy boundary between friendship and romance. Like in the equally excellent Mexican comedy Club Sandwich (2013), Swanberg and his actors host a playful game of smudging the boundaries of sexual propriety by employing ambiguous actor positions, dialogue and physical interaction that fudges the accepted movie conventions about on-screen friendship and romance. If not anything else, Drinking Buddies is an embodiment of the shortcomings and apprehensions of the ‘millennial’ generation, for which the line between friendship and romance has become porous and tricky to negotiate.
SOURCE: The Seventh Art - Read entire story here.
One of the biggest excuses artists give for not being in more frequent contact with their lists is that they don’t want to bother people. You know what it’s like to receive tons of email and don’t want to contribute to the overwhelm.
I understand. Even though everyone on your list has opted in to hear from you, it still doesn’t feel right to email so many people if you haven’t established a marketing groove.
There’s a solution: Send emails only to people for whom they are appropriate.
In other words, target your messages rather than sending every email to every person on your list.
All of the attendees at my Nashville workshop are grouped together on my list. Photo courtesy of Mary Claire Crow
Email marketing platforms like Constant Contact, MailChimp, and Emma have the capability to segment an email list. If you haven’t used this feature, the first step is to research how to segment a list inside of your email platform of choice.
My email list is segmented automatically when someone purchases something from me. When I have an update for that product – usually in the form of a related blog post or article – I can send the information only to those people.
This segmentation by purchase means I also have buyers’ locations, which allows me to pull up names by state, province, or zip code.
Your segmentation might not be as automated as mine since most artists’ online shopping carts aren’t connected to their email platforms. Even so, it’s worth your time to consider taking these steps.
Each artist has his or her own unique circumstances that should be considered when segmenting a list.
Interests
If you make more than one line of work, consider dividing your list according to customer interests. For example, add all of the jewelry patrons to one list and functional pottery patrons to another list.
Buyers of Specific Products
Group everyone who purchases your e-book about mixing color in one list and those who buy your iPhone cases in another. Your sales volume determines how deep you go with the product level segmentation.
Everyone who buys a copy of my book from me is grouped together in my list. This is Eszter Rajna reading my book in the elegant tea lounge at the Randolph Hotel in Oxford.
Collectors
Collectors are people who have purchased a significant amount, whether in dollars or in quantity, from you. These are no doubt your VIPs that you want to treat especially well.
Students
Selling a service is much different than selling fine art. Because of this, you’ll get better results by grouping students together and further segmenting them according to their learning levels, geographical location, and interests.
All of the artists who started an Art Biz Coach marketing salon are grouped together in my list. This is a photo of the “Frozen Chosen” salon in Fairbanks, Alaska.
Geographical Region
The less information you ask people when they sign up for your list, the more likely they are to sign up. I ask for first name and email only. Over time, you can accumulate more information, such as location.
Segmenting lists by geography comes in handy when you do arts festivals or teach out of state. I live in a state (Colorado) where artists from around the country visit for our summer arts festivals. And, yet, I rarely know they’re here in advance.
Are you segmenting your list? Tell us how you slice and dice your names and how you use the various groups.
SOURCE: Artist Business-Building Strategies - Read entire story here.
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With rising construction costs and a shortage of workers and materials happening in Japan due to earthquake recovery and preparation for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, new construction methods need to be figured out. APOLLO Architects & Associates Co., Ltd. were approached by a couple to design a home in the Nakano ward of Tokyo that would have a short lead time and would adhere to a tight budget and the result is FRAME.
Instead of using regular wooden frameworks, they decided to use exposed concrete with FRP (fiber-reinforced plastic) for the structure. They also used a frame-waterproof material for the roof. Both of these options cut costs and manpower, making them a good option for construction in Japan.
The house also contains a studio on the first floor for the husband who’s a fashion photographer. Since the home is located in a flood zone, they raised the entrance by 800mm (~2.62 feet).
On the second floor, the home’s living area, they used teak wood for the ceiling helping to elongate the room as your eyes follow the lengths of the wood to the massive window at one end.
Teak wood is also used on the floor, as well as for the furniture and fixtures, creating warmth throughout the space. The floor-to-ceiling window fills the space with light and makes you forget that there’s glass there since it’s one single pane.
The interior walls are highly insulated with 60mm heat insulators. You’ll also spot more exposed concrete.
The kitchen cabinets are made from the same teak wood you see throughout, making the living area one cohesive space.
The third floor is open and will be the future children’s room, but in the meantime, they can use it as a gathering area or a game room.
They even managed to create an outdoor living space that feels private, yet open to enjoy the weather and the views.
Photos by Masao Nishikawa.
SOURCE: Design Milk » Architecture - Read entire story here.
Father-of-two Thomas Conlon, of Sunderland, began painting only after fulfilling his mother's dying wish that he that he get a university degree Thomas's mother's dying wish had been that he get a degree, and after becoming a mature student he graduated from Sunderland University three years ago with a 2:1 Degree in fine art, specialising in oil ... (more)
SOURCE: Painting News - Read entire story here.
Read MoreFor 20 years, the World Music Expo (WOMEX) has been the premiere European destination for targeted world music marketing. But realizing that the con...
Read more: Forsa Media Grooup LLC, Chã, World Music, Lusafrica, Atlantic Music Expo, Kreol Jazz Festival, Aline Frazao, Daniel Fernandes, Manecas Costa, Mario Lucio Sousa, Maya Kamaty, Funana, Marcy DePina, Morna, Ame, Batuque, Nancy Vieira, Dance, Chachi Carvalho, Cabo Verde, Ceuzany, Arts News
SOURCE: Dance on Huffington Post - Read entire story here.
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As an artist seeking to make a living, or at least generate income from selling your art and related products, you are a small business owner, and entrepreneur. This means you take on the tasks of organizing and managing your operation, and assume the risks inherent in running it. Effective use of small business tools is essential to your art career success.
Besides being the chief creative officer, you also are the chief marketing officer, the chief financial officer and more. It takes wearing many hats to run a successful small business. Fortunately, technological advancements allow semi-automation for many of the tasks you need to perform. We are not at the point where robots and artificial intelligence can fully manage your business operations, but we are probably closer than you think.
Just like you, I am an entrepreneur running a small business. My creative product is information presented in the form of books, e-books, blog posts, webinars, and workshops. I also provide consulting, but due to limited available time, I have never intently focused or marketed on that part of my business.
1. Google Apps for email – my primary email address is barney@barneydavey.com, which is powered by Gmail. For the most part, it works flawlessly integrating with Google Drive, Google Hangout and other Google related programs. Oddly, one of the things that do not work as well as possible is the search. The point of archiving the email you wish to keep is that the search function will help you find it, quickly. Sometimes finding an email through the Gmail search is very frustrating. I label everything that is truly important.
As an alternative, I have seriously considered using Zoho Email, which is free and powerful. Microsoft Office 365, is another strong choice, which, while not free, comes with the option to have the entire MS Productivity Suite available in the cloud. That option may cause me to move to Office 365 at some future point. Google offers lightweight productivity programs for word processing, spreadsheets and presentations, but for me, the word processing, in particular, is not equal to using Word. I doubt it ever will.
Here is the last, but not least, word on email. If you have a domain for your website, then you should have an email address to associate with it. One way to scream amateur is to have gmail, yahoo, or aol as part of your email address. Even worse are the ones from your Internet Service Provider such as cox.net, comcast.net, sbcglobal.net, tampabay.rr.com, and so forth. You are seeking to present yourself as a professional businessperson. Your email address speaks volumes either positively or negatively. I agree, switching email addresses can be painful and somewhat laborious, but it is easily worth the effort in the long-range scheme of things.
2. Google Calendar – a calendar is necessary to run your business. You have to keep track of your appointments and activities. You can use your calendar as a stepped down project manager tool. I use Google Calendar because it works seamlessly with my email and my phone. If you need a project manager and customer manager (CRM) tool because you have a large database of buyers and prospects, and you have multiple projects with many moving parts running simultaneously, then look at Insight.ly, a free extension that works with Google Chrome.
3. ToDoIst – the basic premise of David Allen’s bestselling Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity
My co-author, Dick Harrison, and I are near the finish line on a new book, How to Sell Art to Interior Designers. As such, I am transitioning from the writing stage to the promotion stage in the sequence of getting the book written, published and marketed. This means picking up new tasks to do everything possible to get the word out about the book. With new tasks and challenges, I find getting everything committed to ToDoIst for my book project is the best way to keep things moving and on track. I just could not be as effective without this wonderful tool.
4. WordPress – if you have a website, I also hope you are blogging because it is the single best way to develop an email list and pull your collectors, fans, friends and followers closer to you. You can use a blog to show your business and your personality, and snippets of your life to your readers. They don’t care what you had for dinner, but they are interested if you attended a recent gallery opening, took a museum tour, or like listening to Beethoven or Muddy Waters while you work at making your art.
Besides being a blogging platform, WordPress has evolved into a Content Management System (CMS), which allows you to create a website using it. It is estimated that nearly 20{b29860ee6b7af5bf99d3058cca3182816eed414b47dab251265e93b8c00e69b1} of all new websites published in the U.S. are produced using WordPress. Because of its huge and growing user base, the platform attracts throngs of developers adding new themes and plugins to enhance its use. As such, small business owners and artists have a wealth of options when it comes to creating a unique website and blog with a plethora of available advanced features.
I use WordPress for both ArtPrintIssues.com and BarneyDavey.com. The former is purely for blogging; the latter is an informational-based website with a fully enabled e-commerce solution. I will let you in on a secret. If I could go back to 2005, when I started both of these sites, there would only be one site with a blog attached. With a do over, I would have kept BarneyDavey.com, but the blog would go by blog.BarneyDavey.com.
Back in the day, I only had one book, which was about the print market. So I focused on that in the URL and title of the blog. As years have progressed, I have found I have much more to offer than just advice on the art print market, and have found the name to have somewhat pigeonholed me. Not to the extent that I am willing to go through loss of Google rankings and other bother to rebrand the blog, but that remains a distinct possibility for a future project.
For the past ten years, I have built my small business while working at a variety of full-time jobs. The need for affordable, quality health care has kept me from jumping to full-time status. That is due to change this fall, and I could not be more excited to have more time to consider such things as overhauling and folding ArtPrintIssues.com into BarneyDavey.com
I cannot conceive of how taking on such a challenge would be possible if I were not using WordPress. In 2005, WordPress was only two years old. I chose then to use Typepad to publish ArtPrintIssues.com as a blog, and built BarneyDavey.com on an html template. The Typepad decision turned out to be a bad one because it does not allow its users an easy way to transport a large blog like mine easily. Getting posts and their associated images with them moved was a time-consuming nightmare. This helps further illustrate why having a WordPress site and/or blog is useful – you can move it to another host flawlessly and painlessly within a very short time.
5. StudioPress.com - I use the Focus theme from StudioPress.com for both sites. StudioPress is part of the Copyblogger Media family. It is one of the best premium theme providers in the business. Many of its 42 themes are mobile responsive, including the Focus theme. This means the theme will respond to smaller screens without having to have special software or a different URL, such ArtPrintIssues.mobi, or m.ArtPrintIssues.com.
The growing use of smartphones and tablets for reading blogs, and surfing websites means you must make it easy for visitors to navigate your site. If your site is not responsive, or mobilized, then you are losing valuable traffic. It is too hard to work on driving traffic to your site to lose it because it is not convenient to read your information, or move around on it.
If you are using WordPress, then using a premium (paid) theme is important. Free theme developers have no incentive to keep pace with the ongoing upgrade to WordPress. They usually provide spottier, less effective support for their themes. When it comes to plugins, fewer is better. Each plugin you activate takes resources to run and slows your site down. Only use plugins that have been downloaded many times and have lots of 4 and 5 star ratings. Otherwise, you risk your site being hacked, or crashing due to poor scripting from inexperienced developers.
6. WP e-store – These days there is no reason you should not sell your art directly. Whether in-person, at a show or from your blog or website. You should have systems in place to make selling your work on the spot happen quickly and effortlessly. I use the WP e-store plugin to sell my books, e-books, downloads, webinars and other products right from my BarneyDavey.com/e-store page.
Given the physical size and shipping needs of selling art, it is probably not the best choice for your e-commerce solutions. If you want to keep your e-store as a plugin on your WordPress blog, I recommend looking at Woo Commerce. It is free, but has ongoing annual fees of approximately $300 for the various premium add-ons you will need to make it work for you.
If you are techie, or willing to hire a developer, then you should look at free, open-source programs such as OS Commerce and Zen Cart. I have not checked recent reviews to see if these providers are keeping pace with technological advances. As always, do your own research and careful due diligence before investing your time and money in any software. Getting expert advice is highly recommended. Chris Lema writes extensively about WordPress and has excellent information on e-commerce and other WordPress functions. He is also available for consultations if you are looking at a large-scale, expensive launch.
Other options are standalone e-commerce sites such as Volusion, 3DCart, Shopify. There are many other such platforms to consider. Check around with other artists. They can be your greatest source of reliable, insightful information.
7. Mailchimp - The whole point of a website, blog, and e-commerce is to get found, get customers and create sales. Building an email list is an integral, foundational part of the process. A responsive email list is a bottom line asset to your business. Working to build an email list is critical to your long-term online success. Facebook may lose favor; YouTube may cancel your account or delete your videos, and galleries will come and go. Throughout all such predictable turmoil, your email list will remain your most valuable marketing tool.
I use Mailchimp and recommend it to artists because they offer it free for your first 2,000 subscribers. You don’t get some of the advanced features with the free version, such as auto-responders, but you can’t beat free for starting out. Other recommended email service providers are Aweber and Get Response. I see these three most often included by developers building marketing tools, software and plugins that require email integration.
There are many other email service providers for you to research and investigate. While the platform is important, it pales when compared to the task of working diligently to gain qualified, opted-in email subscribers.
For the past several years, I have championed the idea of artists solidifying their careers by finding sustainable ways to sell direct to collectors. It is the entire premise of my Guerrilla Marketing for Artists: How 100 Collectors Can Build a Bulletproof Career. Email marketing is one of the key components to making this a reality. Networking, warm and local marketing and online marketing are all funnels to help you collect names and establish personal relationships with collectors.
Email marketing is central to achieving this goal of a self-sustained career. Find the fans, friends and followers and convert them to buyers. Keep them informed, interested and entertained through social media and especially email marketing. Focus your marketing on making this happen, and you give yourself the best shot to have the career you want and deserve.
8. Grammar.ly – Most of us, including me, don’t have the time and extra income to afford a full-time copywriter. Having seen what a good one can do to polish good copy into extraordinary copy makes me wish I could. As my business grows into a full-time occupation, it might just happen.
This copy and every post I have written in the past two years have been run through Grammarly. It is an online copywriting software program that works pretty darn good. It is not perfect, but it catches many common errors, overuse of words, and helps make one’s copy shine a bit more.
If you want to use a live service, then look at Gramlee.com. I have used it many times and have never been disappointed. Its prices are quite reasonable. You can bank words. For instance, you might buy 1,000 words and use it to have several 300- 400 pages blog posts or web pages professionally edited. If you are writing a proposal, resume cover letter, or other crucial document, then turning to Gramlee.com is highly advisable.
9. Go Daddy Bookkeeping – I started using Go Daddy Online Bookkeeping before it was bought by GoDaddy.com when it was called Outright. If you are using PayPal, then I don’t need to tell you when it comes to tax time that extracting the data you need for your Schedule C and other tax reports is a monstrous pain in the patootie.
Now, I can get a Schedule C report in a matter of a few minutes. You can add your credit cards, PayPal and checking accounts to the service. It will keep track of your expenses. You can train it automatically to file certain expenses in a chosen category. For instance, it recognizes all PayPal credit card transaction fees and appropriately files them, same for purchase from my Stamps.com account. This service saves me hours of time and headaches. I recommend it without hesitation. On the other hand, if you have more sophisticated bookkeeping needs then look at Quickbooks or Freshdesk.
This is far from a comprehensive list of every tool I use to manage my business. These are among the most important. I use them personally and have great confidence when you use them you will get the highly satisfactory results I experience, or better.
The post Nine Small Business Tools for Artist Entrepreneurs appeared first on Art Print Issues. Barney Davey is the publisher and author of this post with the exception of very infrequent, and always properly attributed contributing authors.
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