I can’t believe how well this is going..

I really can’t.

I don’t know why I decided to start a blog two months before the Christmas holiday. Even if you are an artist who doesn’t often work, odds are you are busy this time of year. If not with commission work, then at least with making gifts for loved ones.

When I decided to get out of the studio for a while and focus on promotion, I expected a slow buildup, something like when I first started painting. I grew as an artist over many years, and it took a long time before people thought of me as ‘that artist guy I know’. I thought building up knowledge of myself to the world would be a slow burn, but it is a bright fire.

Where to even start..

I picked up two older model Go-pros on Ebay for about $50 each, a couple cheap tripods from Amazon, and went to work making instructional videos.

I’ve never done any filming or editing, but I know I’ll spend hours watching people create on YouTube and dream of doing it myself. When I watch the actual work that goes into something I have a much deeper appreciation for it. I see the story of it, and getting people to see that should be one of your main goals if you want to sell your artwork. Using Youtube to as a medium to tell that story seems obvious. It’s yet another window in my storefront.

I took video of my next project, and quickly found that filming everything I do as I am painting is really hard! It was hard to know where to start. I set one camera up stationary at my painting table and had the other move around with me. It takes a lot of steps to paint with stencils, the preparation takes almost all of the work so there is a ton to show. The actual painting part is over pretty quickly so I needed to think about how I could make my videos interesting but also informative. My main goals in this are to entertain, inform, and to show the immense amount of work that goes into a piece so I don’t feel so bad about my prices.

I would say it took twice as long to paint that piece as it would have normally, but at the end I had hours of footage. I spent the next day learning about video editing, eventually settling on Lightworks. The free version only requires you register and is a very powerful editor. There are a lot of good videos to learn the basics and it only took a day before I edited my first video! I was super proud of it at the time, but in retrospect it wasn’t very good. A lot like my first painting. With a lot of good feedback and watching others make similar videos, every subsequent one has improved and I now have a format I am happy with. I have been able to upload a video with every painting I think will be of interest to people and like my paintings, I see how they get better the more I practice.

I sold 3 copies of my last painting and another that was similar by releasing the painting on the appropriate Reddit along with the video in the comments. I had one customer say to me that he would have never bought the piece if it hadn’t been for the video, which was quite a validation. The video drove people to my website where they actually bought paintings! They were also finding my social media from there. I was overcome with work from just one post. None of that has ever been the case for me.

That’s really only the beginning of the story. The other points in my plan are working out just as well. I’m gaining 5-6 followers a day on Instagram and interacting with a lot of other artists there. I’ve made a plans for some art shows that I am really excited about, 3 months in my local library for one! I have a new logo and new business cards. And most importantly, I have work!

My wife worries over me that I am working too hard, but I try and convince her that I’m seriously loving every second of it. I wish I could work more and sleep even less. Keep an eye out for more once Christmas calms down. I have so much more to share!

Creating an Online Store Using SquareUp

Why Bother?

The first thing to do in this journey was to put together a store. You need a store because it is not always obvious when you post a piece on social media that it is available for purchase. You can even write a ‘Message me for inquiries’ or something of the sort, but most people won’t. If they can’t see the price easily, they are not likely to come asking. You need to create a place to send your followers who want your artwork! It needs to be something they can find quickly and make a purchase from easily.

Creating a store is not a guarantee that you will sell something, but it’s certainly an obvious first step. Eventually I will link this site in my Instagram, on my Facebook fan page, on my Youtube videos, on Pintrest, and to this very blog.

WHY SQUARE?

I have been using Etsy for years but it has completely dropped off. Etsy pushes new stores to the front of their search results, and so the longer you rely on them, the less sales you will see. It’s good that they help new stores get seen, but its at your expense the longer you use them.

I went to square to set up my first online store as it is free, fair to the vendor, and a good place to start. Since I am barely selling anything right now, I was looking for something without a monthly charge like Weebly, Wix, or Go Daddy.

Square has a transaction charge like Etsy, but no listing charge. Square only charges 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction, verses Etsy which charges a 3.5% transaction fee, a $0.20 listing fee every 4 months, and a 3%+ processing fee. If you are already using the service, and you aren’t selling a lot, there no reason you can’t use both. I still have my Etsy page, but I have turned off the automatic renewal of my items. I’m not sure if I will revive that or not.

Square allows me to take all my artwork on the go and sell it without having to update the site, as they gave me a chip reader that syncs with their free app. I can take everything to a festival or market, charge people’s cards from my phone, and my website updates. I also appreciate that money from sales made goes into my bank account within a day.

SO WHAT’S THE CATCH?

There are only a few templates to choose from, and you can only ship within the United States.

I find that if you are trying to sell more than 20 or 30 items it can start to look cluttered, as there is no way to filter items besides adding sections to your main page.

The biggest drawback for me was that the site does not accept HD photos, so showing off my paintings was going to be a challenge. My artwork is my real storefront, and if people can’t get a good look at it what’s the point? I overcame this obstacle by uploading my HD images to Imgur and then linking them in the descriptions.

As far as resizing images goes, here is a guide to the sizes of images used in each template. I am using the Atlas theme. I want to note that the site will accept images in the general ballpark of these guidelines. I just use faststone capture to quickly resize or grab images.

Overall Squares limitations aren’t that restrictive, and I haven’t seen anything better that is also freely available.

THE BASICS

I used the set up guide over at square, and found it to be easy enough to follow. but I’ll mention a few important standouts.

Make sure and put a lot of thought into the name of your store. It should be consistent with the name of your business and/or your social media presence. If you have yet to pick a store name, do a google search to make sure someone else isn’t using it. You don’t want to make competition for yourself.

Square lets you attach a custom domain if you want to. A domain name is the address your site uses and a custom one let’s you stand apart and look professional. Since this was my first step, I wanted to see what names were available before I got into pushing my brand. I wouldn’t want to get all through the processes of building pages and social media presences only to discover nothing remotely matching my brand was available.

You can search for domain name from google domains here. Google will list the yearly price and alternate domains that are also available. As long as a domain is not popular, most of them run about 12$ a year. I had to settle for a .net address as SubtleShades.com was a premium domain.

Eventually, if this all works out like I hope and I see some success, I would like to park my domain on this WordPress site and link back to the store from here. That way I don’t have to worry about making Square my actual website, just my store. WordPress hosting can be expensive but I will get there.

You can give your site a custom header, logo, and a couple footers, so make sure and take advantage of that with something grabs your customer’s attention right off the bat. I use this image of my spray cans. It pops, and it has the name of the business along with my name. If you don’t have Photoshop check out picfont or canva for online image editing.

Take advantage of the ‘contact’ and ‘about’ sections that are available to you. If you can tell people a story about yourself and get them to relate to you, you can draw them into your artwork and make it more personal to them. I like to tell the story of how I became an artist, because people get the feeling that maybe they could do this too and I like that. It makes it easier to connect to strangers and easier to talk business.

I take a great deal of care in writing my image descriptions, making each one have at least some uniqueness. I try to tell the story of the painting, why I painted it, what makes it special, the inspiration, how I feel about the subject matter. It all helps the potential customer connect with the piece. If it doesn’t speak to them, they aren’t going to buy it.

On shipping, people like free shipping. Figure a conservative amount into the cost of your piece and call it a day. It’s easier for both you and the customer when things cost what they cost.

CONCLUSIONS

I may not use this site forever, but for now it’s exactly what I need. As a long-term goal, a full WordPress site would be preferable. Honestly even if I was paying for hosting a top-notch wordpress site, I still would integrate Square with it to keep track of my inventory and retain the ability to take payments on the go.

I hope this has helped you on your way towards your own online store. If you are interested in starting your own store but don’t have an account you can follow this referral link. Referring others to Square will earn you up to $1000 in free processing.

If you have any questions click the contact button up there and chat me up on discord. Always happy to talk art, meet new people, and get ideas for new posts here.

Inventing Myself

Lately the phrase ‘If you really look closely, most overnight successes took a long time.’ has been rattling around in my head. I have been at this a long time, almost 15 years now, and I think a little bit of that overnight success would be just fine.

I got to thinking that after doing this so long, maybe it was time to reinvent myself. Its normal for artists and the like to reinvent themselves, right? Giving my brand a shake up should bring me some new attention. I need to remind people I exist, which in turn will get them interested in my work again.

What exactly am I reinventing though? I have slacked off on every part of this profession that isn’t straight making art for almost the entirety of the time I have been at it. I’m really going to have to invent myself before I try and reinvent myself.

Right now, I am largely unknown. In my own small community some people know about me, but outside of that I don’t have much social media interaction. I have about 200 followers on instagram, about 1000 on facebook, and interact with a small community on reddit, r/stencils. A gallery in my town shows my art, and it does get seen by a lot of people. I am grateful for that.

Its my own fault for forgoing self promotion. It’s just plain hard for me to do. Whenever I go to extremes to show people my work, I always feel like I’m a kid running around getting my parents to look at my coloring book. I often find a lot of fault with my artwork that others do not see, which I’m sure you do as well.

Honestly I would just rather paint all the day and night away in my little studio in my backyard. The promotion, distribution, and even the selling of my artwork seems secondary to what I would rather be doing, which is just painting whatever comes to mind. At the end of the day, it’s just a waste not to get some of artwork out into the world. Selfishly, I work super hard at this daily. If I don’t bother with marketing and selling, what am I even doing here besides decorating the heck out of my house.

When I first started out in this as a hobby, the people in my social circle really support me and help drive us toward our goals, even if those goals weren’t yet defined. They bought my crappy art and told me it was good. My friends and family were really great about motivating me to continue in my artistic pursuits.

In those early days I felt a lot of popularity come from my art. Everything I posted was adored by people I was associated with, and like a drug it kept me painting. After 10 years of shoving my art in the same folks faces, it’s just not that special to them anymore, even if the content has greatly improved. Like the difference in how people treat news of your first child against that of your second. That’s a knock on me though, not them.

So how can I get my hands on some of that success? Over the last few months I have been putting together a series of goals, things that I think will help me gain more traction within this very competitive community. I will expound on these goals as I accomplish them and future posts will go into further detail on the specifics of each.

• Create a professional looking store and website with a custom domain. Focus on driving clicks.
• Begin writing an art blog.
• Produce Youtube videos, both for entertainment and instruction. Focus on showing people how easy this art thing is.
• Grow my social media following. Expand the platforms I use.
• Live stream painting sessions to twitch or Youtube.
• Creating a live chat system on Discord.
• Get endorsements.
• Paint more!

As I work towards this, these goals might evolve. I hope they do. I’m looking forward to taking myself and what I do a little more seriously. I am a good artist, and so are you, we just need to get that through to the rest of the world.

I was expressing some self doubt to my wife about all this, having spent a good amount of money on video camera and other equipment. She is always supportive, and like always she gave me a good piece of wisdom. She told me that all this did not occur to me for no reason. If I see this as a possible path to success, it probably is. Even if the outcome is less than I hope for, only good things can come from trying. The journey to get there only strengthens me as an artist.

If it only took ten-thousand hours of patience and practice to get me here, whats another ten-thousand. If you love to make art, or anything really, there are a lot worse ways to spend your life.

10,000 hours

A cold winters day, raining as usual, and I’m stopping in a coffee shop to warm up and get a fix. It’s early and my brother has picked me up to help him with a job. The pump that keeps his basement dry has failed in the night, and we need to dig it up and replace it.

Gil’s not actually my brother, but I always just say he is. Some friends are just like that. Saying ‘my friend Gil’ never really got the right message across. We’ve been friends since we were kids.

As is the case in most coffee shops in Portland, there was a good deal of artwork on the walls, several artists had displays. As I sipped my house drip and waited for Gil’s complicated coffee drink I wandered around looking at it, in particular being drawn to a set of Star Wars inspired stencil art.

I am a nerd at heart, and that sort of thing really speaks to me. There were stencils of several of the main characters, a Boba Fett piece in particular had caught my eye and a few of ships in space, with that classic spraypaint space art as a background. I was overwhelming impressed with the quality and general ‘coolness’ of it all and found myself quite transfixed. My brother wandered up behind me with his fancy coffee.

‘How do you suppose people can make this sort of thing just out of their brain and onto a wall like this? Man, people do some cool things.’ I said to him over my shoulder.

‘Nah. This sucks.’, he scoffed, ‘You could do it way better.’

Now my brother is about 5 or 6 years older than me, and throughout our lives, he has always been way more grounded than me. I will often get super excited about an idea, especially when we were young, and not easily see any of the possible hurtles or negative outcomes. He has always been the antithesis of that, a hard realist who makes sure we keep our heads during projects or adventures, who keeps us from doing most of the dumb things that young men do.

For him to say something like this frankly surprised me. I am not in any way an artist, I was a cook. I could certainly not make anything like this in my wildest dreams. I was blessed with no artistic talents like the artist who’s work I had been admiring.

‘What are you even talking about Gil? Look at this.’ I motioned to the Boba Fett. ‘Some guy made this with spraypaint!’

And then my brother started verbally destroying this painting, pointing out all the flaws. Things like overspray, wavy lines, off-center layers, and other blemishes. He pointed out how the artist could have done better, how anyone can do this kind of art if they want to, and how easy it would be to get into if I wanted to do this and be good at it.

I gotta say, he was really only mistaken about the last thing.

It’s funny but it was hard to see the paintings the same way as I had just a moment before. The way he had described it, it became more of a thing somebody figured out how to make then a thing that came pouring out of someone via some mystical sort of inspiration. More of a craft than an art. Like a well made rocking chair.

Could I really do this?

I had always been kind of person who picks up a new hobby every couple months, gets super into it and learns everything he can, and then moves onto the next thing. I am a jack of all trades but a master of few, as the saying goes. As I dug holes in the rain that day, I decided I would give it a try.

I bought 25$ worth of Krylon spraypaint and some cutting blades at the local department store the next day, and painted by moonlight on my sons old easel. The moment I sprayed my first layer on top of another, and saw the effect, I knew I wanted to be really good at this. Here was my first piece.

Gil helped me build a spraypaint table, a contraption  that pulls air through pegboard and shoots it outside, after he found me high to the point of drooling on paint fumes a few days later. He had a serious talk with me about carcinogens and safety. If I was going to do this seriously I needed to do it correctly. Since then it’s always been a priority. I will do a future post on how I have my studio set up.

All this happened about 10 years ago, and art has just gotten more interesting and exciting the more I learn about it. Since then, I have painted at least one painting every week. With the opportunity to practice so much and the will to just make cool stuff I just can’t help but improve.

I’m here because I just don’t want to keep it to myself anymore. The more I can show people about how easy this is the better. If you want to create art every bit as awesome as mine you totally can, all it takes is practice. Literally anyone can do this, you just have to decide to, and then practice a lot. People will soon think that you have a ‘natural talent’, but you will know it is just the result of grinding out paintings and learning from mistakes.

4 years ago I quit my job as a Chef of over 20 years to paint awesome pictures in my shed, and so far I haven’t had to go back. It’s an amazing life that I never could have dreamed about those years ago in that coffee house. I have a sincire hope that someone see’s one of my Boba Fett paintings one day and says, ‘That sucks, you could do way better..’