It’s not that I haven’t been drawing, it is that I haven’t been uploading. I know, the whole point of this was for me to be held accountable and I can tell you by not uploading I have been slacking in the drawing area.
What has kept me so busy? Travel for one, traveling from state to state and country puts a lot of wear and tear on me, and one might think flying might be the perfect time to draw, oddly it is not. I have a lot of incomplete sketches from my travel days. Lots of bodies and no faces, but they do have their purpose, they help me study proportion. Not every study gets completed you know.
What else has kept me busy is working on getting the options to create prints and teeshirts from my art. I found a great place for printing the tee shirts, the work is great and it is not a cheesy iron on that anyone can make. The ink is in the shirt so if you wash and dry it the art stays in tact. This was very important to me as I would never sell anything that was junk. I couldn’t in good conscious accept money from you good people if I didn’t believe in the product myself. Also I have done some test prints with Giclee Printing and I have to say for the sketches (I started with Rock Lobster for all of this) the test prints turned out amazing! You can’t tell the difference between the real thing and the print. Amazing. Now for paintings I found the Giclee Print to be a little bit flat, and the brush stroke were not as nice in the print as they are in the original. This could be for two reasons. One, the test print was much smaller then the original. Two, the painting’s image was taken via my DSLR rather then with my flatbed scanner as I did with the sketches. Reason for this is that the painting is larger then tabloid size. Or three, lastly it could be the testure of the paper it is printed on that makes the difference. I could try and print on canvas or a metallic print, which looks kinda amazing. So until I get that figured out paintings might take longer to get prints of, and may be cheaper to purchase then the drawing Giclee Prints.
Lastly I have been trying to figure out a good way to accept funds, how to operate my store front. I want to make it easy on the shopper and I want to allow my international viewers/readers/fans/followers/whateveryouare to be able to partake. Many people like paypal, and so did I, until I moved to Canada. In Canada, to use paypal you must link it to a bank account, which means if there is a dispute that bank account will get frozen. No problem one might think, just open a separate account for paypal, sure, but in Canada bank accounts are not free, one must pay a monthly fee to have one open. So it is frustrating. No problem you might think, use a US paypal, sure, I can do that, I still have US funds, I get paid i the US, but I can’t buy something with a US paypal and have it shipped to Canada. Mucho annoying, and while I will be happy to put all of this aside and figure out a way for you to shop with ease I can’t help but think I am not the only one with these aggravations. Perhaps paypal is not easy for other countries too. So the plan is to find a way where people can use a credit card, or paypal, or perhaps even google checkout (have not even looked at that) and last resort they can mail me a money order, though that might take a touch longer to process.
Still with all of these plans on the horizon it is exciting. I am only starting this because some people started asking for it, and @odin1eye really pushed and inspired and heck if a one eyed god tells you to do something, you do it :) But it all got me to thinking, for the amount of time I spend on a painting, it doesn’t really pay much for what I have sold them for in the past. A few hundred dollars here and there doesn’t really cover much. Not that I have ever approached this as a business but as anyone who has visited my home and seen my paintings about knows, it is hard to let go. This way I could sell more, for less and ask for more for an original.
thoughts, comments, suggestions, please put it here on the blog at http://nimlas.org/blog