Fur In The Paint

Art Fair Insider has once again honored me by re-posting one of my Art Fair related posts on their blog. (thank you) It’s an interesting site with loads of features. Anyone working the circuit or thinking about it, should give the site a looky-see.

Speaking of Art Fairs
So the past 7 weeks have blown by and I am knee deep in inventory and packing for an event this weekend in Waterloo, Iowa. You know from the other side, 7 weeks seems like an eternity to do inventory and replenish stock. And so I wait to do it. And do something more fun like . . . start a new painting. But now I’m on this side of those 7 weeks and kicking myself. (sigh)

As per my usual after a long break, I am looking forward to the money but not so much to all of the hauling and toting involved. But I’m sure, as is also my usual, once there I will be having a great time.

Plus, since we are going to a larger city (by real world standards it is probably considered a really small city, but when you live in a town of 700 . . . .) I should be able to find an art shop to restock some WC Pencils and find some frisket film. Hobby Lobby came up bupkiss. I came home with some re-positionable book covering material but is so low tack it’s pretty well useless.

Once again the gallery has been busy (Yay!) but this also means not much new work has been done on Spanish Gold- Andalusian Stallion. Hopefully tomorrow I’ll be far enough along to be worthy of posting a WIP.

Well Fur in the Paint is officially 1 year old today. And like any 1 year old we are still trying to figure out how to go from crawling to walking. I’m guessing by the age of two, I’ll be a terror and running wildly about. (okay the baby metaphor is losing steam.)

Blogging has been more challenging than I imagined when I started. I mean the fluffy bunny posts are easy enough but anything that has real content definitely takes effort. Because I really knew nothing about blogs (I didn’t read any before I started my own) I had a serious learning curve. Not to mention learning how to use the software and upload pics. Kids these days are born with electronic knowledge, I, on the other hand had to painstakingly learn. (Don’t they say learning new stuff as we age is good for staving of Alzheimer’s?)

Here are a couple of the unexpected good things that came from blogging.

Of course the end goal was to generate and direct traffic to my website. The blog has done that, but in a limited way. I think I spend too much time talking and not enough time offering the art for sale. Something to work on for next year. (I’ll probably keep talking as much, I’ll just fill in the quiet with artwork.)

So anyway Happy Blogday! to me. And Happy Thanksgiving Eve to all of you!

I got a notice from Undaunted last week that she had given me a blog award. How very flattering. Thank you. I would have commented on it sooner but it took me this long to get the image transferred. As you may already know, I am not very computer savvy though I have learned a lot since beginning this blog. In the end, I asked my guru of all things electronic (namely Mike my husband) to do it for me.

Part of this award is to select 7 of your favorite blogs to “pass along the love” as it were. I am more than a little embarrassed to say that I don’t actually even read seven blogs faithfully, I read 3 blogs (of which one is Undaunted’s) and sporadically at that. Undaunted assured me it was okay to claim my award anyway.

Here are the three blogs I most read, though I should say that in my defense, I have visited hundreds.

1. Undaunted’s (aka Linda) blog Rediscovering Art. I enjoy her blog because she is clever and funny and honest (the three most important reasons I read and return to a blog.) She is just sticking her toe into the waters that are the art world. And it is enjoyable to watch her confidence and style blossom. She’s full of talent, she just need to get out there.

2. Maggie Stiefvater’s blog Greywaren Art. Way back, when I first starting thinking of starting a blog, I searched for horse art blogs. Surprisingly there were pretty much none out there at the time, other than Maggie’s. Hers was the first blog that I read all the way back to the beginning, which includes her first blog Smiling Horse Art. She made me laugh and her artwork is excellent.

Her blog recently has turned more into writing than art, because she is a published author with a sweet book deal. Congratulations on that BTW! This has led me to not visit her blog very often of late. She is one of those rare individuals who has creativity and talent in many areas and the drive and determination to see them to their fullest potential.

3. Katherine Tyrrell’s blog Making a Mark I have mentioned her blog often and it is worth a look to anyone who is in the art business. Nuff said, check it out.

Comment on Comments
Truth is, I really want to thank the aforementioned Undaunted and Angela Finney (a fellow critter artist and ummm . . . slightly above average aged gamer, like myself) for their input, comments and interactions. Currently I average between 50 and 100 readers a day, but these two are always asking questions and offering their support. What this means to me is that I stay motivated to blog. Plus they get me to thinking, which in turn leads to new posts.

Thanks to both of you. Your input is invaluable and has made this whole blogging experience enjoyable. Without you guys, I would truly be writing in the dark.

The Definition of Irony
So I went and got the mail, as I do every day. And to my surprise, (and delight) a hefty envelope had been sent to me by an artist friend. Inside was a large magazine called Artful Blogging, Visually inspiring online journals by Somerset Studio. I had been talking with my art group about blogging, as it is still a relatively new experience for me, and one of them had sent it to me. (I got the best friends, especially since the cover price was $14.95.)

It doesn’t really strike me as a how-to kinda mag (though it does have a couple articles in the back about blogging etiquette and how to get started.) It is more like a glimpse into hundreds of creative blogs, that I might never had discovered on my own. It is a quarterly mag that is chocked full of gorgeous imagery (Ooh. . .eye candy) that is accompanied by nice little tid-bits of writing. Rather inspiring to see so much creativity out there.

Kinda strange though. I mean really, how weird is it to have a magazine about blogs? But then, I guess I am blogging about a magazine, so the circle of life is complete.

Blogging is still quite new to me. And as such, I am spending much of my free time out looking at other blogs, mostly artist’s. This blogging thing has opened up a whole ‘nother universe for me. I live in a very rural area and so often feel quite isolated as an artist. My art group has members spread over a 150 mile radius. It’s a real trick to get even a small portion of us together. In the summer, I do artfairs and have an extended artist family with them. But when winter sets in, and the cold snowy winds are a blowin’ I get lonely. So what a wonderful gift all these blogsites are for me. Kinda like manna from heaven.

My latest discovery is Katherine Tyrrell’s blog, Making a Mark. Her site deals with a variety of well researched subjects on art and the art business. Hers is the second blog that I have subscribed to.

Her Feb 2, 2007 post, called What Happens When You Annoy eBay Sellers was extremely interesting. eBay has recently made some substantial changes to their policies which may have a dramatic impact on sellers. I sell through eBay, so it was nice to get so much information on whats going on.

When I find a site I really like, I tend to dig through it pretty good. The other post that I found really interesting that day was an older post from Aug 22, 2006 Why Artists Should Blog. The statistics on the state of the blogosphere were … well mind boggling. Like:

• 175,000 new blogs are created daily, 8% of which are spam blogs or ’splogs’
• there are (as of Aug 2006) 50+million blogs
• they’ve been doubling in number about every 5-7 months.

Again this is old news. But it had a real wow factor for a newbie like me. So I decided to go digging and see what statistics I could dig up that were a wee bit more current. Unfortunatly there wasn’t much to be found. David Sifry, the founder of Technorati would faithfully publish “State of the Blogosphere” reports every few months. But as of April 2007, Technorati has a new CEO and no new reports have been published.

Digital Inspiration reports in October 2007 that currently

• Technorati was tracking 108 million blogs
• 120,000 new blogs are created daily
• Most popular language is Japanese folowed by English
• and 1.5 million blog posts are published daily.

There is just so much information and people to meet that are only a mouse click or two away. No wonder blogging is such a huge pastime. Oh, I do have one more statistics for you. I found this on Pew Interent Reports dated 12/19/07

• 28% of online teens have blogs and that the blogging growth is fueled almost entirely by girls.