A Day in My Art Studio

Monday is small business day. I think it is fast becoming my favourite day of the week. Exploring my own creativity is surprisingly gratifying.

First things first: posting something on instagram. This is totally new to me. I just post an element of one of my paintings each day. The goal is to do this for 100 days straight just to get me into the swing of the platform.

Next, I logged onto YouTube. Last week I filmed an art studio tour…it was short…there’s not much to show! I so enjoyed filming it though. Over the weekend, I edited it, adding my voice over and some lovely music. Today, I uploaded it to YouTube so I could include it in this post (it’ll be at the end!).

Over the weekend, I also completed the design of my second Christmas card. I love this one so much, and already have an order for 20 of them! Today, I took some product photos and added it to Etsy. This is quite a long drawn out process. Right now, I only add one product a week, but I think I want to increase this. I bring most of the traffic to my Etsy store, and given one of the advantages to going with Etsy was the traffic it would bring, I have been quite disappointed. Apparently though, Etsy favours shops with more products, particularly shops who add products regularly. Anyway, for now, I will just add my new Christmas card.

Speaking of which, I also printed 20 of the Happy Kissmas cards to fulfil my order as well as another 20 to keep on hand just in case anyone orders from Etsy over the next few weeks. I filmed the whole process to possibly use in my next studio vlog.

I’m playing about with ideas for book marks at the moment. I’ve done some rough mock ups just to see whether it’s worth the effort to make them properly. What I mean by that is that my designs for the book marks have my drawings on them with the background removed. At the moment I’ve only removed the background using the tool in Canva but this isn’t always accurate. If I go ahead with these designs I will need to remove each background manually which will take hours. I also did a bit of research for short quotes I could write on the book marks. After printing out the mockups, I added the words by hand. However, in the final ones I will add the words digitally. One side has the painting in miniature and the words, whilst the back side has my logo and a print I made using a variety of elements from all the paintings.

I try to do a bit of filming each day so that posting on YouTube doesn’t become too arduous. One video I’d love to do is my process of making a greeting card from the conception of the design to the final product. Obviously, as I create each different design over a few weeks, I’ll need to film over those same few weeks. Today I filmed me sketching the picture and painting the wash.

In the same YouTube vein, I went through all the footage for my next Studio vlog, binning all the rubbish clips (of which there are so many!) and uploading all the vaguely interesting ones. I’ll not be posting my studio vlog for a couple of weeks but this gives me an idea of any additional filming which needs to be done.

Etsy sent me my money for November, £50, which is less than I earned but obviously they take their cut and also hold a certain amount in reserve. But £50 is amazing for me! I intend to reinvest any money I earn, especially into something which will help me to create different products. So, today, I ordered a long arm stapler and weighing scales specifically for postage letters and parcels. The long armed stapler is so that I can make my own notebooks and not rely on KDP and the scales is because my kitchen scales are not accurate enough and last Monday I had three trips to the post office before I got the size and weight within the parameters the order needed to be.

Last but not least, I unpublished all of my KDP notebooks. I have worked so hard on these notebooks but every time I order one set of them at least two are not quite right. Either the colour is off or the formatting is off or they send me matt when I’ve published gloss. When I asked them about it they said that when printing in bulk, as KDP do, it is fairly normal for them not to be exact and that most people wouldn’t buy a whole set so it wouldn’t really matter. Thing is, it does matter to me. As I said above, I’m going to learn to make my own. They won’t be as thick but at least they will be the quality I want.

As I mentioned at the top of this post, I recorded a video giving a short studio tour, which I’ll leave below:

Enjoy!