Not knowing what to draw, I started drawing animals from memory, alphabetically.  I started with an aardvark, which was so pitiful I threw it out immediately.  Next I tried to draw a bird (a penguin, actually), which was also horrendous.  Here’s my third attempt with a monarch butterfly, but I couldn’t remember the actual pattern their wings have:

After that I gave up on animals for the time being and just decided to work with the alphabet itself. i had just finished a typography class, so it was kind of fun.  Here are a couple of typography doodles. I won’t share the hundreds of random letters I drew, though you can see some of them show through the back of the paper.

10,000 hours of expertise starts with a single sketch….

It was two days after Xmas.  Can you guess which movie I went to see?

Tired of making stuff up, I decided to try drawing some things IRL. Here’s my attempt at drawing a rubber tree leaf that looked like a bird.  It took a surprising number of tries to get the proportions and curves right, even with a ton of erasing.

And this is a two-minute sketch of the back of my husband’s head before he moved.

Then Tina Jett asked me how things were going. She is doing a drawing-a-day project too, in the form of an illustrated blog, which inspired me to illustrate my last two blog posts, too.

Anyone else embarking on a similar project? How are things going with your New Year’s resolutions?

One example Mr. Epley gave is that people will guess that a football player made more tackles in a year if his jersey number is 97 than if it’s 27. He also recounted an interesting study in which a grocery store sign suggested that people buy Snickers bars to put in their freezer. In one instance, the sign said to buy “some” Snickers bars, and in another instance, the sign said to buy 18 Snickers bars.  People ended up buying far more Snickers bars when they were given an anchor number of 18, rather than the word “some.”  The reason this works, says Epley, is that people tend to only use one anchor number at a time, so whatever anchor you walked into the grocery store (or football stadium) with gets replaced by the new anchor that is put in front of you.

I wonder if this concept of “anchoring” is also what accounts for people’s tendency to accept more expensive prices on an item if that price isn’t a round or common price number (say, $57 as opposed to $50 or $49.99). If a price is harder for us to compare to our anchor, are we less likely to fight it?  I’d love to see price anchoring tested out a local shop or craft fair. Any takers?

p.s. First drawing-a-day with color! Pushing boundaries!

Initially I was sort of surprised how central the issue was, since I always think of networking as an important but secondary part of any conference.  To me, programming always came first.  That’s why you pay for a conference that has expert speakers, rather than just attend a party, right?  But the more we talked about it, the more it became clear that community-building might actually be more crucial than content.  To give just one example: let’s say you attend a session featuring someone you admire; the presentation itself probably doesn’t include much material that isn’t already on the speaker’s blog, in their latest book, etc., but afterwards you have the opportunity to introduce yourself and ask a specific question of one of your heroes.  Which is more valuable, the content or the connection?  To put it another way, a session might present some interesting ideas, but it’s the time you spend discussing those ideas with other people that ultimately leads to plans for action.

If you think about it, every modern art movement — from impressionism to Dada to street art — grew out of a small group of artists getting together and bouncing ideas off of one another.  Renoir, Monet, and Mary Cassatt all attended each other’s exhibitions (or showed together), collaborated, critiqued each other’s work and introduced each other to new friends and patrons.  So did Warhol, Basquiat, and Julian Schnabel, or Invader, Shepard Fairey and Banksy — you get the idea. Though the image is often of the tortured, solitary artist, working alone in his studio, the reality is that most successful artists are part of a supportive community.

I’m ultimately going to ignore the chicken-or-egg question of whether successful artists become friends because they are successful, or if they become successful because they are friends. Sometimes it’s the former, such as when speakers meet at conferences, and sometimes it’s the latter, such as when friends promote each other’s work to their respective online audiences.  Overall, I think one causes the other and vice versa, so it doesn’t really matter where you start — except that it’s generally easier to make friends than to become commercially successful.  I’m currently trying to do both, and the problem I keep running into is where to split my time between the two.

These days, when people talk about building a community around your art or business, they’re usually referring to social media. I’ve (virtually) met some great people through social media, but between Twitter, Facebook, blogging, and now Pinterest (which I refuse to join), you can lose a lot of time that could otherwise be spent on making new work.  I also make the mistake of following/liking a lot of people I admire, which is a great way to feel inferior, especially when you’re not being terribly productive.  Our lunch meeting last week reminded me how much I prefer talking to people in person.  It’s much more efficient than scouring tweets, and builds a deeper connection than just shouting things into the ether.

Next month the four of us plan to meet again over dinner, hopefully inviting a few more people as well.  It may not be a conference, but we’ve all been in business long enough that we each have knowledge to share.  Our collective experience means we can help one another take our businesses to the next level.  At the same time, we’ll be building a mutual cheerleading club, which does wonders for motivation and cross-promotion.  In the meantime, I’ll be scaling down the social media side of things until I’ve got enough of a real-life community to make it worth it.

Thanks to Tina Jett for inspiring today’s illustration with her own daily illustrated blog posts.

(Like every year before this) I declare that 2012 will be the best year ever.  2011 was mostly taken up by apartment-hunting and CCE, but this year I’m leaving myself room for some new creative and business pursuits.  New stuff for 2012:

• First up, the Deep Creeps will FINALLY hit stores.  It has literally been years since I started working on this new line, but the packaging finally got approved this week, so the little buggers should arrive in stores sometime around April 1st. Leonardo the dumbo octopus is first, followed (hopefully) by the still-unnamed angler fish in October.  BTW, folks, if you have any good name ideas for an angler fish (she’s a girl), please send ‘em my way.  Nothing is clicking so far.  There’s a full set of Deep Creeps and some shout-outs in it for you.
• Secondly, drawing every day.  I feel my drawing muscles have somewhat atrophied lately from lack of use, and I’m trying to build them back up again, no matter how much it hurts.  I’ll likely post some examples now and again of useful failures and successes, but I certainly won’t subject you to every tired sketch.  I’ve been going steady for about two weeks now. We’ll see how long it lasts.
• Thirdly, I’ll be speaking at the Craftcation conference in Ventura this March, while continuing to teach monthly classes on indie biz topics at WorkshopSF. CCE is not happening in 2012, but the girls and I are already cooking up ideas for 2013 while we consider other CCE business like non-profit filing and fiscal sponsorship in the meantime.
• Fourthly, a WHOLE NEW BUSINESS. I’m not really talking about it yet, since I don’t like to count my chickens before they hatch, but stay tuned for what I hope to be the summer launch of a brand new digital venture.  Business plan and prototypes are already underway.
• Fifthly, all the usual new year’s-resolution-type stuff like eating healthier, getting up earlier, staying more organized, driving less and exercising more. I’m taking my bike for repairs on Wednesday, so I can attempt a ride to work on Thursday, when it will be sunny and un-cold.  The route is much flatter from this new apartment than from our last, so I’m hoping this can be my new commute.  I have incentivized the bike-riding by making the following deal with myself: if I regularly ride my mom’s 20-year-old bike to work this year, then I can have a pretty new commuter bike for Xmas in December.

That’s about it for now. I’m trying to keep the list fairly short, since the quickest way for me to fail is to overwhlem myself. What are your plans for 2012?

Lesson 1: you can’t half-ass a craft booth

The Bazaar Bizarre was the only fair I did this season.  I wanted to hurry my transition out of retail by getting rid of some inventory, so I didn’t bring much new to the table (no pun intended).  Aside from a couple of prints I had little in the way of new products, so none of my usual customers were interested.  I also didn’t have the second table I thought I had purchased, so it was difficult for shoppers to make sense of the crowded display.  All in all, my booth looked a little sad compared to my neighbors’ open, well-lit, and organized spaces, so I didn’t fare too well.  My plan to off-load boxes of toys to an audience that already owns them backfired completely.

Lesson 2: outgrowing the craft fair

Craft fairs are absolutely the right market for a growing handmade business, for all of the reasons I mentioned above.  But they are no longer the right market for me.  The whole weekend I felt a slight twinge of embarrassment at being there.  I was disappointed in myself, like I was dressing for the job I had rather than the one I wanted.  This feeling was compounded when more than one person approached me with a confused/vaguely distrustful look before asking, “Aren’t you the person who put on the CCE conference?  What are you doing here?” It seemed as though they suddenly didn’t trust that I knew anything about running a small business since I was standing behind my products piled sadly on a table, with no customers clamoring to buy them.

The Big Takeaway

As with most things in life, you only get out of a craft fair what you put into it.  And because I have already mentally left that world behind, I didn’t put much into it.  Just like I tell my students, you can’t market right unless you’re in the right market.  Now that I’m hoping to build bigger and better things, I need to find a new market with room for my business to grow into.

If you’d like to make something eeevil for the trick-or-treaters ringing your bell next week, Jeffery has a whole book of ideas and instructions that can help you pull it off in time.

Images courtesy of Jeffery Rudell

Soon it will be time to start thinking about holiday windows!  Can anyone share a link to ideas they’ve enjoyed in winters past?

Clockwise from top left (prices listed for approx. 5’ x 8’ size): Momeni Tempo ($778.99) — great for a kids’ room when they’re too old for this one, Dwell Studio Draper Stripe ($250), Dwell Studio Loop Texture Dove ($550), Normann Copenhagen Dahlia ($1004), Angela Adams Nectar ($750), nuLOOM Magnifique Chevron ($276.23), Angela Adams Birds of Paradise ($750), Z Gallerie Ombre ($399.95), Thomas Paul Tree ($876)

Once again, clockwise from top left (prices listed for approx. 5’ x 8’ size): Bev Hisey Anise ($?), Gandia Blasco Lepark ($2,225), Bev Hisey Moroccan ($?), Sara Schneidman Green Contemporary ($3,050), Peace Industries Norooz ($1,680), Ralph Lauren Cameron Stripe ($805), Second Studio The Ocean ($2,066), Urban Outfitters Floral Stripe ($68), Peace Industries Fuller ($1,680)

Good lord, how does Grace Bonney do it?  I’m exhausted already.  Anyway, last time, clockwise from the top left, yada yada: Madeline Weinrib Breeze Denim ($1,250), Madeline Weinrib Blue Lulu ($925), Madeline Weinrib Dusty Blue Adam ($4,500), Bev Hisey Spun runner($?), notNeutral Links runner ($270), Second Studio Cubizzmo ($1,887), Second Studio Cassady ($1,887),