Through the corner windows of Rare Device

Bus Shelter Reflection on Hayes (I think this one might be my favorite)

Flat Old Pick-up on Scott

And here are a few that I didn’t submit, but still kind of like:

Starling Perch

Automotive Service

Planter on Fell

A few weeks ago I pulled the piece back out and gave it a hard look.  The shape of the island was a non-descript ovalish form, communicating nothing other than its being an island.  In a fit of inspiration, I pulled the whole collage off its backing and cut it apart to be reassembled into the shape of an airplane, (an international symbol for travel!) but it still doesn’t salvage this piece as an illustration.  The airplane shape is based off of a three-quarter view, which resulted in some foreshortening that makes it look more like a shark.  The place names are also still too small to read effectively, so there’s no publication/medium where this would be useful.  Still, it’s nice to have it finished and put away, and when your only stakes are practice, every failure is also a success.  So, success!  I declare it, take my ball and go home.

Moving your Business Beyond the Kitchen Table panel at Craftcation with me (moderator), Angharad Jones, Delilah Snell and Nicole Stevenson

Despite my exhaustion, I had a really good time.  I love helping other creatives (especially women) get their businesses on the right track, and I got to spend a little quality time with other energizing crafty business ladies.  I had one particularly raucous dinner with Steph Cortes from NerdJerk, Rosalie from Unanimous Craft, Marlo Miyashiro, Danielle from Etsy, Ashley Jennings, and Rena Tom that I will not soon forget.  I haven’t laughed that hard in a long time.

Marlo, Rena and me

I was really pleased to see such great attendance at Craftcation, though some of my sessions didn’t run quite as smoothly as I’d hoped.  The session on pricing was so popular that the room became a fire hazard and we had to start turning people away.  We also didn’t have a working projector, but the attendees all rallied their technology so that each table could view the slides on a shared iPad.  The marketing session was also a full house and we ended up running out of handouts halfway through, but my helper for that one, Stephanie, was freaking amazing.  I understand that you can never quite predict session attendance, and besides, shit happens, but I want to make sure that anyone who couldn’t attend or take home handouts has a chance to access the materials.  Y’all paid good money to attend the conference after all, so here are the links to the materials from my three solo sessions (the panel didn’t have materials):

• Pricing your handmade goods (also see this article I wrote for Craftzine for more)
• Intro to small business bookkeeping (includes a very thorough excel ledger too — bonus!)
• Marketing on a Budget (handouts and presentation all in one pdf)

Full house at the Marketing on a Budget Session at Craftcation

One thing I’m having trouble with is measuring the ROI of this conference to my own business.  The benefits are so intangible for the most part that it’s tough to tell whether offering three days of (essentially) free teaching will pay for itself in the long term.  I really like teaching, so there’s that intangible benefit right off the bat, but does it make up for the three days I couldn’t work on any of my own projects?  Right now I’m leaning towards “yes”, but I couldn’t give you any hard evidence for why I’m leaning that way.  Right now it’s just a gut feeling surrounding the concept of “networking”.

How do you figure out when to take on projects that are peripheral to your creative business, like speaking, writing and teaching?  I could honestly really use some help with this one.

• Moving Your Business Beyond the Kitchen Table (panel)
• Marketing on a Budget
• Pricing Your Handmade Work
• Accounting/Bookkeeping for Crafters

I’m excited to see far-flung friends Jenny Hart (at a conference I’m NOT organizing, for a change!) and Danielle Maveal (see this video Q&A we did together last month), and to spend time with fellow SF crafty-business ladies Stephanie Cortez from NerdJerk and Rena Tom.

For a little pre-conference recommended reading, please peruse this article I recently posted to design*sponge on approaching other business owners for advice.

Looking forward to trading business cards with y’all.

Fleece, felt, polyester fiberfill stuffing, thread, PET pellets, screenprint.  Approx. 14” x 4” dia.

Available in full color or grayscale here.

(Sorry for the less-than-stellar photos)

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?