Next year's big project: Artbook and prints for sale

 

As work becomes harder and harder to get, I have to try different ways to pay the bills. Over the years I have sold a 1 or 2 prints a year of some of my drawings. It doesn't add up to much but it makes me feel good and i think shows there is potential to sell more if I can figure out how to go about it.  With that in mind I made  plan to produce and sell a book of illustrations on Amazon and tie it in with selling prints. I plan to sell with an online service that will handle the printing, shipping and taxes. I have several places in mind but any advice is more than welcome. 

The book will feature illustrations of acrobats, athletes and dancers - my most popular subjects. This won't be a retrospective or "best of" collection but include only images I will be selling as prints and ones I think will sell the best. I think having a book out there will help sell the prints and vice versa. I won't include any explicit nudes because I think that might be forbidden on Amazon even for art books and will limit who can see the work. I have a large catalogue to choose from and the idea is to not try and put it all out there at once but see what happens and add maybe an image a month to the print site so there is always something new and if things go really well, produce a second book in future. 

This is plausible but is it possible considering I have zero social media presence and I am not exactly a household name in the art world? I might have to break down and open "Behemoth media" accounts in Instagram, Facebook and whatever else and hopefully convince some of my friends who already have accounts to like and help promote my work to get it out to more people. 

Here is the design layout, the inner title page looks good to me and I decided the full images on the right and a close up of that image on the left would be visually interesting and give the potential buyer more information on how detailed the pieces are. 

So the plan is to finish some new drawings... I have about 15 lined up and most are hopefully for this project if they work out. Picking the right ones is no easy task. This will take months to finish so I am hoping to get it going for real after the new year. The text will be both English and French.

The Sweet Fail of Success

Success is measured in many ways and in the creative fields there are perhaps more ways to think of it than in other endeavours. 

In my case, for example, I can point to many signs of success. I wanted to work in special effects/animation as a child and make movies. For the personal documentaries I  made I wanted to:

1. Win some awards
2. Get a project shown in a real cinema
3. Get something shown on TV

I've done all of these things and even sell my films on Amazon.com, something I wouldn't have imagined starting out. So I can't complain that I haven't achieved my basic goals. 

Now the fail part. I also expected with these achievements I hoped I would be able to squeak out a small living, nothing ridiculous, but this has not happened. I've worked on some nice professional projects for PBS and well know documentary film makers, and even though some won Emmys and Peabody Awards, I am cleaning streets part time to make ends meet with almost zero graphic design and truly zero video work is coming in for a couple of years now. 

There are lots of "reasons" for this. No one has the budgets anymore with the economic crisis ( or so they say) to hire people and I did not grow up in Montréal or New York City or get the chance to go to college… all of which would have helped make stronger networks to draw work from. So while my work is considered excellent and not even expensive, I have to remind as many people in hiring positions possible that I still exist as often as I can. Knowing the right people is everything in business and no amount of talent, hard work or dedication can overcome the basic fact of "it's who you know" and "getting there at the right moment". 

Then there is the artistic part. I am very happy with my drawings for one thing and while I could certainly use more money (read: any money) for my film projects, in the end I'm happy to keep making them and progressing slowly into more complicated things. So… success again. 

So in the end, I'm a success in how I think of my work and how it's received when I get jobs... but a failure in the "making a living" area which is, truth be told, the only measure of success everyone, including artists can agree on. 

My Digital Revolution - part three

After the internet started taking hold of things a lot changed and not just with online software. For years I had made short films, mostly in Super 8 and aided in some 16 mm films as well. I really loved film making and effects work but it was simply too far out of my budget to even consider it anymore. I actually cried the day I sold my Bell and Howell Super 8 camera (I loved the thing!). Then on day Apple introduced, free with the OS, Imovie and I digitized my old films and re-edited them. God bless my ex-boyfriend at the time. He saw how excited I was to work on film again and spent all his money to get me a video camera that holiday season. I made a couple of documentaries, one about him and another on my grandmother (Big MA). I won an award for Big MA, then for other films I made, soon I had a small showing at a movie house in Provincetown and eventually 2 of my films were shown on Canadian TV. Of course, everyone reading this thinks I must be filthy rich... everyone who gets in the movies is rich.. non? No at all... to this date my most expensive film cost about 200$ and TV never paid me a dime, the movie house netted a pretty sum of 176.52$ I believe. That “you much be rich” attitude really burns me at times. Every artist gets it... “you paint so well you should sell them and make a fortune!” What world do these people live in? Where will this money come from exactly? Most of the time the people saying it have never bought an original piece of art in their lives, like about 95% of any given population. Artistic urges are like a mental illness, you need to do it or you can’t cope. Satisfying as it is for an artist to make art, it mostly goes unseen and unnoticed and certainly, unpaid for by anyone but the artist him or herself.

I did get attention form some friend who encouraged me who were in the production biz. One gave me software to help me out.. Final Cut Pro, Cinema 4D etc. The other gave me some advice, training and eventually work doing de-rigging (a tedious chore I actually love to do). At the same time, I convinced several clients to go online with their work flow which let me work easily from my studio on several things at once and not having to wait for FedEX to deliver crucial information and files. It was all looking very rosy for a while. I always seem to be 1 or 2 steady clients away from a livable income however... even now. I’ve done some very top notch work, but always just not enough to get the steady contracts. I suspect I am in the majority of contractors in this respect.

Animation is another hobby of mine I am slowly able to explore in ways I never could have before. I’ve surprised myself with several animation awards when, truth be told, I had no idea what Iw as doing when I made those films. The MAC continues to be my machine of choice, I’d really like the new 8 core tower to improve my speed and render times but that seems a little like a dream world right now.

In many ways, I am living my dreams... the stuff I can do with my photography and film work was unthinkable a short time ago. My level of experience in Photoshop, Final Cut, After Effects etc are expert and I can only hope eventually, after this self made financial world crisis is over, those skills will be in demand again and the economy of hiring someone like me online will appeal to more and more tech savvy employers.

All in all, the future, though tough right now, still will offer opportunities I can’t even imagine right now. The digital revolution, in which I was swept up in, has changed how I communicate, work and do my art. Even a “nobody” like me in this new world (I am no Steve Jobbs or Bill gates obviously) benefits.