Asian Goddess Quan Yin

Pink Lotus

Here's something I've been wanting to paint. Amazingly it didn't take long. Which is good since I'm a impatient kinda girl!

A What? ... Artisan Stimulus Package?

What’s a Artisan Stimulus Package?

I landed on this site after reading Cindy Davis Art blog and she did a nice write up on the site which prompted me to sign up as a verifed member.

Artfire has a creative marketing campaign called “Artisan Stimulus Package”. Artfire is another Handmade Ecommerce site like Etsy but has more features for Artists to shop, sell, forge (trade) and interact. A nice comparison chart is on their signup page of how they compare to Etsy.

The special offer is you can get a Artfire verifed account for $7.00 a month for LIFE

(Regular Price $20.00) They are only offering this to 5000 accounts. Right now there are only $1,981 accounts left.

Register on ArtFire.com

( Update! - Only 1,977 special accounts left to sign up for! When I started writing this blog, there were 1,981 special accounts left and now it’s dropped down 4 accounts in the short time I started to write this blog post. )

But I have questions…..

How they are going to bring in buyers?

They state that they have already locked in the back cover of “Craft” magazine for the next two years, purchased numerous display, broadcast and web ads, as well as over 75 million views of ArtFire ads on websites such as Facebook, Mother Jones!, Google, various blog sites, “green” webzines, arts & crafts webzines, and many other channels in the last 100 days. And will continue to buy advertising and increase that budget every month for you. Their site traffic has grown more than 3,000% because of this marketing.

And Why? No listing fees, final sale fees or renewing fees... what’s the catch?

Here’s what they say “There really is no catch. We used to sell on other ecommerce auction sites. It costs those companies about 2 cents per listing (in hardware and bandwidth); then they charge you 30 cents to a dollar in listing fees plus a commission. We just thought it was crazy to pay that much for such a simple thing.

Go ahead. List 500 items, list a thousand – sell a thousand, you still pay US $7.00 per month for life. Really. Since we don’t have a corporate jet or cool clubhouse headquarters, skyboxes or free meals in the company food court, we can afford to run the site while charging such a low fee. Heck we even buy our own coffee. In this economy, who would you rather do business with - people like you, living frugally to make things work or the big corporate types who think another “sales retreat” at a spa/golf course is critical to this quarter’s stock price?”

They want us to be Happy...

“It may sound odd, but we built this for you and we really just want you to be happy. We want you to sell, even if it is not with us. In fact, as a verified member you can link to your Etsy store on every item and we’ll even help you track the traffic.”

Art Supply Warehouse - Save on Shipping

Just wanted to share this site since they have a great flat rate of shipping. Who wants to pay high shipping costs? especially when you can use that extra cash to buy more supplies :-)

ASW - Art Supply Warehouse
http://www.aswexpress.com/

"NEW FLAT RATE $5.95 SHIPPING CHARGE FOR ALL ORDERS SHIPPED STANDARD GROUND TO THE CONTIGUOUS 48 STATES. NO OVERSIZE CHARGES. NO TRUCK SURCHARGES. NO SURPRISES."
They have a expansive inventory of thousands of art supplies from respected names such as: Creative Mark, Charvin, LUKAS, Matisse Derivan, Chroma, Sennelier, Silverbrush, Liquitex, Derwent, Da Vinci, Golden, Old Holland, Winsor & Newton, and more!

Pears

Finding a interesting subject to paint has been my challenge lately. I've been working on creating a reference catalog. But nothing inspired me! most of this week I was pretty busy but I wanted to paint something, finally decide I would just throw some color down and see if a image emerged and then I would do some negative painting and go from there.
After the paint dried, there wasn't a lot there... so I just decided to break out a book and do a exercise. The book I choose is "Watercolor for the first time" by Kory Fluckiger. This is a really good book with friendly exercises to start off with. For my painting I choose the pears.

Thanks Michelle Burnett! for the great site for Artists

Found this site from visiting Michelle Burnett blog site. (Thanks Michelle!) It's called Etsy "Your place to buy and sell all things homemade" Michelle has a post up about purchasing a piece of art by Authur Simo, Arthur is an artist with autism. You can see and read his blog here.
http://simoartcorner.blogspot.com/

It was cool to find this site and see all the incredible arts and crafts, and the deals are unbelievable. I'll be doing my shopping here in the future. Of course I wondered about sales, does anything really get sold here? I couldn't see if things were actually being sold (although I haven't fully check out the site). But then I found this statistic report that Etsy puts out and WOW! nice to see that a whopping 683,369 items were sold and generating $9.9 million for the month of January. This is a smart move for Etsy to post these statistics and let everyone see how well this is going and the potential sales you can have here on their site. See a partial report below, you can see more on their site .

Now that I've seen the statistics and I like the site I've created a account and I'll be thinking of the things I can make and sell here. What a great resource! I'm going to tell my family and friends about it. http://www.etsy.com/


Etsy Statistics: January 2009 Weather Report

Story by winenutnyc Published on February 6, 2009 in Etsy News	Photo by barbraziemerphoto

Every year, January is an interesting month at Etsy: we know that sales will be down when compared to the prior month, December, but listings will go up, as folks re-stock their shops after the holiday season. We also pay very close attention to how sales change from week-to-week. As we approach Valentine’s Day we expect the last week of January to exceed the first.

We were pleased with January results: the numbers exceeded our expectations in these difficult economic times.

The stats:

• $9.9 million of goods were sold; roughly 23% below December's sales figure (sales for the last full week of January represented a 9.3% increase above the first full week of January).
• That represents 683,369 items sold for the month, a 16.2% decrease from December's stats.
• 1,203,417 million new items were listed in January, up from 1,098,644 items or 9.2% vs. December.
• 138,000 new members joined the Etsy community, 16.3% below December's record number of new members.
• 443,468,017 page views were recorded on the site, an 8.1% increase compared to December.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to the Etsy community in January!

Cool tool for scoring lines

Oh and I found this tool in the scrapbook dept. it's a image transfer tool used for paper scoring, rub on's and dry embossing. I've been looking for a better tool to use than a palette knive when scoring lines in the paper (for leaves, petals, etc) I've always had a heck of time holding a palette knife in the right angles while scoring, I usually make a bad line and that really irrates me. I just tried this on my leaves and it worked great! They are pretty cheap too, I think I paid under $3.00 at Michaels Craft stores.

The Poppy Stranger - Progress

Here's where I'm at to date with the Poppies. It's coming along... the one thing I've found out about this painting is that I should study poppies more. I kinda feel like I'm going through the dark, not much passion either, since I really don't know the poppy. No formal introduction, no small talk, no dance.. it's like painting some stranger. I like poppies, in fact I think they are very beautiful, but I have no relationship with them. How silly! but not really......... I'll have to make a date with some poppies.

Could have used a few more feet.........

Could have used a few more feet to my height otherwise I wouldn't be standing on this chair to take these pictures of my art for this blog! Heehee! I just had to show you my fancy scanning technique I had to develop since the paper I was working on was bigger than my scanner.
Boy, would I love to get one of those A4 or X-large scanners but the cost is bucko $$$ so being a smart short person, I create my own way! Hey it works!

Red Poppies - work in progress

This is another one of my pictures I'm working on from Jan's class, one of the five! It's red poppies that's coming along. Today, I ran around so I didn't get to paint much, but I did get some of the green stuff in. I still have to darken the reds and work the centers, and the more green!

Sea Angel Abstract

Here's another painting that I have named Sea Angel for all the greens and teals of color. I did this in Jan Foss's watercolor workshop. Jan demonstrated how she did her moving water, rocks, and trees abstract art and it was my intention to do a moving river with rocks and trees, but when I removed the sarah wrap from my paper, the glorious Angel appeared and I knew that I wanted to keep it as an Angel.

Lake Tahoe and Workshop with Jan Foss

Had a Great week painting 6 hours a day in a week long watercolor workshop with Jan Foss of Lake Tahoe. See her paintings on her website, http://www.watercolorsbyjanfoss.com/.
Every day we did a new project on either a 1/4 or 1/2 sheet of paper. I really enjoyed this process of using the sheets vs the blocks. I mainly paint on blocks of watercolor since it's seems easier and what I have a lot right now. Using the sheets gave me the feeling of more creative rights to what I could paint and the scale. Painting big seemed intimidating, but Jan made it feel so natural and fun.

Jan is a wonderful artist and teacher. I really love her techniques on achieving the soft edges and colors she uses. She really helped us all with composition, scale and technique. I also liked the way she setup her palette. I had just set my palette up and found that I didn't like the way I had placed my colors around it, because i kept having to unnaturally reach for yellow to mix with my blue and mixing my blue with my red for purple. So I've been using up the paints and when I've got most of them used up on the palette, I'm going to re-setup my palette the way she did. I'll do a separate blog on that.

This picture is done on a 1/4 sheet, so it's larger than my scanner. It's a snow scene of Lake Tahoe. I'm going to use it for next year's Christmas card. It was great learning how to paint snow on trees. Jan showed us a couple of version on how to achieve snow on the trees, shadows and composition.