Having my work photographed, and framing it

I took lots of my work out of frames and schlepped it to a nearby town a couple of days ago, to have it photographed by a recommended photographer. I'll see the results in a few days. I'm pretty excited about this. It's a step I've known I needed to take if I was serious about getting into galleries or shows, so of course I've put it off! Well, part of the reason for that was that I worried about how much it would cost. But I had inflated that in my head. So I came away a happy painter. Now all I have to do is put it all back into those frames. It's all over the dining room table - there not being room in the studio for such a messy job. I have high hopes for the results - and I'll be showing it off here, maybe just about the same time I get indexed.

There are some great things about watercolors and pastels, but a drawback is that you have to mat and frame things to show them. Speaking of expenses. I think I've gotten the process down as cheap as it can get. I watch for sales on inexpensive frames at the big box "craft" stores like Michael's and JoAnne, and I order mats, and better frames, from framesbymail.com. I've had great luck with them so I recommend them. Once I made a mistake myself, which I took to be their mistake, and they fixed it without arguing. Only later did I realize it was my mistake. So I'm making up for it here by recommending them. I think I shopped around a bit and found them to be at least as cheap or even cheaper than everyone else. And they have a good selection. And since you shop online you can live anywhere and shop there.

Go paint!

For starters

I've been thinking about starting this for a long time - and what got me going was that I want to get some business cards made so I wanted to get my url for the cards. Whatever works. I've been painting for quite a long time, and drawing for my whole life. Now I've decided I need to get serious about marketing. I'll be having my work photographed in a couple of weeks. A big step for me. I'll be working on the blog little by little. I realize it's a bit bare-bones for the moment, cause I clicked the wrong key and seem to have chosen this bleakish format, but I'll tart it up as I go along.

So the main topics are painting and marketing. The two things are so different they're practically mutually exclusive. I'd so much rather paint, or even procrastinate about painting, than try to market my stuff - but I've gotta believe I can do it.

I do watercolor, pastels, and collages. Watercolor is fantastic, cause it's so hard to control, and sometimes you lose control and it's horrible and sometimes you lose control and it's better than you could have imagined. Pastels are the opposite: you lay it on and it stays exactly where you put it, and if it's right it's cause you had the control you needed and did it right. I do the collages because they're FUN. I started them because I had so many reject paintings lying around I thought I'd try to use them somehow. Then I found stuff everywhere I could slap down. One of my best "suppliers" is my eight-year-old granddaughter, Ellie, who's a great artist in her own right, and whose work I've borrowed for collages.