Man.

I met with the owner of the business where I'll be showing artwork next month, and he said "I'd like 6 or 8 pieces, please. Do you have business cards? You'll want to have plenty, people always want those."

After I left the business, I went and sat down on a bench so that I could process. It sounded partially like this: "Argh! I don't want to give out my phone number, I'm an introvert! I don't want people looking at my Facebook, that's for family only! I don't want to send people to my blog, I can't waste an opportunity to properly market my artwork by forcing them to read my ramblings!" Plus I know how often I update this blog...

So, since getting accepted to show in the artwalk, I have been getting all sorts of business done, in a bit of a panic to be frank. Here are a bunch of bits.

Here is the art walk's website: Madison Park Art Walk.

I'll be showing here: Madison Park Jewelers. September 14 is the opening night. I'll also have a single piece at the Starbucks up the street.

I've made a website: Alyson Lapan the dilettante.

I photographed all sorts of work I have sitting around, to have something to put in the website. Some of it was buried in one of the four portfolios under my bed. Hmph!

I made myself a logo:

I like the way it looks. Not bad for 2 days' work. Impulsive!!

I got business cards printed...WITH MY LOGO ON THEM.

BUT: I still have to produce the artwork.

Ok, that's not to say I don't have any work done. The problem is that I've been tootin' along, painting about 2-3 items a month, and suddenly I kind of want to have 15-20 pieces done, but I only have 8 completed to my satisfaction! Just like how the pressure of needing to do my taxes results in a very clean and organized house, the pressure to produce art is very helpfully resulting in all of the other stuff noted above. I guess I'm just going to have to take what I can get.

Wish me luck!

Submitted art for a couple local art shows

Well, I've gotten a little bit back into creating art. As I'd suspected, what I needed was an art buddy. A friend of mine and I have started meeting once a month at her house for a couple of hours, just to create. It's a pretty introvert-friendly plan. We talk about making it more complicated, by adding participants or changing locations, but haven't gone that far just yet.

She has a great garden, and often when I've gone to her house I end up painting flowers she has in her house. Here's an example:

Peony Bouquet

Another couple of recently-created works, randomly chosen:

Quilled Egg

Renton Sunrise

I have submitted some of these art pieces to two local art venues. Since one of the applications asked for my website--ha, so professional they expect me to be!--I gave them this one. Then I figured, I'd better have something appropriate on here.

All of the pieces I'm doing right now are on 8x8 pieces of plywood, because one of the shows only sells in that format. I kind of like using the "necessity is the mother of invention" concept, so I could imagine myself using those 8x8 pieces for quite a while! Plus it's great to imagine that art I'm creating might leave my house. It makes it a little more fun to do, because it means that I can do more than one painting that is similar in style or subject.

I will post links to the art shows if I get into either!

Update about experiments

Ha, I just read through the previous post. I thought I might write another post in 8 weeks!! It is to laugh.

Anyway, the art experiment didn't work out. I'm not doing any of those things I talked about. They were nice ideas, but life happens and so forth. I am still writing gratitude posts on Facebook, though, so that project is going just fine!