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Online Printing Resources and more: Notes and Links

Online Printing Resources for Artists

Last week for Creative Arts Workshop: Artists Portfolios for the Web, we talked about print solutions to go along with your website.

Business Cards and Postcards

I discussed moo.com for small and regular business cards, I love moo because I can pick up to 100 different images rather than settling on one. It is always fun to see which ones visitors prefer to take at Open Studios. It gives you feedback about what work people like without necessarily putting them or you on the spot.

You can use moo.com with your flickr.com photo sharing account or upload images directly.

I mentioned Modern Postcard too, as a quality shop to get an affordable and larger run of postcards or business cards.

Printed Artists Portfolios and Books

We looked at a few sample printed portfolio books that Ken Lovell made. Chatbooks makes cool books from Instagram and Facebook feeds. They are square and well-made and inexpensive. $8 a paperback. Sweet!

Speaking of Instagram– it is a photo sharing service which you mainly upload from your mobile device so take that into account when figuring out images for your book.

We saw examples from Lulu and Blurb also. More variety, and you can upload your own pdf and sell online, even offer your book through Amazon!

These are great proof-in-concept places, because it is so affordable to print just one copy and have the book online if you need more, or if you want to shop your book around for wider publishing or to use as a gift in your Kickstarter.

Artists Funding

Speaking of Kickstarter, and we did, we looked at how different individuals and teams use Kickstarter to fund projects or goals. There are also sites like GoFundMe and Indigogo that I forgot to mention. Browse through and see if there is a site and a format that would fit your particular project or needs. You could Kickstart a book or give supporters handmade work to fund a studio renovation. We touched briefly on Patreon as an artist’s tip jar as well.

Video 

If you end up creating an appeal for funding, you probably end up needing to make a little video telling the story of your project. Upload it to Youtube or Vimeo.

Questions

If you have any other suggestions or questions about these services, leave a comment.

Heath Commons

heath commons

Sometimes I am just amazed at what a beautiful campus it is at the school where I am teaching. In the Commons, one looks out at a panoramic view of West Rock, East Rock, all the buildings of downtown New Haven, and over to a little sliver of Long Island Sound. All this in the late afternoon light that makes everything so dramatic. That light has a name, I recently found out, alpenglow:

  1. the rosy light of the setting or rising sun seen on high mountains.

Creative Arts Workshop Daily Drawing Class

This wintersession at Creative Arts Workshop, I am teaching Daily Drawing which is a class geared towards artists of all kinds making the habit to carve out a little time each and every day for their artwork. This is a class for beginners and for practicing artists, anyone who wants to set themselves the challenge of making art a priority in their daily life in 2017.

A really good way to set yourself up for success with this goal to have

  1. materials at hand
  2. an idea of what you want to draw (this is where the list of daily prompts comes in)
  3. time, really 5 minutes to 30 minutes is all you need daily to set this in motion, if you have more time and can use, that is wonderful too but not necessary. 

 For the class you do not need much in the way of art supplies: a small sketchbook that you can fit in your backpack, purse, or coat pocket, maybe a slightly larger one to keep at home, or even just bond paper and a pencil is all you need. If you want more, a travel watercolor kit, markers, colored pencils, whatever media you want to explore in this journey, because it is all about you, and what you respond to naturally and want to explore more.

 For what to draw, we work from a set of daily prompts and this is one that I found online. I am resharing it here and now because it is a good list. If you are a New Years Relolution type of person, you may want to go ahead and start this journey BEFORE our class begins, by starting with the list and working in sequence. If you do not care to start before our class, we’ll start with the actually days on the list as listed. Do one drawing a day. If the prompt speaks to you, answer the prompt. If something else strikes you as visually interesting, do that instead.

Your goal is ONE a day, so try to do it that way, rather than all seven the night before class because we are building this as a habit and a practice, not an obligation. OKAY. Have fun.

 Here is a link to the list of prompts we will be using, it has a full year of prompts to keep you in this habit before, during and after class.

365 Prompts

Since you are doing these drawings outside of class, class time will be spent sharing the weeks work with each other, and the remainder of class time will be spent in a longer drawing project each session, focusing on non-traditional and traditional perceptual drawing skills, as way of an introduction to skill-building for new artists and a refresher for practicing artists.

Happy New Year!