Long overdue

Since half my audience (this means you, Kylene) needs an update, I thought I'd better write one. (Sigh...) It's rough being at the mercy of your fans. :-) I've been amazingly busy, however, considering I'm not in school and I don't have a job! Lots has happened in the last few weeks. My fledgling art career is, well, still fledgling, but we're making progress! I designed greeting cards based on the drawings I've been doing, and they have been selling pretty well. Three stores in Sonoma are currently stocking the "Endpapers" line, and I'm looking to expand my radius a little into the neighboring towns. I'll be featured on the walls of the Barking Dog coffee shop in August, and an upscale consignment store has agreed to showcase a few of my originals while I'm away at camp. It's all very exciting, if not very profitable. The cards are a small, but comforting trickle of cash, but the cost of framing all my drawings was something I kind of forgot about. I did find some great frames at Target, though, and they look really nice. (Don't tell anyone that's where they came from, though--my profs would be shocked!)

I took a framed sample around to some of the local galleries and asked what they thought of the framing and how they would price it. They were very enthusiastic about my work (which was encouraging) and quoted prices that were double what I had planned on charging (even more encouraging!). It's hard for me to imagine someone actually paying money to put my stuff on their wall, much less a lot of money. It was interesting talking to the gallery owners about their experiences selling art. In their experience, when people don't know about the quality of an item, they rely on the price to tell them. Thus, if I underprice my drawings, they may actually sell less than if I overpriced them! We settled on $85-$100 for each framed original (which still sounds astronomical to me--I certainly can't afford to spend that much on art), which is a good deal less than some of the prices that were suggested to me. I hope to sell a lot of them, but I can always take what's left with me back to school and put on a show there.

I leave for camp on June 8th, and I'm getting pretty excited about going. Before I go though, I'll be heading to a John Mayer concert in San Jose with my friend Rachel thanks to the free tickets I won off the radio last week! You know those cheesy "caller number 9" deals. I just happened to be listening when they said "Call now!!" and I did, and I won! Woohoo! It's going to be AWESOME. In the meantime, I have 20 or so drawing to frame....