Selling your work

I'm surprised. I'm always surprised when people really enjoy my work. It's not like I haven't had positive feedback before, in fact, I usually get positive feedback, but I think when you come across someone that loves your work enough to put it on their wall and look at it everyday, that's something.


I just ran into someone who received one of my pieces for a Christmas present (they got it early) and she was so complimentary, and explained that the more she looks at it, the more she loves it. That just makes me smile.

Because of the wax's unique texture, it really does beg for you to touch it. It's funny, my whole life I've cringed when people want to reach out and touch drawings, paintings or even the metal/jewellery work that I have done. The metal tarnishes with fingerprint grease, drawings smudge and often paintings are off-limits to touch. But she's right, you have to touch it, you have to feel the texture and enjoy that tactile aspect of the art work that I've never really thought about.

I'm constantly touching the paintings, as I'm doing it, and always after they are finished. Over the past two months, I've sold 10 wax pieces. I've never sold that many pieces in my life. I've done drawings or pen and ink ones that have sold for pretty good prices, because of the intense effort involved, but I'm enjoying doing these so much that I want to continue doing it, and now that I know people actually like them, I want to do it even more.

I think what I have to do, to really get this stuff off the ground, is to find some galleries that are interested in showing my work. That's not an easy task, but I'm looking forward to making this something worth doing. If all the feedback means anything, it's that I cannot just sit back, I have to aggressively go after this, or nothing more will come of it. The ball is literally in my court.

The only negative with all this is that I've put off some of the writing material that I've been wanting to do. I've started the plot outline on a new story and thinking about it, but the painting suddenly has priority over writing.

First festival in the bag

I need a T-shirt that says, "I survived the Wainwright Arts Festival."
Although the full went went over pretty well, I was disappinted with the turnout. Turns out, Mother Nature was completely against us and we had one of the coldest weeks since last winter. Perfect.
The rest of the show went over well, with I think, the Art Show and Sale being the most popular of the six events.

We had 30 artists from all over our area taking part, and one of the biggest compliements we could have had were people talking about how much talent there actually is in a town of 5,300 people, and less than 10,000 within the entire district.

We are pretty lucky to have so many people interested in art or those that actually make art. Of course, we had to limit the show to just paintings and drawings, which caused a bit of an issue, but it was our first year and I'm glad that we made the decision that we did.

I sold Boneyard at the show, one of my first real wax paintings that I did, three months or so ago. I know it's going to a good home.



I've since sold two more since the show ended with people who saw pieces they really liked and now wanted to purchase them. That's great. Out of the 12 pieces I brought to the show, I now have sold seven of them. That's pretty good, especially since I didn't sell anything at the show last year. I did sell one after the show was over, but still, it wasn't nearly as good as this year. Then again, last year, I was doing completely different stuff.

I'm pretty pleased with myself and I hope to have more work done in the near future, at least things that may go over the Christmas holidays or the many new ones I hope to create.