Skulldog Studio

First, a convention that’s entirely fun, I’ll be attending a day of Penny Arcade Expo.

Those rules..

Now for the ones that I’ll be selling at I’ll be hitting up Lunacon for the first time ever. This isn’t under my name, so you’ll just have to hunt me down by finding the hats.

Anime Boston, not under my own table again, but with the support of a fellow artist friend. You’ll be looking for the table with the animal eared hats, I’ll be sleeping back there.

Remember me?

Of course you do, and now this adorable little dead dog is ready for order through Patch Together. Set to be 12 inches tall, with super soft neck poof, how can you say no?

Currently at a $24.95 pre order discount, PT’s method of ordering means you WILL NOT BE CHARGED until it’s ready to ship.

I’ve always believed this world has a strange sense of humor, somethings more entertaining than others. The other night I went out on a trip to buy two things, more soda of the non-HFC variety, and beer.

The later is much easier to find, the first not so much. There are only two places that carry my favorite Pepsi Throwback nearby. However on this day, the world wanted to have a laugh at our expense. In the vast soda isle, instead of the usual stack of bright blue boxes, we found some extra diet Pepsi and this..

A sweet potato.

To top that off, the while checking out at the second store, the first item listed on the fellow in front of us in line was, you guessed  it, one sweet potato.

I know my advice tends to run in the negative here, your art sucks, stop whining, get over it.

But I always like to reiterate the positive aspect of art to people that read. You are an artist, you do what not everyone can, you create. As such, you will run into people that will try to tell you what art is or isn’t, they might try to tell you that if your drawings don’t have some deep metaphysical meaning, it’s crap, not worth doing.

Don’t listen to them. Art CAN and should have meaning, but everyone in awhile, there’s no harm is just drawing whatever silly crap turns up in your head. It’s not any less of an expression, you aren’t any less of an artist.

Not everyone can be a Bansky all the time, some of us like to just revert back to the happy four year olds with a new box of crayons.

Carry on.

One new digital picture added to the mix.

Plus a few new item added to the store, some ACEO original paintings along with some large originals.

For Christmas one year, a good friend gave me a coloring book. Mind you, this was during my free roaming years in college as an art student. I was thrilled by this book, like no other gift that year could top. This book was in it’s most primal form, terrible.

You can tell whoever was in charge of it, had no idea what kids like, or what kids should even be coloring. Some stories are common, innocent things that one can pass over, until you come across ‘The story of Pocahontas’. Of the not Disney variety. While my brain is still wrapping itself around why they picked that over say, Snow White or Sleeping Beauty, I gave up thinking all together by the time the next story comes up.

Hercules and the Amazons.

Really? Really.

Have a scan of John Smith, who looks to be related to Lucky, from the Lucky Charms cereal box. Thanks Jen, thanks a lot.

I caught this news on Deviantart, the site I currently use for the creation of prints, it’s quite good news.

So, if you wanted to nab a print from me, consider now a good time, as you can load up and save on shipping. The timing is good too, with all sorts of silly holidays around the corner.

News article about this sale: http://news.deviantart.com/article/97515/

Another day, another..something. Nothing too amazing on the art front, but a potential new toy needs some helpful support.

Click here to see full view, comments and vote greatly loved.

Finally got around to updating the shop plugin for real. This time I didn’t lose everything saved.

The one nice addition is that off site links finally work. So I added in a few items that link to offsite sales.

In honor of new shiny shop upgrade, free stickers will be added to all orders until October 1st.

This seems to be a topic that will end up a dead horse at some point here on the advice section, but I can’t seem to stress these facts enough. If you can’t sell your art, look at yourself first, then start blaming outside forces, here’s the checklist of things I see people ignoring time and time again. It’s brutal. It’s honest. It’s what I’ve been seeing first hand for the last seven years.

1 – Your pictures:

Are worth a thousand words,  or in the case of selling art, six billion.

Are your samples just links, or actual imbeded images to your post?  Grab people’s attention right away by starting with a small attached image, and not a link to a gallery, where they have to navigate through a lot of junk, not to mention having to sign up to view things. Laziness with art is double for your viewers, if you can’t be arsed to post at least one right there in your face file, expect that your viewers aren’t going to click past one link to see more.

Don’t bullshit around, don’t tell people ‘my inked commissions will look like this sample, ONLY WITH INK’. If you don’t have at least one sample that looks exactly like the type of art you’re selling, GO MAKE some first. Heck, go offer to make some for free for friends, then you get the positive word of mouth from people, and you get samples to sell your art.

In the case of premade art for sale, not only should you include a high quality scan of the art, take some photos of the picture hanging on the wall, help your customers visualize what owning it would be like.

Don’t even bother with webcam, cellphone, or whatever the heck else people use to make those godawful grainy digital copies of art.  Just don’t. All that says is ‘I don’t care enough about doing art to actually get these scanned properly’.

Learn to touch up. No I don’t mind filter the heck out of it, I mean simple tools like levels, and color correction. Taking the time to make your pencil work sharp and clean, to erase out dust specs, and otherwise showing you care about how your art is presented says a lot about you as an artist, it’s worth the extra ten minutes to do.

Take a cold, hard look at your art, is it interesting, eye catching, different? Why should someone stop and look at what you’re offering. There’s nothing wrong if not being perfect and selling it, but there’s a point where you just aren’t ready yet to try selling your art.

2 – You attitude / Reputation:

If you were to ask a random person online what they thought of you, what would they say? Hopefully something along the lines of ‘So and So is a decent artist, who was pleasant to work with’, and not ‘So and so peed in my cereal and stole my dog’.

I see a lot of whining that ‘popular’ or ‘elite’ artists that aren’t that great get more work. This seems to come out a lot when someone is having a hard time selling their own art. Bitch all you want, but the reason some bad artists can sell, sell, sell, is because they have the reputation behind them to back them up. They’ve been doing art longer, have more customers giving them word of mouth, and get out into the world and promote themselves. If you aren’t motivated enough to do the same, chances are you aren’t going to catch up to them anytime soon.

No one wants to deal with the Oscar the Grouch of the art world, if you sound like you hate working with people, expect those same people to worship you, and generally only put forth a negative image, no one will want to to put up with that to get art from you.  Put a little positive attitude out there for people to see, it spreads, people talk, talk gets around.

Sometimes it may be better to just shut up, and leave the snark to private journals. I’m certain we’ve all bitched about life, but you probably don’t want too much of that being ALL that your buyers see.

And personally, I’d much rather buy art from the nice, approachable artist with slightly lacking skills, then a perfect artist that acts bitter towards the world

Potential buyers do not owe you anything, don’t treat them poorly, do not rage at them for not buying.

3 – Your visibility / accessibility:

Goes hand and hand with number 2, if people can’t find you, talk to you, or otherwise interact outside of your random art selling post, chances are you won’t be the first person that comes to mind when they need art.

This doesn’t mean you need to start up galleries on every art site created, hardly, it does means you need to give your fans, buyers and followers somewhere they can see that you post regularly, keep track of your owed art, and pretty much just exist. Don’t just be a random post in a sea of equally relevant posts.

Along those lines, do you only take Money orders, won’t draw females, or otherwise create a huge list of things that start with ‘won’t’ or ‘can’t', then you’re limiting your accessibility. It’s your right to pick and choose what you want to deal with on a professional level, but if you only want to draw wolves facing right, and to be paid in E-coins only bought from one store in the US, you might find yourself short on work.

This might sound a bit backwards, but to help improve your visibility, commissioning other artists from time to time can really show you’re a real person, who gives back to the community.  Again, build the reputation, show an approchable attitude with other artists instead of complaining that they get more work than you.

Is that really it? Yeah, pretty much.

tl;dr – Shitty art +  Shitty attitude = Shitty sales.