One Fantastic Week

Most artists seek out other artists and creative types. No one really “gets you” like another artist. It’s how we find colleagues, mentors, and friends. The time I spend with other artists is some of the most special time I have. The desire and advantages of participating in art communities in person and online are both huge and easy to understand.

Thanks to the internet, it’s easier than ever to find other artists. It’s so easy, in fact, that you can create a world for yourself that’s almost exclusively art friends, and before you know it, you find yourself in an art bubble. Your social media will be filled with amazing pictures that both inspire you and occasionally make you want to quit. You will begin to think everyone is in the process of making their own intellectual property, and that everyone’s doing a Kickstarter.

This weekend, I rented a 20 foot by 10 foot slab of concrete for 3 days at a cost of $4000. Let’s take a walk through that choice and I’ll let you know how it turned out.

Over the past year and a half, I’ve been readdressing the way I sell my work at conventions. After about 10 years of doing them as cheaply as possible, I started to realize that I had been doing a poor job at getting the most out of my time. I decided to scrap my old setup and rebuild it from scratch, doing my best to emulate the way the top performing artists were displaying their work rather than relying on what seemed to be the most popular approaches. This yielded a year where I first doubled my average sales and then doubled them again, leading to sales figures that were previously impossible for me.

Imagine you had a job where you not only had to come up with ideas for stuff, but you had to come up with GREAT ideas on nearly a daily basis in order to keep your job. That is the job of a concept artist and oftentimes an illustrator. Doesn't sound easy does it?Now imagine that instead of working for someone else, you worked for yourself? Not only do your ideas have to be great, they have to be THE BEST and they have to be UNIQUE.

But how do you learn to develop ideas? Let's say you can paint circles around everyone in your field - that's great! You can sell an idea like nobody's business and that's a big leg up.