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Thursday, 27 March 2008 |
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For those of you who are not familiar with Zapp Applications, they are an online system set up by the Western States Art Federation to help art fairs with their jurying process. It does an excellent job of connecting artists with art fairs around the country but I think there are a few problems with this system. First, you can only present your images at 1920 x 1920 pixels and no larger than 1.8 Mb. This is all well and good but you cannot tell me that this resolution is adequate for proper viewing of art. Second, their system only allows you to enter 100 characters (not words) to describe your materials and technique. That is it! With 100 characters you are supposed to describe what you do, how can anyone make a decision about your art based on 100 characters? Finally, there is the jury fee. I don't know what Zapp charges art fairs to use their system but most of the fees for the artist run at $25 to $30. Not a huge amount of money but when you are applying to a lot of fairs this really racks up. Now, I understand that it takes money to run the system and for the fairs to process all the jury information but I would like everyone to consider how many people are applying to these fairs. From the letters I have personally received back from fairs, it appears that most fairs have several hundred to several thousand applicants. One fair I know of had over 1,700 applications at $30 each. That is $51,000 someone has made off of artists. There is no way that it cost that much for a fair to use Zapp and to process applications. It seems to me that this is just another way for Fairs and Zapp to make excessive money, dare I say rip artists off! Don’t even get me started on how much the fair charges you to attend once you are accepted. |
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Thursday, 27 March 2008 |
I have been searching awhile for a use for Kroger and other plastic bags we all seem to accumulate. Other than using them as garbage bags (way to small) or to collect cat droppings, there does not seem to be a whole lot of uses for these ubiquitous scourges of the environment. Yes, you can put them into the Kroger collection bin and hope that they are recycled or you could even stop taking them entirely (which I have mostly done). But what else can you do with these things. I have seen people weave them into rugs or make tarps out of them, but that takes a lot of work. The only thing I have come up with is to use them as packing material. I wrap three to four of them around bowls and tiles and use them like peanuts in my art fair bins. I also use them as packing material in boxes to replace or augment peanuts.
Of note, is that I now collect paper bags and use them in place of plastic bags when I sell a piece of art at an art fair. Sure, they don't say "Thank You" on them but as an artist who works in recycled paper, I think it is better to give someone a reused paper bag that says "Value Market" than adding yet another plastic bag to someone's collection. |
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Thursday, 26 July 2007 |
One good thing to come out of the Berea Fair is that I realized I needed a better way to pack my art. I have several pieces that are to large to put into bins so they typically have to be wrapped in bubble wrap. This is not a one person job. To solve this problem, I created a bubble wrap bag made to fit each piece. This way, when the piece is sold, all I have to do is slide it into it's bag and it is ready to go.
Making the bags is easy. Just measure out enough bubble wrap to cover the front and back of your art (leave several extra inches for sides and to make it large enough to easily slide over your art). Next just start taping all the seams. Glue guns set on low also make nice bags with no obvious tape seams. Almost like they are machine made. This does take a bit longer than tape.
As Scrooge McDuck said, "Work smarter, not harder". |
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Thursday, 19 July 2007 |
The Berea Art Fair is well over now and I finally have some time to write my impressions of the fair. I like doing this fair because of where it is and because I have friends in Berea, but I am not sure that I can keep doing it because I usually just manage to break even. Granted I would have done better if I had not rented a van, but I needed transportation, an on going problem. That all said, I did manage to sell a piece of sculpture to a teenager... thank god for guilty parents with good jobs. Hopefully, she will enjoy her art for the rest of her life.
On to the transportation issue. Getting things to and from fairs is a serious pain and problem. I rented a cargo van and that did not go well. Beyond the $240 price tag, there was the issue of it being way to big for my needs. This made packing a serious problem because to make everything secure, I had just jammed boxes into our cars and everything fit snug and did not move around. This was not the case with a cavernous van. For woodland I am borrowing a neighbors SUV and we will see how that works. It might actually be to small, but I won't really know until I try and pack it. Fortunately, his SUV has a trailer hitch so I can always rent a small pull behind.
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Monday, 18 June 2007 |
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Now that I have attended Francisco's Farm Art fair, I can honestly say that it is the best run most artist friendly fair I have ever attended. The staff (all 150 of them) did their best to make sure that the artist is well taken care of. They also did a good job of promoting the fair. Unfortunately, the number of people attending the fair was not very high and my sales and the sales of just about everyone I spoke with were not very good. I have yet to run the numbers but my guess is that I may have just broken even on this fair and if it were not for the sale of one piece of sculpture it would have been a definite loss. That said, I will try and attended the fair again next year because it held in a good location and it is so well run. I think in a few years this fair could become better than many other fairs in the region.
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Francisco's Farm this weekend |
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Thursday, 14 June 2007 |
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Francisco's Farm is this weekend in Midway and I and sort of looking forward to it. I hope my sales will be as good as Cherokee Triangle but I don't know because it I have not attending this fair before and it costs $5 to get in. Also, it will be in the lower 90's, which never makes art fairs fun. I have been taking a lot of pictures of my new art, and there will be a lot of new art at the fair, and hope to have them posted sometime next week. I have a new softbox and it seems to be working well so my pictures should be better than in the past. I can now create that nice light to dark gradient most of the time. The color temperature of my lights is a bit of a problem but I am sure I will improvise something. Dimmer switchs are great for controling intensity of tungston floods but they really screw up the color. |
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Monday, 14 May 2007 |
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I'm still up dating pages and working on adding more pictures and more information about each pictures. Unfortunately, I have not had much time to mess with my site as making art is a bit more important right now. However, i hope to soon determine which piece of art I will give away for my contest.
I just bought a soft box from B&H, I can't wait to try it out and see if the pictures of my art improve any. |
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