Summer Get together

We will get together on Friday, July 31 to paint at 10 am.

contact me at Chetti7@aol.com if you want to be a part of it or just come on~

We will view a video of an artist creating a Plein Air Painting in Europe, then
go to the village where we will set up to do our own plein air painting.

If you would like to go to the gardens or a park, that might be a great option, or downtown if you are in the mood for a street-scape.

Just wanted to spark some creativity until the fall sessions begin.

BLESSINGS!

Allison

We're BACK!

We began a NEW semester this week with 20 people now in the group!

For the upcoming weeks we will dig deeply into the book Saying Yes, Accepting God’s Amazing Invitation to Artists


Our leader, Melanie Morris adds a few comments with:
I’m excited about our studio time next week and think our focus on shells is a great start to the semester. Our books talks about how God was the first artist and there is certainly great artistry in the beauty of shells. I’m already thinking about what I’ll do. I can see a really great close-up of a shell that becomes an abstract painting– which would definitely be new for me. I also can see how shells would provide inspiration for an intricate pen and ink drawing or a loose and colorful collage from tissue paper or magazine photos. If you are new to painting, don’t worry because anything goes – you could even use food coloring to dye sand and create your shell with colored sand.
MELANIE


This weekend some of the artists in the group are heading South..for some creative time with toes in the sand- our SPRING RETREAT.

Check back with us next week as we draw on inspiration from the sea!

Blessings!

Allison

Welcome Spring 2009!

We will begin a new semester on Wednesday February 4 in Crestline.

Together we will study a number of new "sources of inspiration" and paint/create every other week.

For the first time we are having a RETREAT to the beach...
to spend a few days perfecting our craft or just "rubbing elbows" with
other creative types.

We welcome you to join us.

Also, if you haven't checked out Church of the Highlands...
as a creative person who has been SO blessed because of my relationship with
God in my creative life as well as my personal life....

Give it a try....
you will love it!

We are up to more than 12,000 "Happy People" (that's what they call our church..
not a bad description :)) who are being filled up and pouring out our talents across this city and this state.

Blessings in 2009...may the "creative bug" get you!

Allison

Selling Your Work on the Internet

I have been experimenting with selling artwork online, particularly with Ebay and have had success, actually sold four paintings this way, one going to Washington State, one finding a home in Texas (just after the storm- so a bit nerve-racking knowing I was shipping in that direction), one to South Carolina and another in the Southeast.

I found the following article on the American Artist website which gives a great bit of detail about the process.

I am searching for a more economical way to sell online. A great plus is that I have had a gallery find me online, which now sells my work.

Blogger has a GREAT search engine, even the artists I write about on here say that my blogs come up when they search their name so a website here is a plus!

Hope you are having a great day and finding your creative spirit stirring.

Allison

The Internet Art Marketby Daniel Grant

A decade ago people questioned whether anyone would buy art that they had only seen over the internet—not in person. Now there are many online means of promoting and selling artwork, and many collectors go online before they head to their nearest gallery. Artists and their work are accessible on their own websites or through links from the websites of galleries, art organizations, and juried shows. Some artists offer artwork for sale on eBay and Craigslist or through one of the myriad mall sites (art-exchange.com, starvingartistsgallery.com, and originalartonline.com, among others). Blogs and YouTube carry artists’ words and pictures. Artists’ pages also show up on social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Opportunities for exposure, promotion, and sales abound, but it is still the rare artist who can point to the web as the source of the bulk of his or her earnings. Louisiana painter Marcia Baldwin is one of those artists. Earning a living from selling equine and floral paintings on eBay since 2003, where she is known as M Baldwin with eBay ID mbaldwinfineart, Baldwin was able to reach her personal sales goal of $100,000 in 2005. “The key to selling on eBay is to keep producing,” she says, noting that she paints one or two pictures a day, seven days a week. In the course of a year, she sells as many as 500 paintings, with prices averaging between $289 and $500.

Selling on eBay is not free, and the expenses add up to approximately 40 percent of the gross, perhaps the same as the amount an art gallery would take. The expenses include a 17 percent commission on all sales, and $32 per artwork to list her paintings on the first page of a search (a typical eBay search under the category of “paintings” produces more than 100 pages and 10,000 offerings). PayPal, the online secure payment system for credit-card purchases, takes another three or four percent. There is also the cost of shipping the paintings to buyers (custom boxes, packaging materials, FedEx Home Delivery, and insurance), which averages $30 apiece.

Producing a lot and keeping the prices relatively low for an audience that is bargain hunting is essential for artists using eBay. “You learn how to make paintings quickly,” says Illinois painter Diane Millsap, who creates four New Orleans-themed paintings a week and generally sells between eight and 12 per month, averaging $400 to $500 per piece. Some of these bargain hunters purchase more than one of her paintings and recommend her work to others. Print publishers also have perused her offerings on eBay, which she says has led to print-licensing agreements.

Artist websites present opportunities for sales to a far wider audience, foregoing the percentage-charging middlemen in the brick-and-mortar or online galleries. A website expands the artist’s potential to reach all corners of the planet, but it doesn’t necessarily lead to sales. Artists still struggle to figure out how to make their site stand out from the billions of others.

The answer is search-engine optimization—how to be found by someone looking for something online through a search engine such as Yahoo! or Google. A search on, say, Google for the general category “landscape painting” is apt to produce more than a million potentially relevant websites, with 10 results per page. Web marketers note that it is rare for anyone conducting a search to look past the fourth page, which means that the overwhelming majority of sites won’t be visited. They point to the use of unique and specific “keywords” as essential in elevating a particular site’s standing from back in the pack to the first few pages. When a website is created, certain keywords are written into the site’s HTML code to identify the content of the site, and these are also the terms that someone making a search would type in. There are ways to shortcut the process: Companies may buy advertisements on search engines (the ads appear on the page where the search begins) whenever certain keywords are used, and some purchase keywords so that their websites appear at the top of the list.

“Ads and buying keywords are a game for people with marketing budgets, because it can get expensive,” says Chris Maher, a website developer for artists. “It’s better to just incorporate good keywords—the more specific the better.” Maher notes that landscape painters might want to include the name of their studio, the town they live in, the particular subjects of their paintings, and other unique qualities of their work that might help browsers find their website more quickly and easily.

The algorithms of search engines also tend to give precedence to web pages that are linked to other high-traffic sites with similar content—popularity begets more popularity. One artist who has put this into practice is Linda Paul of Colorado. Paul has been making a living exclusively from website sales of her giclée prints and painted tiles since 2000, earning more than $200,000 in 2007. “I haven’t spent a cent on search-engine optimization,” she says, but she has promoted links from other websites to her own. “I’ve got 2,000 sites pointing to me right now.” Among her techniques are reciprocal links with other artists, writing blogs and articles on other sites, and promoting her work to print media that have their own websites.
The bottom line is that an increasing number of artwork sales are coming from the web. Even sites that don’t elicit sales are creating valuable exposure. And when you’re an artist, every little bit helps.

Read more Business of Art features.

Creative Call To the Botanical Gardens

This week we began a new Fall Semester with our artist friends from the
Church of the Highlands.

We visited the Botanical Gardens to see the new show by Amy Crews.
Amy spoke with our group a few semesters ago with great inspiration (see archives)
We can't wait to start again, as we study Creative Call and discover what God has in store for us in new techniques, shows and inspiration.

Melanie Morris is leading the pack...

We hope these glimpses of Amy's work will inspire you!

Allison

A NEW SEASON BEGINS

We began our first meeting for the fall semester today and have a great group.

Forstall Art Center sent Ernie Elridge to kick off the meeting with coupons and announcements on some great classes.

Our own Melanie Morris will be teaching on Oct. 11, from 9-3
Acrylic painting Workshop

go online to see their schedule
FORSTALL ART CENTER

We will study the CREATIVE CALL and paint on alternating weeks so there are
no excuses! By the time the group ends, together we will create more than 5 pieces together...enough to pick one to enter the ENERGEN show!

Come visit!

CREATIVE CALL ON SUMMER BREAK

I have been missing my artist friends....

We have not met since May....
just about the time things wind down for the summer we are all reflecting on the heat, families, outdoor time...

looking for new subject matter....

I have spent quite a bit more time in my studio as my children are with their father for five weeks this summer....

I recently interviewed an incredible artist from Dothan who sells her paintings nationwide for tens of thousands of dollars.

Her inspiring story will be in an upcoming issue of Southern Beauty...so I don't want to spoil the story...but I will say, I was moved by her dedication
and share with artists...

she does not wait for inspiration....or seek motivation...

she enters her studio at about 7-8 pm....
she begins working....painting....planning...
and she paints throughout the night...with no phones..no distractions...
until sunlight...

and then she sleeps til noon...

I didn't ask her WHEN she began this schedule as I feel certain it might have been AFTER her son was grown...but the fact is...

her painting is SERIOUS....
her time there is SCHEDULED....
and her family respects that time...

I was amazed too that she TAKES PRIDE IN THE FACT THAT HER PEAK CREATIVE TIME was at NIGHT..

how many of us creative people begin with an idea at 11 PM (my peak time...at least it USED to be before a 3 year old...:) )
or are awakened with a story or idea at 3 AM (what IS IT with that hour anyway?)

and we apologize..or go back to bed...with a song that dies there on our pillow...
because it seems too UNUSUAL!

I challenge you artists...to EMBRACE THE ARTIST...
slip to the studio...get a pen light....

don't let the genius get away....

SAVOR your UNIQUE gifts that come to you in the dark....
and pick a night with a full moon...
drag an easel outside and GO WITH IT....

Then next fall when we RE convene...

We will have made another revelation...
not only are WE ARTISTS...but we can come to appreciate WHEN IT IS THAT WE ARE AT
PEAK performance...

gotta go...I feel a painting brewing up inside!

Blessings and I miss you TONS!

Allison

Justine Rynearson Demo

Justine did an incredible job demonstrating FAST PAINTING, based on a workshop by Robert Burridge. www.RobertBurridge.com

His incredible paintings make us "bright painters" glad to be alive. They are bursting with color and vitality...and would inspire a monkey to pick up a paintbrush!

Steps to take:
1) Determine the focal point, the STAR of the show.
Ours was a big yellow flower in a still life we set up.

that area will be the lightest, brightest or most detailed of the painting.

2) Determine the darks to be against the focal point
They will be also emphasized with color..
if the flower is yellow...the complement is purple (usually the color across from it on the color wheel) but the fun part about painting like Robert is that there is no "black and white"...purple is anything between red and blue (the colors that make up purple)...that can mean deep red/violet or it can mean bright, sky blue...

IT IS YOUR PAINTING..USE WHAT YOU SEE!

Of all of the messages..the most important is to be loose!
Even in dipping your paint..put the paints on the floor..use a long brush,
straight arm..and reach down...use loose strokes driven with your full arm extended.

Justine uses a messy orange range of tones that she selected from her color wheel that was created by Robert.

The formula is : spice, spice, dominant, complement

This day she picked...yellow as the dominant..
and the complement being between blue and warm purple

She arranges the colors in the tray in a similar arrangement. He uses tubes of
pure color..no mixing..the mixing is in picking what the eye sees.

"And don't forget, every painter needs good music", Justine told us.

We listened to Justine's Shane and Shane.

After blocking in lights and darks, you have to determine how the light hits.
She used a huge brush to put in the darks...using the complement of yellow..
a dark purple..and since purple is made of red and blue (always thinking here!)
we use that splash of red to add SPICE and throw in some bright blue...sky blue perhaps...

YOU CAN'T MESS UP...IT'S ACRYLIC...ACCORDING TO JUSTINE...
NOTHING GESSO CAN'T COVER UP AND THEN YOU CAN START AGAIN...

HOW REFRESHING!

And Robert also uses his hands...
His wife markets his work and sets up workshops....
he paints and paints and paints..
starting with little exercises (shown of justine's)

Robert does these "little gems" every day.

We also did studies of how the light comes into the vase and where it goes
out...AH.......SO MUCH TO LEARN!

Take our still life...and try your own!

The Highland Artists.

Creative Call

In 2007, a group of women artists joined each week to study the book, Creative Call, by Janice Elsheimer. The book provides inspiration so that we may become the artists God made us to be.

Each week we gather to share information, to encourage each other, to listen to praise and worship music and to explore our gifts of painting- in a attempt to wake up the creative spirit that lives within us.

Goal one is to come to the realization that because we create, we ARE artists.
Our first semester brought us to a comfortable place in our new title as ARTISTS.
Semester two we studied Scribbling In the Sand by Michael Card.

Other books of interest:
The Artist's Way, Julia Cameron

Spring 2008, we will read If You Want to Walk on Water, You Have to Get Out of the Boat.

We visit local art events together, share learning experiences by inviting local artists to do demonstrations and view member artist's work and techniques.

The group has grown into a close-knit group of friends who are now more than "colleagues" but are friends.
We invite you to join us today and check back as we share our creative endeavors with you online.


"Our talents are a gift from God, and I am to use them to fulfill his purposes in my life and his world. I humbly acknowledge and accept my gifts as I ask to receive God's vision for how I am to use them. I ask the Holy Spirit to free me from self-doubt and self-absorption. I pray this work will bring me into closer alignment with God's plan for me as I seek to bring my gifts and talents into his light and to become the whole and complete person he intends me to be." Amen