Overcome Sales Shyness

Some of the greatest artists I know struggle with the process of marketing and selling their work. Their quality is indisputable and their vision unique. Yet they approach sales with a mask of confidence over a yawning pit of shame and terror.

Sometimes that’s just shyness. The traits of being artistic and being good at sales aren’t the same at all. I doubt they’re even linked. They’re two separate aptitudes. Having a knack for either makes it easier to learn and more fun because you’re confident of good results.

Both of those competencies can be developed by learning the skills, even if you don’t start with much natural aptitude or don’t believe you have any. Not believing in real aptitudes is so common it’s like catching a cold. The professional who swallows her stage fright to give a good presentation will make sales as often as the equally good natural extrovert who shares her gallery.

I was lucky in this regard. I had some marketing skills before I had enough artistic skill to be that good. The level that real people handed me actual money for an artwork came early in my development. I was good at about two or three subjects - dragons, white rats and abstracted trees that looked like undersea tentacled forms. I was competent in one medium - technical pen drawing.

Even in those competencies I was nowhere near as good as I am now. My works were stiff, my compositions haphazard at best and my shadows went all over the place.

I sold a dragon for $1 standing in line to register at my first science fiction convention. I was drawing a dragon because I was bored. This other guy in line liked it and said “Can you do one of those on a button? How much do you want for it?”

I asked for a dollar. That was what buttons were selling for and he still had to pay another buck to the guy with the button machine to have it made up. I drew it and moved forward in line. I sold another one by the time I got to the registration desk.

I sold that because when a customer looked at my drawing and liked it, I answered off the cuff with what I thought was a reasonable price. I didn’t argue with him that my dragons weren’t good enough. I priced it like a cheap cartoon - because I had seen other artists doing off the cuff quick sketches that size for a dollar. That was back in 1975 or so, not 2011. Inflation might have made it a seven or eight dollar cartoon today, at least a five.

I sold some cat cartoons that were badly drawn but very funny because I got silly at the con and had funny ideas. A professional cartoonist told me decades later that it doesn’t matter if you can draw well as long as you can draw consistently and get funny ideas. Getting paid for cartoons made sense to me. I was laughing, I believed that anyone who paid me cash for the button would be getting real value.

When they wore it, people they didn’t know would stop to read the joke, laugh and get to know them. So I was selling real social value with those cartoons. I doubted they were good. I could easily see how much better the professional cartoonists were and knew I wanted to be able to draw that well someday. But I had also grasped the gut lesson that pro cartoonist told me - if someone is genuinely happy and waving real cash, the drawing is worth that money to them. If I don’t think it’s as good as they do, I should keep my mouth shut about what’s wrong with it, grin and take the money.

I didn’t know it but that was one of the core competencies for selling art in itself. So many artists are immensely self critical. Sometimes I think self criticism rises with skill - a beginner like I was will be whooping around the first time he can tell it’s a dragon. He’ll think it’s awesome, grin, celebrate it and gosh, that grin is infectious. Someone else wants to get that dragon and keep it, remember that moment of discovering a cool new artist. They pay well for something that’s real - the drawing’s social and emotional value.

It makes people happy.

Please, please remember that when you’re talking about your art. It really is work. Good craftsmanship goes into it. The longer you’ve painted and drawn, the more critical you are, the more you push yourself in your perfectionism, the more a non-artist is going to respond without beginning to understand all the technicalities that create that emotion.

You changed the world for the person who’s waving a check or a handful of cash or a plastic card. You made that buyer happy. You touched them in a personal way. You reminded them of some of the best things in themselves.

You gave them something real and good.

We artists are in that happy few modern professions where there are tangible results of our work. At least to ourselves there are real standards of that work and at least sometimes the market reflects them. We don’t always agree with the buyers on which piece is our best or whether our prices are right.

But when you sit down to work for a day, at the end of the day there are tangible results of your work. All of your skill and training is reflected in it. The buyer is not just paying you for the fifteen minutes it took to do that sketch. Or less. The buyer is paying for all the years and thousands of lousy sketches you went through to learn how to do it that well.

Imagine a classical Japanese sumi-e painter, a master. This small gentle Asian person with gray hair and beautifully wrinkled visage, the classical little Asian master, unrolls a sheet of soft rice paper on a clean white blotter, takes a dish with five values of carefully ground ink and a large soft brush that comes to a natural point like a mop. Sits looking at the paper for a moment.

Swish splash. In three strokes, a fish dives toward the river bottom past a reed. The entire painting took less than a minute. Maybe all of five minutes if you count the time the master stared at the empty paper or twenty minutes if it’s the top of the day and the master prepared with the meditation of grinding the ink.

Your breath is taken away by the beauty of that fish. Those three strokes are so elegant that the beauty is impossible to bear. You wish your hands could do that trick. You can feel the current of the spring the fish is swimming towards, you can follow the flick of its tail, your mind is at peace in a river that consists of blank paper.

The master crumples that beautiful piece and chucks it in the can. Then does it again, and again. The seventh of these beauties rates a stern nod. Then you’re finally allowed to write a four figure check for this piece. You have paid for the work of a master whose hour was worth over a thousand dollars.

You would have snatched the first one out of the master’s hands if you’d known what the master was about to do. You felt like crying over the trash can. Yet the master, who’s approaching eighty or ninety, has the same internal critic that you have when you rinse off a piece of Wallis Museum for the sixth time and use the ghosts of the previous paintings as a dry underpainting for a landscape that finally works.

I had a natural extrovert personality, so I sold all my mistakes. I never filled trash cans with the first five or six tries. If someone waved cash at me for something I thought stank, hey, I took the money and smiled. I’m not going to wreck their good mood or argue with them that I think it stinks even if I botched some of the cross hatching with shaky lines and had to cover an ink blot with a dark patch that turned into mottled stripes on the dragon’s back.

When I dance and I fall down, I turn the fall into floor moves. Sometimes that makes the dance better than it would have been if I wasn’t a cripple and didn’t fall down while dancing.

I got in the habit of saving botches on the spot if somebody was watching and wanted it. I pretended I meant to do that. I drew this cat cartoon at that very first con, the cat washing its paw, the kitchen trashed, paw prints everywhere from spilled ketchup and stuff. Caption: “I meant to do that.”

It’s the theme of my art marketing.

It’s been validated by something wonderful that happened in the past few years.

When I moved to Arkansas in 2008, I had to pack up all my stuff. That included going through old stuff. I flipped through old sketchbooks and boxes of drawings from 2004 and 2005. I looked at my DeviantART account.

I found some paintings and drawings that I thought were botches when I did them. Some of them were. Some had obvious flaws that frustrated me.

Others, the “botch” was a principle I hadn’t understood at the time. The wobbly line worked because a hard clean line would have been less powerful. The composition on one of them had a better balance than the nit picking realism iris I did in 2005 that I thought was so perfect - that one looked stiff.

Sometimes the buyer who liked a piece of my work better than I did was right.

It wasn’t always that they were ignorant of art and I was the skilled artist who knew where it went wrong. Sometimes I got it right and didn’t know it. Just like all the raw beginners I’ve taught, my hands learned the trick before I did. I could do that again today and only realize it later on when I’m older and better.

I still get self conscious when I paint loose. Sometimes I’ll think I got too sloppy in a piece. I’ll post it on WetCanvas to thunderous appreciation from artists so much better than I am that I worship at their feet. They enthusiastically tell me why it’s an improvement instead of a mistake with exactly the feeling I tell a beginner that a person’s forehead really is that big, they got it right. That’s okay.

No matter how good I get, there are always beginners learning something I understand well enough to explain and masters who take my breath away. It’s true for all those masters too. Every time there’s a cool workshop or class, they’re the ones cheering and flocking to it, sometimes traveling thousands of miles.

Someday I’ll be able to do the elderly Asian master trick of swish splash, there’s your fish in three strokes. Of course being me, that’ll probably be a portrait of my cat painted just by throwing his points on the page. He’ll come to life pouncing or sleeping or washing himself in a minimum of strokes.

I’ve been trying that since 2004 and now master artists comment on some of my pastels “Your strokes are so concise and expressive.” Everything I learn comes back through my hands after I’ve forgotten the words. That happens to you too. It happens to anyone who creates.

Once you’ve painted something, separate yourself from the work. Accept its value as the precious thing it is. You used the best materials - that is a good decision in two regards.

One, it justifies the reasonable good prices you put on your work. That’s giving good value to your buyer. When you use artist grade supplies, it’s not going to rot and turn brown next year, cheating them out of the beauty they purchased.

Two, it justifies your good market prices to yourself.

You’re making treasure when you paint.

No matter what medium you use, no matter what techniques, you studied for years and practiced for years with or without formal schooling. You understand what you’re doing and you do your best every time. You are crafting something that is well made in every technical sense that you understand. It is unique. Only you could have made it.

Give the same subject and supplies to a dozen artists and every one of them will do it in a different way. That’s a great way to do a themed exhibit too - give all of the artists one model or one scene and then exhibit everyone’s work together in a show. That combination is always exciting, seeing all the different views at once.

Like handwriting, the better you draw and paint, the clearer your unique vision and personality becomes to the viewer. You may be too used to it and forget the powerful impact it has on viewers. Maybe you had a muddy passage or you had to crop half of it off to create a better composition. Don’t be afraid of the floor moves, do what you need to in order to save your mistake.

My master, pastelist Charlotte Herczfeld got a great idea recently. She started cutting up failed pastel paintings and laminating strips of them into bookmarks. She was surprised and delighted at how beautiful the bright little random strips of color and texture looked as abstract accidents.

That’s a world class floor move.

Nothing you do is worthless. The ugliest page in your sketchbook could be on auction at Christie’s as a collectible, priceless because you scribbled your signature and a grocery list over part of it. Not to mention what collectors would pay for that first grade tempera painting where you flunked because you didn’t want to do a stick figure and drew trees that weren’t lollipops. Or did copy the stylized symbols the teacher insisted on in the proper assigned colors and shapes to get good marks. Whichever.

I did mutant sea anemones instead of the lollipop trees at that age and I was lucky. More of my teachers were impressed than appalled, I got called as a talented prodigy.

Maybe that’s what gave me the confidence to grin and tell the buyer “Sure, I’ll do it for a buck,” and draw the dragon in the registration line.

If you got punished for coloring flowers with metallic gold and silver instead, or for drawing rounded figures instead of stick figures, you’re fighting your past. You can still learn the value of your work by looking at the “botches” of artists you admire. Remember that yours may be better than you think they are.

How to Get the Most from an Online Art Class

I've been taking free online art classes through http://www.wetcanvas.com for several years. The big artist's community hosts classes in subjects and mediums, monthly challenges and plenty of other structured activities that keep me painting and drawing. My favorite hangouts are the Oil Pastels, Watermedia and Pastels forums.

Last December, world famous painter Johannes Vloothuis got a thirty day free trial of "Go To Meeting" webinar software. He definitely got the most out of his free trial. He started webinar classes the first day he got it. On the second day, I saw posts in the Pastel Forum and joined his classes. I haven't missed one since.

The first thirty days of trial and error classes were intense. Johannes takes enough material for five or six classes and condenses it all into one. During the first 30 day free trial, he stayed online sometimes four or five or six hours going into everything about the day's topic in depth. I couldn't retain half of it if I hadn't developed a good habit in college.

I took notes.

I'm a visual learner, not an audio learner. I don't get much out of lectures unless I write down what the teacher's saying. So that was the beginning of Robert's Notes too. I grabbed a sketchbook and a Pigma Micron pen along with some Pitt Artist pens (small brush tip ones in colors) and filled pages with written notes and tiny color thumbnails illustrating what he was talking about.

When he drew a diagram, I copied it. When he sketched an example online, I copied that too. When he explained something and showed a photo, I sketched it an inch or so tall and interspersed those little sketches with paraphrasing what he said.

I can't write fast enough to keep up with soemone talking. But if I understand it, I can get it down pretty fast by shortening the sentences.

I created those notes for myself because Johannes Vloothuis was Mexico's greatest watercolorist ten years ago, he commands four and five figure prices for his landscape paintings and they're brilliant. He was inspired to do the classes because he studies Clyde Aspevig, who always gets five figure prices for his paintings if they don't go up to six figures.

I'd like to consistently get three figures for my paintings, so I studied hard. I posted my notes online just to share them with friends. I hoped others would post their notes in case I missed something important. I was a bit embarrassed at how many pages I posted and wondered if I was overdoing it.

Instead, dozens of people thanked me for taking notes. So I've been posting my notes ever since. Once he learned the software, Johannes started doing classes for pay. The price is reasonable and the information fantastic, so I continued going and taking notes.

I realized something a few weeks into the course.

My little thumbnails were starting to look better. I looked at my first batch of notes and my current ones. By sketching along with my teacher, I was not just learning principles by rote. I was teaching my eyes and hands along with my mind.

How many times have I read things in books, enjoyed them and skipped doing the exercises? Often, since I like to read. Sometimes I'd try something from a book but usually that was in a real drawing or painting of a subject I liked. I'm not saying my books were worthless. But I've never given a book the kind of sustained practice that taking notes and doing thumbnail sketches to illustrate them gave me with Johannes Vloothuis classes.

Below is a page of my notes from today's class, the first in a six week series: "Essentials of Painting Trees." I love trees. I've covered much of this material before in his previous class on painting landscapes from photos. Yet when I did this batch of thumbnails my little illustrations were a lot cleaner.

My recent paintings show the influence of his design principles even though I wasn't thinking of them in words.

So if you want to get the most out of any online class, take notes. Even if you think you'd remember without them, the act of paraphrasing and writing it down helps to fix it in your memory. With an art class, illustrate your notes. The drawings don't have to be refined, polished or large. It's better if they're not - if they're little one or two minute thumbnails where you focus just on the subject of the lesson and don't care whether it looks good as a drawing.

If you have trouble writing down the words, just sketch the pictures. Get a very small sketchbook, something like a Borden & Riley ATC pad - the recycled sketch pad has fifty sheets. The tiny size will force you to stay small and simple with your sketches. Then draw anything the instructor does and try to sketch whatever he's pointing out in the photos or his paintings.

I got so used to both writing and thumbnailing that now I don't have a problem getting it all down. At first though, I had some trouble writing fast enough and doing the sketching quick enough. It helps to print in block letters, they're usually more readable than cursive handwriting.

So give it a try. I know that taking these notes gave me something none of my friends who rely on them get from them. My hands learn to move the right ways. When I go to using a real brush or pastel stick, my hands still have the body memory of asymmetrical trees, melodic lines and abstract shapes.

If you can't get it all down, write out as much as you can and watch the class more than once. With enough practice, note taking becomes automatic. I hardly look at my hands while thumbnailing or writing, just watch what Johannes is doing. It's done wonders for my painting. I tested it with art videos on http://www.artistsnetworktv.com and it's the same thing - I get more out of the videos if I've taken notes and sketched along with the teacher.

You can find out more about Johannes Vloothuis classes at http://www.improvemypaintings.com/. I recommend them wholeheartedly. Johannes is a modern master with hundreds of "golden nuggets" each of which can make your landscapes livelier, richer and more beautiful.

See you in class!

How to Draw a Cat

I love art. I love cats. I love my cat. Naturally as soon as I ever had a cat, I wanted to draw my cat. I just wasn’t very good at it back in the Dork Ages when I got my first cat.

I was pretty good at rats though. I had a white rat for a pet when I was eleven or twelve. He was very tame and I observed him constantly. I doodled him with every drawing instrument I could pick up. Technical pens, ballpoint pens, dip pens, pencils, you name it, I drew Puck with a line drawing instrument.

I was a kid. I didn’t notice that I’d done over a hundred inch-long pen sketches of my pet. I studied different parts of his body and got those right after several tries. I knew his rear end hunched up higher than his shoulders. I found out how to imply his tiny toes on forepaws and hind paws. I got the line of the top of his head right and the shape of his little nose in profile.

By the time my rat was a year old, I could sketch him rapidly in any pose just from memory. White rats danced around the edges of my homework after I finished it in study hall. I can still create white rat sketches from memory.



Somehow I forgot about drawing rats so accurately by the time I grew up and finally got a cat. My attempts to draw that cat were a Toxic Fail. She looked more like a white weasel with orange juice dripped on her in patches.

I got discouraged, quit trying to draw her from life and went back to something my friends applauded, dragons. I completely forgot about all the times I sketched my rat and felt good because I got that furry bulge at the base of his tail right, or the dashed-line white fur technique, or any of my ratty discoveries.

I concentrated on drawing the whole cat instead of just watching her nose and trying to get just the nose right on my next sketch. I didn’t systematically work through every important anatomical structure. I just tried haphazardly to sketch her.

Eventually I was able to get a cartoon cat that was recognizably a cat as long as I drew it in solid black with reserved white eyes and no highlights. That was the level of my cat drawing for a few too many years, but I succeeded in selling some cat-toons.

A famous cartoonist once told me “You don’t need to draw well to be a cartoonist. You need to draw consistently and come up with really funny gags.”

My funny gag was the instructions on a bottle of Cat Shampoo. I did an entire series on “#1. First Wet the Cat.”

So don’t sweat it if your early efforts aren’t perfect. People may still give you a few dollars for it if you give it a good funny gag.

But you still want to draw a cat that looks like a cat, right? Not a demented mongoose, not a dog with a chopped down muzzle, not a Picasso feline with both ears on the same side of its head. You have a cat, you love your cat, you want to do a cat portrait, not a cat-toon.



The answer is to draw your cat very small and very often. Go back to what I tried as a kid when I taught myself how to draw my rat. Study photos of your cat. Sketch from the photos. Sketch your cat from life, just not very large.

Doodle little cats on the phone pad or a Sticky Notes pad whenever you’re on hold, even if the cat’s not there. The more you can remember while doodling, the more accurately you’ll be able to sketch your cat when he’s around but he moves every two minutes.

At home, try two minute gesture sketches of your cat in a sketchbook. Just start drawing and stop when your cat moves. Start a new pose as soon as the cat sits still. Don’t be embarrassed to draw those simple, silly potions like “brick position, facing away.” Getting those knees up above the rounded hump of the cat’s back from behind is an accurate cat drawing.

For all you know, someday you’ll be painting a city scene. Exactly where you need a focal point, there’s an open window where a ginger cat facing away dangling her tail out the window is a perfect warm accent. No cat pose is too silly, too simple or too stupid to sketch.

Try penciling your cat. Then ink the sketch in different ways to develop your own unique way of doing fur texture. You can ink it with anything, an archival technical pen or Pigma Micron or a cheap biro (ball point) you picked up in a bag at ten for a dollar.

One advantage to sketching in pencil first is that you can get a good look at the pencil version. Recognize there’s an error, fix it in the pencil layer and then ink it. Or just fix it in the pen stage and erase away your extra pencil marks when the ink’s dry.

Plate surface bristol paper, smooth paper of any kind or a Stillman & Birn Epsilon series sketchbook makes a good surface for pen drawings. You can practice on the backs of envelopes or printer paper, or choose to buy a ream of archival printer paper in case one of your pen drawings turns out so well you need to keep it.

While you’re sketching the whole cat very small to get its relative proportions right, don’t neglect feature studies. Why not spend a whole big page of Bristol on sketching just your cat’s eyes, one eye at a time or both eyes together? Then turn that page over and sketch cat noses all over the next one.

Proceed to the beautiful, interesting shape of a cat’s ears. Sure, you can symbolize them with a triangle pointing up but the real shape is interesting and asymmetrical.

Try line drawings of a paw over and over again. Dip your cat’s paw in graphite powder or something nontoxic and press a cat paw imprint on the paper to see how cat footprints look.

Sketch your cat’s tail in relation to her body length and see whether she has a long tail or a short one for a cat. There’s a lot of variation in feline builds.

That’s where if you don’t have multiple cats, it’s a good idea to sketch from photos too. Use the grid method to get your cat’s proportions and details accurate from the photo reference. Pencil the cat first and then ink the sketch or use colored pencils. Early successes with the grid method will also teach you more about your cat’s anatomy and poses.

Alternate drawing from photos with a memory exercise. Study the photo for as long as you like, then try to sketch the cat without looking at the photo while you do. It’s okay to do this with the same photo reference you drew from with the grid method. You’ll notice new things about the cat when you’re studying it because you’ll remember some of what you learned in drawing from a photo with a grid.

Not all of your experiments will be a success. The way to get real success every time is to date your attempts and number them, so that you have them in chronological order. Every improvement means that sketch is a success even if something else in it is hopelessly wrong. If it’s a demented weasel with cat ears, then it’s a success because you got the ears right. You can work on body length to leg length proportion on another one.

With enough practice, you’ll reach a stage where you can draw your cat’s individual features, build, markings, expressions and favorite poses. Accuracy comes from long practice with the same cat or cats you love the most.



At that point drawing a jaguar, lynx or puma starts to get easy. It’s just a cat with a smaller head, heavier legs, different tail... at every anatomical point you can see the differences between the new cat and your beloved feline pal.

A good way to get in lots of practice is to buy a sketchbook that’s no larger than an Artist’s Trading Card. Borden & Riley make several varieties of wirebound ATC pads, all sized 2 1/2” x 3 1/2” with perforations so you can take out a finished page to sell or frame. One of these pads is designed for pen sketches. Another is lightweight recycled sketch paper with a lot of pages. Any of them are good for practice because you won’t spend as long finishing a drawing at that size.

Store your best ATC sketches in an archival Top Loader or Soft Sleeve. These archival storage envelopes are available at trading card stores, they were invented to preserve baseball cards. You can use them as a way to save your best small sketches or even sell them on eBay or Etsy. If you like, color these feline pen sketches with colored pencils or markers.

Alternate careful drawing from photo references, short gesture sketches from life where you start over when the cat moves with memory sketches. Once you get in the habit of Cat Doodling, you’re on your way to a beautiful portrait of your closest feline companions.

If you happen to have a dog, a parrot, a horse or any other sort of pet, this method will still work to understand and draw the anatomy of your favorite animal. It will also work to create good sketches and drawings of your youngest offspring or favorite rose. Any subject can be tackled this way and once understood you’ll be able to draw anything else with greater ease and skill.

Have fun with it! I’ll be back next week with another new Art Lesson. I’m starting on a new schedule of weekly updates on all three of my blogs, so if you enjoy these entries, click Follow. Ari purrs at you and sheds Cat Hairs of Inspiration on you!

Daily Art Is Daily Progress

Recent sketch page for a life drawing activity at WetCanvas.com in the Drawing from Life forum. Tombow brush pens in a Stillman & Birn "Delta" sketchbook.

Build a habit of daily art. Say hello to your sketchbook to manage it, even a full time artist may have days when spending several hours on a painting isn't practical. Even a timed three minute gesture sketch every day will increase your observation skills, your rendering skills and most of all, your confidence.

Date every sketch, drawing or painting you do.

One of many benefits to daily sketching is that deciding what to draw becomes minor. It's not a big deal if you're only going to spend a few minutes rendering it. You'll get more and more practice on your favorite things until every time you sketch them, they come out well and accurate.

If you spend all week onother activities but set aside some time on the weekend to paint, it's easy to block up on just deciding what to do. If you're used to sketching daily, it becomes a habit to choose something. More than that, you may have already been planning a painting in your daily sketches. One of them came out well, gave you an idea it'd be cool to turn it into a painting.

By the time it's Saturday afternoon and everyone else in the family has been chased out to their separate pursuits, you know what you want to do next. The sketches and value map studies for it are all there in your sketchbook. It's easier to get started or keep going on a long project because daily art gives you a habit of creativity.

Some artists choose to create small paintings in oil or acrylics daily. A good example of a brilliant daily painter is Carol Marine. Her small 6" x 6" oils appear on her Daily Painting Blog (the link) where she auctions them with a starting bid of $100.

Look closely at Carol's techniques. She's not using a small round brush to get in a lot of tiny details. She's working bold and big on a small canvas with a flat brush, letting the planes of the objects come through by hue and value without smoothing everything out to photorealism. Her colors are subtle and realistic. She captures the shine of clear glass and opaque ceramic, contrasts that with the juicy insides of oranges or the look of rusty metal.

I've been following her daily art blog for a couple of years now and seen what daily painting has done for this master oil painter's style. Go to her blog and look back a few years. Study her style and see how in just the past two years, she's still always growing and learning. She was brilliant when I first started reading her blog. It's just that now, as I view her later still lifes, I can see greater complexity, greater subtlety, interesting compositions and wonderful textures.

She keeps an interesting collection of still life items. Figurines, cups, bottles, various other objects return again and again in her compositions. So here's the chance for you pack rats to justify all of those odd little things you picked up on vacation or bought at thrift stores.

Organize them in a cabinet that's easily accessible. One thing you can do is store them by color - have a shelf for blue stuff, clear stuff, red stuff, yellow, green, if you don't have enough of a color you can group them together like "orange and yellow" or "gray and multicolor."

Then set up a small folding table. Be sure it's a folding table that stays folded most of the time, otherwise it'll accumulate keys and books you're reading, other stuff, become a drop spot for everyone in the house. Unfold it and put it near the window or near a handy tall lamp so the light falls on it from above and to one side or the other. Having that strong lighting is important.

Start setting up a still life. At first, set up easy compositions. Just put one or two objects together under the light. Fruit from your local grocer make good still life subjects because they come in a wide variety of colors and have simple, easy to paint shapes. Plowers are good too if you love color and want your still life to be colorful. Set up a drapery behind it just by putting a cloth over the back of a chair or put a colored mat board behind the table.

Anything so that you have a background color and a defined change of direction from the flat table surface to a vertical "wall" or drapery. This will let you capture cool shadows from your still life objects. If the folding table is too complicated to paint quickly, put a towel or tablecloth over it to make it one flat color.

Set up your objects and move them around till they form a pleasing arrangement. If it's one object, place it off center on the page (wherever it falls on the table). If there's more than one, it will look better if they overlap visually from where you stand or sit to sketch them.

Sketch the entire setup very fast. Start with a timed gesture sketch - an egg timer or kitchen timer is great for this. Two to five minutes, no more, to just sketch in the basic shapes and maybe the major shadow shapes. Don't try to shade it unless you have time on the timer. Start over when the timer goes off.

Then take some gray scale pens or markers to do a value mass sketch. You can also combine a pen and a pencil using the pencil for a middle value to get a three level value mass sketch or notan. Just use what you have.

Before taking down the still life, do a color study with felt tip pens. Tombow dual tip brush pens are great for these but you can use any colored markers or pens in a sketchbook. Try to capture the color as accurately as you can, including matching the values to what you see.

Put the stuff away. You don't need to do a full setup every day. It's easier to start out with one object under a lamp and do daily studies of your favorite obkects. Start with easy ones like plastic fruit and fake flowers - the ones that'll still be there to work from when you have a few hours to do a good painting.

Colored pencils are also good for that type of sketching. Look for soft ones like Derwent Coloursoft, Prismacolor or Caran d'Ache Pablo so that they're soft and smudgy rather than hard and delicate. Pastel pencils are another good choice for quick sketching in color, or colored Conte crayons. You can even use children's crayons - it's all in your sketchbook, these practice sketches don't have to last forever.

The key to successful daily painting or drawing is to work small and squeeze it in no matter how short a time you have on any given day.

Another way to explore techniques that may take longer in daily art is to work small. If you do work larger, go very bold and swing your arm around more than your fingers with pastels or charcoal.

Don't try to get it perfect. Just get it better than the last one. Do the best you can, relax, date it and put it away or turn the page.

Constant daily practice eliminates most self conscious jitters. If it doesn't have to be perfect, you open the door for serendipity that comes out tons better than you expected or would have planned. Most of all, it becomes playful. Art is something I do every day as a break whether or not I have something major to work on.

If you like, try to create Artist's Trading Cards daily. Then you can trade them and start building a good collection of others' work in the tiny ATC format - 2 1/2" x 3 1/2". Art Cards, Editions and Originals are the same thing but can be sold as well as traded, so you can put them on eBay or Etsy to help fund your art supplies.

If you're a member of LiveJournal, there's an annual event called ArtSoMoFo which is a challenge during October to create art every day. You can join anytime during the month of October and just keep up from your join date, that's what I did the first year I found it. I think I started on the fourth or fifth.

It was eye-opening how much my sketching improved by the end of the month that first October. So now's a good time to get involved and get into the habit of daily art - any medium, any size, any style you want to. Even a doodle on a sticky note counts! Just be sure to count it, date it and post it to share with your friends.

It takes three weeks to form a habit. Starting now, you could be in the habit of daily art by November and find it easy to keep up all year round. Daily art is also wonderful for stress management - there's something deeply satisfying about having a small success to count on every day of your life. That success is knowing that you can keep up daily art - even if you don't like the drawing, you know you're learning to draw better and can pat yourself on the back for doing it.

Go on, give it a try! Today's the day to start!

Pastel Surfaces Sanded or Unsanded

Sanded or unsanded pastel surfaces are very different to work with. In addition to this, some papers have a different texture on each side. The painting above, Two Irises, was done on unsanded gray Canson Mi-Tientes paper using the textured side.

Canson Mi-Tientes is a paper that's available in 60 colors now. It's a traditional non-sanded pastel paper used by many artists because it's available almost anywhere that carries art supplies. It has a woven texture on one side and a smooth texture on the other. The smooth texture is toothy and will hold a few layers, much better than regular drawing paper. It's very easy to blend on and most artists who use it will have some blended passages that become muted and soft combined with strong bold strokes that contrast with them and sparkle.

Blending breaks down the crystalline structure of the pigment particles. When you make a stroke with a pastel stick, you're laying nearly pure pigment on the paper. It sticks better if rubbed into the surface and gives easy soft blended gradations but will be more muted. The combination can be used to great effect. I deliberately blended the first layers so that I'd still have plenty of tooth on the surface when I went back for later layers on the irises themselves.

That also pushed the leaves back into the background and pulled the flowers forward with their stronger strokes. It's much harder to get used to the textured side of mi-Tientes but it can be very rewarding. The speckles created by the woven texture make "broken color" effects easy just as the soft surface makes finger blending easy.

Canson Mi-Tientes is also inexpensive like many unsanded pastel papers. Strathmore pastel paper and Fabriano Tiziano have similar handling properties and some of those papers even have a woven side. You'll gain control on the smooth side, as I'll show in the third example where I used an unsanded paper without a woven texture.

The other advantage of unsanded pastel papers is a great range of colors. By using a mid value neutral ground, I was able to make both the darks and lights of the irises pop out from the background. On black paper, the dark lower petals might almost vanish. On white paper, the light colors of the white petals might make them vanish and lose their intensity.

When you try unsanded papers, get a variety of colors and test them with simple compositions. Choose an easy subject and try the same sketch or painting on a light color, white, a warm mid value neutral, a cool mid value neutral like this gray or a blue gray, a dark color and black. Once you have tried many different paper colors you'll start to understand what each of them does with your pastels.

Terry Ludwig pastels are super soft. Many artists prefer hard or medium-hard pastels such as Nupastel for unsanded paper. If you have a light touch, you can use even the softest on unsanded paper.

I always use a fixative when I'm working on unsanded paper because it's more likely to lose powder or smudge than sanded papers. Fixative can also give back the paper tooth so you can add one more layer at the end after using fixative.

My choice is SpectraFix non-toxic fixative. It's casein based - milk solids mixed with drinking alcohol. I used the concentrate and mixed Everclear with it in the small mister bottle I bought along with the concentrate. The resulting spray doesn't leave a cloud of toxic vapor in my unventilated room and it smells pleasant, as if I just poured myself a drink. Unlike conventional spray fixatives, my cat doesn't try to leave the room as soon as I spray it.

When using SpectraFix, expect to allow a few more minutes for the spray to dry completely than you would with Krylon and other aerosol fixatives. It's healthier for the environment, for you and your pets but does take a little patience between multiple coats. It can also cause thin paper to cockle unless you tape it flat to a drawing board while spraying.




Storm Behind Spire, Red Rocks in the Desert is on a sanded surface. I used exactly the same limited palette of 14 Terry Ludwig pastels on Richeson Premium sanded hardboard. Richeson also makes a paper with the same coated primer and it behaves the same.

The difference in how they handle is striking. I didn't blend my early layers at all for this painting. I worked over the rocks with a dozen layers, sometimes pressing hard to mix colors with their underlying colors and sometimes scumbling them lightly over the surface.

Because the sanded surface is fine grained, I was able to use the corners of square sticks to get fine detail even on a small 5" x 7" painting. Richeson Premium is about average for sanded surfaces - fine grit, a lot of tooth and holds many layers without the use of fixative. It comes in several colors, this painting is on Light Umber, a medium warm neutral. I covered the surface completely especially in the focal areas, though a few grains of the original color may show here and there in textured areas.

It's much easier to work on a sanded surface. Corrections are easier. If you don't like an area, brush it off or lift a bit with a kneaded eraser or work right over what's there. Light goes over dark easily.

Different sanded papers and surfaces do vary in tooth. The toothiest is Kitty Wallis paper, either Pro or Museum. Wallis Pro comes in white and a mid-dark neutral called Belgian Mist. Wallis Museum is always white but it's primed on 100% rag watercolor paper so it's easy to use any wet underpainting technique whether that's watercolor, turpentine-thinned oils, alcohol wash over dry pastel or "dry underpainting" by scrubbing pastel dust into the paper with a foam sponge.

Wallis paper can hold up to 25 or 30 layers. I have yet to find its limits. The down side of Wallis is that blending with your fingers may make you bleed into the painting. Blend with a tool and expect that tool, chamois or tortillon or sofft sponge to wear down quickly. Wallis will also chew through your pastels faster, they wear down quicker the more toothy the surface.

Colourfix sanded paper is my personal favorite. It takes about as many layers as the Richeson surface, comes in 20 useful colors along with matching primers that come in pint jars. Using the primer, you can create either good Colourfix paper on 100% rag watercolor paper or cheap practice paper on the cheapest watercolor pad with exactly the same sanded surface. Clear Colourfix Primer or Colourfix Supertooth primer can be painted over a watercolor underpainting.

Another sanded primer I haven't tried but heard good things about is Golden Pumice Gel. It comes in three grits and is also clear, so it's just as good as Colourfix for covering a failed watercolor to turn it into a pastel underpainting. Make your practice paper by priming bad watercolors to turn them into good pastels! If you don't like using it as an underpainting, just use one of the opaque colors of Colourfix primer to turn it white, black, sienna, anything you like.

Sennelier La Carte coated pastel paper acts like sanded paper but is a little softer. The main drawback is that you can't get La Carte wet at all, even the moisture of a sneeze will cause the coating to come off and reveal the white card underneath. This can be fixed with a dollop of Colourfix primer for those that love LaCarte.

Sanded surfaces make it easier to add more layers. Colourfix Supertooth is nearly like Wallis, it has a harsher tooth and will hold more layering than regular Colourfix primer or paper. They're easier for beginners to work with than unsanded paper and most of them are very forgiving, even La Carte is if you don't sneeze at it or spill anything on it. Sanded pastel primers give a beginner the advantage of cheap practice paper with a professional sanded surface. Color selections aren't as wide a range but clear primers allow underpainting directly on watercolor paper to any color you like.



Tree Reflections was drawn on Aquabee Recycled Rough Sketch Paper. This unsanded paper has a lot of tooth compared to other drawing papers. It's a great inexpensive recycled paper. In some ways its texture is similar to a brown paper grocery bag.

Before you laugh, there are pastel drawings by Impressionist masters done on brown grocery bag paper. It has a beautiful warm neutral color and an amazing amount of tooth for something so cheap. The problem is that when it's real grocery bags, it's never been intended to be archival. So it's harder to preserve than the acid free drawing paper that has a similar surface.

I recommend this paper for pastel sketching, especially with hard pastels. I used a Color Conte 12 stick set to create this small landscape. Without a mechanical weave texture, it's easier to create small curves and details while still getting a lot of tooth.

Try many different pastel papers and surfaces. Each of them has a different character. Different colors give different effects. Also, every artist's "hand" is different. Using soft pastels on an unsanded paper takes a delicate touch, less is more and it's important to choose your colors carefully because you won't be adding more than at most three or four layers to combine colors.

Hard pastels on an unsanded paper can go over each other easier. Crosshatching is a good way to create optical mixing - place a row of lines going one direction, sketch over that in the opposite angle with another color, vertical lines in another and back and forth till you fill the tooth.

On this piece I layered directly. Using a limited palette meant that in some areas I mixed four or five colors. Going over other colors heavily blended them together and I sometimes alternated colors to mix them. I let my strokes show because I chose to, but if I wanted to conceal them it wouldn't have been that hard. The lack of a regular texture allowed plenty of detail.

Pastel pencils also work well on any of these surfaces but will leave distinct linear marks unless you shade them in very lightly.

Velour paper is another specialty surface that deserves its own article. It can be very dramatic but it's also easy to goof up and lose a day's work to the pastel dust falling out of the pile. Never tap velour paper or boards on the back to shake loose extra dust, most of the painting may fall on the floor. It works better with hard or medium pastels than softer ones.

Enjoy and get dusty!

Packing Art Supplies

Ironclad Rule in Packing Art Supplies: Do not put any pastels set or pastels box in checked baggage. I've been warned by every professional pastelist I know on WetCanvas not to put pastels into checked luggage. Period.

You don't want to spend hundreds of dollars, treasure it and have it with you for the upcoming workshop or your comeback in your favorite city ever, only to open that up and look at a box of unsortable multicolored dust. Shake it once and you have a box of expensive mixed gray dust you can make hand-rolled homemade neutral pastels with.

What that leaves is shipping them on ahead to your hotel or new home by UPS or FedEx with insurance, or taking your main pastel box on the plane as Carry On. I'd planned to do the latter with my Dakota Traveller, the cool plein air box with 275 half sticks assembled out of a lot of different sets. However, I found out from my airline that I'm allowed only one Carry On.

That would be the attractive long haired Siamese cat in the picture. He gets to fly in the cabin, looking up at me from under the seat in front and grumbling because he has to wear his harness and leash. He hates collars, so he gets the leather chat vest and leash. This is so that I can carry him through the airport scanner. If he struggles free while the carrier goes through scan empty, it's a minute of comedy as he slithers around grumbling about being on the leash. Not the hour long high-speed cat chase throughout the airport.

Buy an umbrella and it won't rain. He'll probably relax and accept all the attention he gets for his good looks without a single mew. I'm prepared though.

He's not art supplies but he's my favorite model and my personal Muse. So I'm left with what supplies I can carry on me in my Personal Item - briefcase, laptop bag or woman's purse. I'm using a Just Stow It art bag with a lot of separate small pockets that buckle because my new laptop won't fit in my old laptop bag and does fit in the cool art bag. I'll pack some Gallery Mungyo pastels into it along with a Canson mi-Tientes pad, so that if my UPS boxes get delayed or anything, I'll still have something to sketch my first impressions of the city with.

The biggest packing problem I had was a 200 color Winsor & Newton full range wood box set that I got on clearance. They're discontinued artist grade soft pastels with a medium texture like Rembrandt. I always wanted a big full range wood box set with a lot of colors and many tints per hue. It's that. It's beautiful. I haven't even used it yet, been saving it for a special occasion. I didn't review it on the other blog because it's discontinued, but if you see Winsor & Newton pastels on clearance, grab them. They're a steal at Clearance price and were good value at their normal price.

That's now sitting in the bottom of a big box that's half packed and already too large to move, with my Unison 72 color Starter set on top of it in its Signature aluminum case. More towels. The two drawer wood box with foam padding that I put in all the open stock W&N pastels I got for a dollar a stick in a Clearance grab bag. I really went wild on the W&N clearance sale. I think the padding on the wood box is good enough to let them travel UPS, but I'm seriously thinking of taking some of the big sets out and filling half the box with throw pillows for added protection along with all the bubble wrap I can scrounge.

I saved the cardboard box for my 120 color Derwent Artists colored pencils set. That's going to help keep the finish on the box. It's got to go into another box, keeping colored pencils and pastels separate might be a good idea for both weight and organization. Moving an entire studio, it's good to sort box contents by medium. Bedding, towels and spare clothes make economical padding.

Colored pencils in leather Global Classic elastic band cases might survive being in checked luggage. Those cases are very sturdy, they've survived drops and being banged around in various ways including getting thrown off the bed by a skidding cat. So think about the packaging your supplies are in.

Colored pencil tins are not a good way to pack them for travel, especially Prismacolor. Pencils jump out of their slots and all rattle to the bottom, then rattle the other way if the suitcase is tossed or the box gets tossed. So if you haven't gotten an elastic band case for your fragile artist grade pencils, open the tin and tape across all the pencils, taping them to the tray. Then pad the box around the tray to further cushion it.

Pastel pencils are the most vulnerable. They get internal breakage if you drop one on the desk. So keep those in elastic band cases and ship by UPS.

Paint sets are usually a lot more durable. As long as they're packed well, the tubes probably won't explode and wreck everything. Be sure to remove any bottles of mediums from the set and ship those separately with plenty of padding, along with any spray cans of fixative or thinner. Do not take flammable chemistry on a plane. Linseed oil doesn't count as flammable, that's an artist grade salad oil that won't create explosive fumes if it's opened. Any turpentine or turpentine substitute or damar varnish or any other medium with turpentine in it, goes in the box with the spray cans and the box needs to be marked as flammable and fragile.

My American Airlines booking agent suggested to me that I should put all the pens and loose pencils from my pockets into a zip lock bag, for easy de-pocketing to put in the tray at the scanner. Made sense to me. She didn't think paint brushes and pens would be a problem, but make sure you don't have any razor blades or art knives in your carry on. Those can go in checked luggage. I guess they trust baggage handlers not to search all the suitcases for the odd box of mat cutter blades or pocket knife to commit violence.

If you're moving by UPS/FedEx like I am, make an inventory list of everything in each box of art supplies. Label that box clearly. This will help you estimate how much insurance to buy on the box. It'll also help loads in unpacking, especially if you really need a watercolor set and the watercolor paper box. Then you won't unpack every one of your pastels and colored pencils and oils before you get to it. Keeping one medium per box is good too.

In a moving van, pack those boxes carefully yourself in a way that nothing heavy winds up on top of them and they can't bang around. Buttressing them with sofa cushions, pillows and other bulky soft stuff helps. Do not trust non-artist family members to load-unload art supplies unless you know they're very careful with breakables. If so, tell them it's as fragile as fine china.

I've spent a week packing as much as I can and taken a rough inventory of my studio. I think it'll go in less than a dozen boxes, though I've run out of cardboard boxes and need to get more. I've also got far more empty suitcases than I can carry in two checked bags, so I'll have to decide which ones are the checked bags and which ones will get packed, then stuck in boxes and shipped UPS.

For relocation, I'm prioritizing everything I own on a scale of 1 to 5 as I pack it into boxes. Priority 1 boxes ship immediately, since I have a friend willing to accept them who's driving me the last leg of the trip. Otherwise I'd be sending them to start arriving the day after I do. Priority 5 go into deep storage with my family until I earn enough to move into a larger space in an apartment share. Everything in between gets shipped out as I send for it.

My beloved collection of five large framed artworks are outside of the system. They're on loan to my daughter till I have space to hang them and I'll order a box of six reusable double-constructed framed art shipping crates sent to her as soon as I'm earning. She can enjoy them in her house till I have the wall space to display them.

Another way to bring framed art that I may use for smaller pieces is to remove them from the frames, pack them in foam board and glassine as if I was selling them and pack all the frames into a box. These are the smaller frames with acrylic glazing so I can just pack them in with the unused frames. They're good frames, I got them on Clearance, but if I lose one or two they're more replaceable than the art that's in them. I'll wrap them since I no longer have their original cardboard corner protectors.

Still life objects if fragile get packed with kraft paper or paper towels or newspaper like any cups, vases, other breakables. Stones and shells, more durable ones, got sorted into their own storage boxes a long time ago so those will be tucked in with other stuff.

Pens, pencils, tools and anything small like erasers get put in plastic Sterilite tubs by where I had them stored. That's probably where my mat cutter blades and razor blades should go, since my art knife already wound up in one. I filled one with the contents of the small drawers on the right of my drafting table and have another one I can use for the left side drawers and most of the carousel. The pencil carousel needs to go in its own box, nothing in it, padding stuffed around it that can be clothes.

While I set out to pack my studio first, the need for padding is starting to cut into all the soft squashy things that need to be packed. Extra pillows, blankets, towels, clothes are all great padding material unless it's something that needs to be ironed. I'm a guy living casual. I stopped buying clothes that needed to be ironed a long time ago, but this would apply to anyone. Or just pack laundry around them if it's something you don't want to wear when it's rumpled.

If it can leak or squirt, put it in a zip lock bag so that one accident won't wreck everything else in the box.

It's a monumental task, but some common sense and planning can get my studio to San Francisco intact with a minimum of replacements needed. I wanted to finish that stage of packing last week, but I only got through half of it due to back trouble, mobility limits and chronic fatigue. The up side is that I'll be packing a lot of the rest along the way just to keep it safe.

What goes in my carry on and remains available to me for the rest of the month will mostly be plein air supplies. Small pocket sets of Conte crayons, oil pastels, watercolors and brush pens can fit in my khaki fisherman's vest and my Just Stow It bag. Tonight I'll be weighing that with the laptop and netbook in it, then carefully packing that till I have 20 pounds and no more in it. Together the cat bag and laptop bag have to be under 40lb, so if each of them comes in under 20 pounds I'll be good to go. Wish me luck on the rest of the packing!

Art Careers - Once and Future Street Artist

This month's posts may be interrupted by my being as busy as a cat at a dog show. Because my daughter Kitten got her dream house with 20 acres of land here in Russellville, Arkansas, we all need to move out on August 1st. I can't live alone in Arkansas. I don't have all of my prescriptions since the state limits me to three and I have five, also one of them was hung up in paperwork for the past six months. That limits my body energy and ability to function.

I'm isolated in a rural area because I don't own a car and I'm that bloke who can walk, but not too far. Just like the one in the Scooter Store commercial.

Since I'd have to move out of state, I'm going home to the city I've loved ever since I first set foot there. Got some amazing good news about it too.

I've got nearly affordable housing in a Single Room Occupancy residence hotel very similar to the one I lived in when I left San Francisco. Shared group bath similar to what you'd get at the YMCA means I don't have to clean it myself. This way of life cuts the amount of housework I need to do to an absolute minimum - allowing me to spend as much time and body energy possible on painting, drawing, writing and teaching!

Best of all, San Francisco Arts Commission has a street art program that's absolutely splendid, even better than the one in New Orleans. Instead of "A" license spots that cost over $500 a year for licensing and have high traffic with a five year waiting list to get one and "B" license spots for $29 a year (1990s prices) with much lower traffic, San Francisco handles the setup spots differently. All new street artists and crafters pay a high license fee over $600 a year.

We all also get a random daily lottery for who gets the "A" spots. That's like getting an "A" license to start out with. Tourism isn't seasonal but year round. The city's micro climate has weather comparable to a Midwestern autumn... the best time of year for me when I lived in the Midwest. San Francisco is the one place I've ever lived that I didn't have a bad season.

So why not go back to work as soon as I get set up with MediCal, Food Stamps and In Home Supportive Services? Every one of the health reasons I had for retiring from street art in the 1990s is solved.

Seasonal? Nope, I don't need to earn enough to pay double rent (pay for a summer month) in the winter, just earn enough to live modestly for that month and build a bit of savings. If I'm $50 or $100 ahead at the end of the month it's enough to keep growing my savings. Mobility? MediCal will get me a power chair because I need it, whether or not I ever earned a living again in my life. Don't have the body energy to both work and take care of my apartment living alone? That's what In Home Supportive Services is - a personal assistant who helps disabled people with the tasks they can't do on their own.

It's easier for me to do a pastel painting than it is to take a shower without help. It's possible to draw, but not to vacuum my own floor or dust my books. I live with multiple disabilities. The things I do well, I do very, very well. The everyday tasks of living that anyone else does without thinking about it are impossible or so difficult that they're not cost effective. Think about what life would be like if it took you all day to do the dishes, not because you let them stack up for a month but because you have to sit down and rest after doing two or three of them each time, then still take a day off afterward to rest up.

I'll sit at the easel. I'll set up in ways that work around my limits instead of driving myself into the ground the way I did in New Orleans. At first, I'll have help from an In House Supportive Services assistant for setup and breakdown and bringing me to my assigned booth space. Later on, once I'm settled in, I'll take an apprentice from a homeless shelter and trade teaching for labor, then get a new one every time I graduate one with the skills to become a street artist.

This lesson isn't about creating art, it's about art careers.

You don't have to be a fine artist in an upscale gallery to earn a living on art. Whoever said to you "no one makes a living at art" never looked at a cereal box in their life and thought about who drew the cartoons on it. How you make a living on art depends on what kind of life you want to live.

If you want the security of a middle class job with benefits and a regular paycheck, consider all the commercial art careers available. It's a competitive field, but commercial art schools are very practical. You'll be able to render anything you want in a wide variety of media and paint what you like on your off time.

Children's book illustrator and magazine/website illustrator is a freelance career that takes the same skills. Commercial art school or its equivalent is a good thing, so that you can develop a strong personal style and a preferred genre or type of work you shine in.

Graphic design and digital art pay well too. Animation pays well if you work within a studio like Disney or Pixar, a friend of mine from New Orleans practiced cartooning long enough that he was offered a job at Disney that included training. If you want to be more independent but like cartooning, consider an independent web comic for side money. Write it, draw it, get the whole story done first and then post it online weekly or daily with affiliate ads supporting it. Free to readers is a good idea till it takes off big, put the proceeds into advertising and set up the books by volume as each story finishes.

Best thing to do is to stay several months ahead of your posting schedule. Do the art and writing ahead of time, then post at the same time on your update days with no interruptions. People will subscribe and eventually buy the print on demand book. That's something you can do on the side with a day job and eventually turn into a career if you promote it well.

Etsy is a good market for slow sales with low listing fees for fixed price listings. You get six months on a listing for twenty cents. No one will notice it unless you advertise it and make it public on your blog, link to your Etsy shop in your signature, otherwise get the news out online. Zazzle, RedBubble, DeviantArt and many other hosts will allow you to sell prints of your best work online. Best thing you can do to boost print sales is to advertise them, especially anywhere the ads are topical to the theme of your work.

If you want to just paint what you like and sell fine art, daily painting can be a good option. Carol Marine makes a good living with eBay listings that start at $100 minimum bid for 6" square daily art paintings posted on her daily art blog. Develop a strong style as she has, and you don't even have to specialize in one particular subject. She alternates still lifes, landscapes and figures more or less in those proportions, the still lifes most often but she's done series with cars or travel scenes or people that appealed to her.

If you have a favorite subject, consider turning that into a niche market. Paleo Art is a very competitive niche market with some incredibly skilled artists who are also paleontology researchers, doing reconstructions for scientific publication as well as movie posters and so on. If you love something, paint it so often that you're good at it and start marketing to everyone else who loves it. Millions of people online and you don't need all of them as your customers to make a living. Advertising in niche websites and magazines is a good idea for that approach.

I first considered doing "Cat Portraits" as a specialty when I saw ads for cat portraitists in the back of Cat Fancy magazine as a teenager. They looked prosperous from the ads, their prices were high and their work was original. I got the impression they showed up at cat shows too, where someone who has a winner is so thrilled they want a good portrait of their champion done in oils or pastels.

Finally, there's my own little-known personal art career, the one I stumbled into when I was broke in New Orleans and the art markets at Midwestern media conventions slumped to where I wasn't making my expenses plus my rent. I decided that if I was good enough to sell portraits of movie and TV stars at conventions, I could do portraits of less famous people on the street.

I had just one commercial subject - portraits of people. Most of the other art I did wasn't selling, I wasn't that good at it yet. My landscapes stank. My dragons were off topic for New Orleans tourists and my fondness for tropical fish wasn't exactly city related either even though I liked the colors.

It was enough. I went down to Jackson Square and talked to the artists there to find out what I needed to do to start. They steered me to the licensing office in City Hall, where I paid $29 for a "B" license that was a little photo ID to clip on my collar or pocket. That was it. I went out that Saturday with a $10 display easel, a folding table to hold my pastels and a couple of lawn chairs. I had a box of 30 assorted Grumbacher pastels and some quarter sheets of Canson Mi-Tientes paper.

I lucked. That was at the start of tourist season. I'd sold 23 portraits by the end of that weekend, $15 for black and white on your choice of mid-tone paper, $25 for color. This was in 1993 or so. I ended the weekend with over $500 in hand, the color sketches sold better than the black and white by a lot.

I went back to Dixie Art Supply and bought the 30 Skin Tones box to go with 30 Assorted that very first day, after I got my rent paid. I was only paying $200 for a month's rent in the French Quarter at the time. I was living high on the hog!

I wasn't very good when I started. My first few looked awful to me compared to the meticulously overdetailed graphite drawings I was selling at the conventions, copied from photos. I kept my mouth shut about them because I did get the likeness and just wasn't that used to pastel - to working looser with less detail and more feeling.

By the end of Saturday I was beginning to hit my stride and get used to the lack of detail. My freehand proportions were getting better. By the end of the weekend I wasn't embarrassed about them any more - they were as good as any of the other "B" license artists and selling like mad at the average "B" license prices.

Over in Jackson Square the pastelists charged several hundred dollars for a full sheet portrait and took all day at it, or sketches around $50 or so. It varied with skill and experience. Those heavyweights, all of them, owned wood box Sennelier sets ranging from 200 to 525 colors. Dixie Art Supply stocked the wood box big range Sennelier sets and the full range in replacements. They sold other pastels too, but Sennelier was the big seller.

I wanted that giant set and an "A" license so bad I could taste it. I used to spend my off days hanging around with the good artists, studying what they did.

I made some big mistakes. I started carrying too much stuff to my setup because I had a wheeled cart, gradually damaging my back. I needed to rest too often for days before going out again. I moved to a larger apartment that was farther away - big mistake. I kept dreaming of getting something like an electric golf cart to drive from my apartment to the setup instead of walking - but the farther away I moved, teh harder it was to get out and do it.

I made it through one summer the hard way, working too many days. The second summer, I couldn't afford air conditioning and got very sick.

I didn't understand that I had physical disabilities reducing my mobility far more than just a bad back. I thought that was depression. I didn't understand that I was living with chronic fatigue. I thought I was just lazy. I didn't understand that I had chronic pain. I had no idea how other people felt! I ached a lot. So did everyone I knew, at least judging from their complaints, so I didn't want to be a whiner.

If I had normal physical abilities, legs the same length and a strong back, able to stand at an easel all day - I'd never have retired or wound up on SSI. Nowhere I've lived since then have I met any street artist or crafter who retired. They stay active and within five years of startup, usually become homeowners or get very good apartments right on top of their setup space. The historic Pontchartrain Apartments were very popular for many of the street artists - no commute, just roll the art cart from your front door to your spot on the fence and set up.

Some of the "A" license artists had been doing it since the 1940s. Some of the other old timers drove in from houses they owned in less expensive neighborhoods, offloaded their carts and setup, then drove to park or got a spouse to park the car. They had families. It was a lifestyle choice more than anything else.

After that I went on a downward spiral. I did some other things for a living, spent one year reading tarot cards out in Jackson Square because the readers weren't licensed - we just had to move on if an artist wanted the spot. That worked until I got sick. By then I wasn't even living in the French Quarter and the walk to transit was too much for me.

Now, I've got a San Francisco address in a residence hotel where I will have minimal housekeeping chores at home. I'll have in home supportive services to help with the ones I can't do living in a single room, plus the IHSS assistant is supposed to have a car and drive me on personal errands including just going places for fun, not just grocery and barber shop. Until I get my power chair and a routine going with the short bus, my assistant can help me set up and break down at first.

Later on, I'll get an apprentice who wants to learn to draw and teach the street art trade, labor for labor. When they're good enough to do portraits or scenery in a quick, salable medium like watercolor or pastels, I'll graduate that year's apprentice and get a new one.

What this career takes is two things. You need to learn to draw or paint at least one popular subject well enough that non-artists will give you cash for it. Something like a journeyman level of art skill. Master decorative painting like Donna Dewberry and put it on canvases if you live somewhere the style is popular. You also need to be an extrovert, enjoy performing in public and painting in front of other people.

I always did, so I was a perfect match for it other than my disabilities. It's not for the shy. But if you like getting attention and can still paint while getting attention, it's great. I fell into a "teaching" mode with my patter, answering questions about the medium and then explaining just enough more that the mini-lesson enriched the experience - and kept my sitter still and listening rather than fidgeting and bored.

The environment you need if you're right for street art is to live in a popular tourist destination. Get around and learn to paint local landmarks, all the usual sites. Best is if the city or the city's arts commission licenses it - that way you won't be asked to move on by the police for selling in public. Licensing protects you and your interests.

San Francisco doesn't jury street artists for quality. That's you meet the market and find out if they like it, learn or change your style till they do. Quality is your responsibility. What the screening does is establish to the committee's satisfaction that you are the artist or crafter who did these works by hand, yourself, and all prints or derived products are done from your designs.

They shut out the importers who can get factory-made paintings in countries with a low cost of living and just do the "Selling" end of it, marketing works done sub minimum wage for pennies on the dollar. You don't have to compete with their low, low prices, you can set a reasonable price for your crafts or art and sell whatever sells most, adapting till you know your market.

It's good to have a couple of spectacular, big-ticket pieces out that most tourists can't afford. They attract attention and then they'll buy a print or a smaller original. Once in a while these display pieces sell because someone with a lot of vacation money hit your booth first and can't resist it.

Crafters do as well as artists in this trade. I knew many jewelry makers, including one of the first innovators doing chain maille headdresses and hand flowers. She's booked solid for her large works by commission but still sells the small items fast. She's middle class like most successes.

People doing street art or crafts don't wind up homeless. You do as much work as you want to and then save up a bit for hard times, you can take off or keep going to build your reserves and stock. Jewelers sink a lot of money into stock once they've matured, have lots of stones and precious metals to play with - but could start over again with silver wire and beads if they had to, as one fellow who got robbed of $10,000 in stock had to do. He wasn't homeless. He borrowed a little money and sold some cheap pieces and built up again.

I am the only street artist I know of who ever became homeless, and that was because I was disabled and didn't know it. If I had known, I'd have gotten the mobility aids I needed and moved closer to my setup rather than farther away. I'd have gotten air conditioning and spent my summers on gallery art, selling on the street during tourist season.

It's not too late to mend those mistakes. I'm going home to the city I've always loved most to do the job I always loved most. As I reach every step in the process of getting out there, I'll blog updates on this process in detail. I'm getting ready to quit my day job as cripple.

There's more than one way to make a living as an artist - and more than one path to your ultimate career. Most of the "A" license painters were also represented in several galleries. That's what they did all summer, serious large works. They went back to the street because they loved it and that's where they got inspiration. That's where I do too.

So if you want to bring your art up to a level where you can do it full time, look at all the possibilities. Look at how you want to live, where you want to live, what working conditions you want, what type of art you most want to do. Then plan accordingly, go to school or self teach, map a path that fits you as you really are. They are all good ways to make a living - and every one of them you can answer "Artist" when someone asks what you do.