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Hope you all had a great New Years Eve celebration! I definitely did. Michel and I wandered around Montreal with a vague idea in mind of what we were doing that night, but instead we went rogue in terms of plans, and ended up having an awesome night.
Found several outdoor art displays around the city, and then stumbled upon a little hole in the wall restaurant that didn't have a line around the corner like all the other restaurants. It was a little sketchy looking from the outside (which I love), so he wasn't thrilled into being talked into eating there. Until, that is, we found they had a hidden second floor and we were seated at a nice window table overlooking the old part of Montreal, and that the restaurant actually had a great selection on their menu, and reasonably priced. Then after dinner we went down to the docks in Old Port, where there was a huge outdoor party going on, with three Quebecois bands playing that were all amazing.Being from the desert, it's definitely different to see people huddling together in the cold, dancing, all dressed up in parkas and warm clothing, not letting the cold get them down. We were even treated to a quick snow storm that looked really beautiful being reflected by all the spotlights that were shining and spinning about everywhere. One of my favorite New Year's Eves.
Beyond that, I had a very nice and relaxing winter break, but am anxious to get back to painting. Did a little sketching during my two week break, but for the most part just relaxed, and spent time with family and friends. Was a bit sad about not getting a White Christmas this year, since I was in Montreal, and snow filled Christmases are almost a given there. Also a little disappointed that I didn't get to go skiing for the very first time, or ice skating. We were too busy with the holidays, family and friends for the majority of my winter break, but the weather in Montreal worked against us when we had free time, most notably freezing rain conditions that took down many tree limbs down, and made walking on ice covered sidewalks dangerous. The weather was very odd the last several weeks, both in AZ and Montreal, when I arrived in Montreal a couple of weeks ago, the weather was absolutely beautiful. Sunny, and warm (for Montreal). Yet back in Arizona, a freak snow storm came to town and blanketed Northern AZ under a blanket of snow, which was unusual enough, even more unusual, it didn't melt away immediately.
Going back to quite a bit of work at the studio, but I'll be shipping out all the orders placed while I was gone by the 8th, each complete with a special gift for being so patient while I was away. I was going through some old back up drives the other day, and found a digital printing file for a piece I did for that very first art show in 2007 (at my friend's restaurant) that I honestly forgot about because I thought the printing file I had for it was destroyed. I might make it available on the webstore later this year, haven't decided yet, but for now I'll be keeping it a secret so everyone who placed orders while I was away can be surprised when they see it.
There were only 5 prints made of this particular piece, and sold during that show, and I never had any more printed until today. I usually include some little extra "thank you gift" with each order, so I had a few extra of these prints made that I'll be adding to the box of "free gifts with order" that I randomly pick from while packing up orders. One of these could be coming your way too with your next order. No promises though, I only had 5 extra made, in addition to all the ones I'll be sending out with orders over the next couple of days.
While looking around on the same back up drive, I found a couple of other paintings and photographic work I did, never released outside of that first art show. I was on display at the restaurant for 3 months, so I continued to work on other pieces to add to the collection, to keep the display changing and "fresh". With the exception of one piece I did during the second month, I only continued to make available a handful of the pieces created during that very rushed two weeks of chaos prior to the first show, for good reason, I thought all the other printing files were destroyed. In late 2007, a computer of mine had a complete meltdown, that I thought destroyed everything from that show, and years and years of work, pictures, old emails, etc.... The computer wouldn't boot up, and the hard drive couldn't be salvaged by experts. I wasn't big on backing up computer files back then, and sadly assumed everything was lost. I back up my files all the time now. 
From what I can surmise, I had copied a couple of things to a cd to take to a print shop, and that cd was copied to a backup drive years later when I started copying all my random cds and sdhc cards to an external hard drive, to later organize. I still lost thousands of hours of work, when that computer crashed, but I'm pretty happy to have found some of these early pieces. I'll be having some of these pieces printed as well, and add to the webstore, or perhaps to include in future orders as special gifts. I typically save the free prints for larger orders ($60+), and smaller orders get fun things like greeting cards, bookmarks, charms, ornaments, so please don't be disappointed if you dont get a free print with your order. I'm not saying it never happens, just typically it's reserved for larger orders, as these free gifts cost me money to make, and prints do cost quite a bit more than the other items mentioned.
On to the paintings!
The first painting this week, "Cherry Blossom Bride" was done in honor of Michel's sister's wedding in August of 2012. It was my first time going to a wedding performed all in French. I didn't really need to understand the actual words being used, I could still tell basically what was being said for the most part, based on tones of voice, and happy tears. It was an outdoor wedding, in a little village, by a little stream, outside of Montreal, next to a pretty little reception hall. It was a beautiful venue, and a fun celebration. Right after the ceremony, the photographer started taking pictures of the wedding party, the parents, all the standard wedding pictures, but at one point he had Michel's sister sit down on the grass, and started arranging her dress out around her. As soon as I saw it, I knew it would make a good painting, so I snuck over and clicked a couple of pictures to paint from later.
Michel and I both went dress shopping with his sister, talked a bit about decorations and themes, even made a last second mad dash right before the wedding to drive back to her house to get the written vows and the ring pillow, which were left behind. I never drove faster, and luckily didn't get pulled over. While talking about the wedding plans, she kept bringing up cherry blossoms for the flowers and designs, thus the background of cherry trees in bloom. While Quebecois weddings vary a bit from the standard American wedding, there's still several similarities, like the throwing of the bouquet and bride's garter. I caught the garter, proving the belief of he who catches it, is the next to be married true, as Michel and I got married a little over a year later.
To me, the one thing that differs most between weddings in Quebec, and those in the US, is what the officiant says. It's less romantic, and more like reading pages of tax codes. You have the option of course of also adding vows, but things that Americans would just read before the wedding and sign a paper signifying they understood, the officiant has to read during the ceremony, an in the case of my wedding, in both French and English, since I dont speak French. I chuckled several times during the ceremony due to how official it all sounded, because I did not expect that at all. Michel's grandma officiated, and we never had time for a pre-wedding run through. During the ceremony, his grandma would say something in French, and I assumed it was something inspirational, about love and the future, but then she'd translate it to English, and it all really did sound like tax codes. Couldn't help but chuckle and wonder what the heck was happening.
Dia de los Muertos isn't well-known here in Quebec. I've been seeing the designs of the holiday (mostly sugar skulls) appearing in more and more items, but I have yet to meet a person here that knows much about the holiday. I gave Michel's sister the first print of the "Cherry Blosson Bride" painting, since I based it on her wedding and dress, and while she appreciated the thought, I could tell she was, at the very least, confused as to why I painted her at a skeleton, if not a bit horrified. I'm guessing a bit more of the later, as I haven't seen the print displayed in her house. It might be hanging in one of the rooms I haven't been in, but either way it's ok. I actually kind of like it more when people dont like something I've painted.
The second painting this week is "The Return". This is a mixed media painting I did as a cover to a book by the same title. I mentioned above that there was only one piece I did outside of the two week period prior to hanging my first art show. The background of this book cover, is that painting: "City in the Sky". I painted the grim reaper character separately and then digitally combined the two pieces. I don't think the book had much commercial success, as it's no longer available. I've gotten a couple of emails about the book over the years, telling me my cover was the best part about it, so I know there must have been at least a couple of copies sold. I was given a preview copy of the book, and I proudly put it on my bookshelf, a little excited that I had done a book cover. I never had the chance to read it, but gave it a look after the first email telling me they liked my cover.
I will say that if I had I read the book before agreeing to do the cover, I might have passed on the job offer. All I was told was that it was a book of short stories featuring the town of Jerome, and that I would be paid a certain amount, plus royalties for every book sold. I'm not a writer, by any means, but I've tried to read the book a couple of times, and had to stop each time. The writing in it, especially the grammar usage is so bad I cant get more than a couple of pages in before I have to quit. It literally hurts my head and makes me want to break out a package of red pens. I've read some bits and pieces from the author's other books, and they're pretty good. Not exactly my taste in writing, but well written, so I'm not sure why this one wasn't of similar quality. Perhaps it was an intensional style choice on part of the author.
Had I been paid, I'd never say anything like that, and would find something polite to say about it, but I wasn't, and have long since given up on the thought of ever getting paid for my work on this book. I will say, politely, that I hope at some point the book will be edited, and rereleased, as I would like to read it, but if they use my cover design again, I'll be expecting a check!
"The Cherry Blossom Bride" is available in 3 different sizes at the Dizzybear Creations Webstore.
As a little thank you to those who've been reading this blog, in the week before I release the new paintings, I'll be doing a trivia contest, asking questions that you'll be able to find the answers to in my blogs.
I encouraged people to ask me questions in the previous blog, so if you have any questions you'd like to ask that I can answer in a future blog, you can either post them in the comment section below, or send them to my email dizzybear73@gmail.com
Direct link to all blogs: http://dizzybearcreations.blogspot.com/
Facebook treats fan pages differently than the normal, personal pages, in that it restricts the number of how many fans of my art page will see my posts (typically restricted to 2% to 10% of all fans), unless I pay to increase the distribution. The other way to get my posts to more people without paying money to Facebook, is to find ways to get fans to share, "Like", or comment on my posts, and the sales helped that to happen, as many of you shared my posts. THANK YOU!
I do my best to keep prices as low as possible, so advertising is one thing I dont invest in, as it's quite costly. I'm always very grateful when someone helps get my work out into the world through their own personal social media, whether it be facebook, or any of the many others, and try to do things to show my appreciation by having contests, giveaways for free prints from time to time, having sales, or including free gifts with orders in the hopes a happy customer will tell others.
The question one person asked was: "why dont you just leave your prices marked down to what they were during the sales?" The answer to that, I cant afford to. The costs of all the items I need to make the items I sell continue to increase, just like the price of everything else. I work really hard to keep those costs down and spend anywhere from 10 to 20 hours each week just networking and shopping for discounts on the items I need to make what I sell, without diminishing quality. I research, experiment, and test the quality of everything new I use, making sure I use products that will last. I work hard to make things of quality, so instead of using things like monofilament, or cord to string the jewelry and ornaments, I use 7 strand wire cables that will last years longer. I make sure the metals used will be hypoallergenic and lead-free, which cost more, I use solid color glass beads, instead of coated glass beads, archival quality inks and paper for the prints, that I hand mount, mat, sign and package myself, and so on.
There's the additional costs of shipping items. I do charge a fee for shipping, but what I charge, doesn't usually even cover the expense of what the post office charges me to ship items. Then figure in the cost of packaging, gas to the post office, even things like printing out packing slips and address labels, tape to seal packages. Also the fees I have to pay to Paypal and Stripe to accept credit cards, commissions to storenvy for hosting my webstore, money charged for domain names, and business licenses... It goes on and on.
Beyond the monetary costs, there's unfathomable time invested in everything I make. From the time to learn how to make and design new things, working on packaging designs, and something you probably would not have guessed, that I typically spend a minimum average of 60 to 70 hours, working on each painting, most clocking in with between 100 to 250 hours each.
In the end though, it actually ends up being less profit, and takes a lot more time, for me to sell an item to an individual customer through the webstore, than it does to sell the same item, with many other items, to a store who then puts it on their shelves to sell to you. I mostly made the webstore for all the people that write me about purchasing something of mine that they saw and regretted not purchasing while traveling.
The other question was: "when's the next sale?" For those that have been waiting for the next big sale, I have plans to do one on Dia de los Muertos in November of 2015, but in the meantime I have been rotating different prints each week to be offered at a reduced price while writing these blogs, but that is not going to be an ongoing, constant thing. These sales will end in March, and I will be streamlining the website in the coming months, removing a lot of the jewelry and ornaments, focusing mostly on the prints.
Thanks for the questions!
The first painting this week, "Cherry Blossom Bride" was done in honor of Michel's sister's wedding in August of 2012. It was my first time going to a wedding performed all in French. I didn't really need to understand the actual words being used, I could still tell basically what was being said for the most part, based on tones of voice, and happy tears. It was an outdoor wedding, in a little village, by a little stream, outside of Montreal, next to a pretty little reception hall. It was a beautiful venue, and a fun celebration. Right after the ceremony, the photographer started taking pictures of the wedding party, the parents, all the standard wedding pictures, but at one point he had Michel's sister sit down on the grass, and started arranging her dress out around her. As soon as I saw it, I knew it would make a good painting, so I snuck over and clicked a couple of pictures to paint from later.
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| Cherry Blossom Bride 5x7 |
To me, the one thing that differs most between weddings in Quebec, and those in the US, is what the officiant says. It's less romantic, and more like reading pages of tax codes. You have the option of course of also adding vows, but things that Americans would just read before the wedding and sign a paper signifying they understood, the officiant has to read during the ceremony, an in the case of my wedding, in both French and English, since I dont speak French. I chuckled several times during the ceremony due to how official it all sounded, because I did not expect that at all. Michel's grandma officiated, and we never had time for a pre-wedding run through. During the ceremony, his grandma would say something in French, and I assumed it was something inspirational, about love and the future, but then she'd translate it to English, and it all really did sound like tax codes. Couldn't help but chuckle and wonder what the heck was happening. 
I often go to Sedona Green to restock shelves at the gallery, where I have a bit of an agreement with the owner that he wont tell people who I am while I'm there, even if they're asking questions about me, or my work. It's mostly so I can get my work at the gallery done, or else I'll just have to talk to everyone the entire time I'm there and get nothing accomplished. While stocking shelves and fixing displays though, I often get to overhear little conversations of the customers, talking about what they like, amongst the jewelry, the ornaments, and gift items. When it comes to the Day of the Dead paintings however, I get a little twisted wave of joy wash over me each time someone walks up to the display and says "I dont like these!" or some other string of words that basically boils down to the artist (me) being twisted and dark, while I'm standing there right in earshot. It seriously makes my day that my paintings evoked enough emotion to make someone stand in the middle of a store/gallery and express their dislike out loud for anyone and everyone to hear :-) I enjoy hearing people say they like them as well, which is what usually happens, but it doesn't get quite as big of a smile.
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| The Return 5x7 |
I will say that if I had I read the book before agreeing to do the cover, I might have passed on the job offer. All I was told was that it was a book of short stories featuring the town of Jerome, and that I would be paid a certain amount, plus royalties for every book sold. I'm not a writer, by any means, but I've tried to read the book a couple of times, and had to stop each time. The writing in it, especially the grammar usage is so bad I cant get more than a couple of pages in before I have to quit. It literally hurts my head and makes me want to break out a package of red pens. I've read some bits and pieces from the author's other books, and they're pretty good. Not exactly my taste in writing, but well written, so I'm not sure why this one wasn't of similar quality. Perhaps it was an intensional style choice on part of the author. Had I been paid, I'd never say anything like that, and would find something polite to say about it, but I wasn't, and have long since given up on the thought of ever getting paid for my work on this book. I will say, politely, that I hope at some point the book will be edited, and rereleased, as I would like to read it, but if they use my cover design again, I'll be expecting a check!
Prints of all the paintings shown here in this blog are available at the webstore.
"The Return" is available as a series of specially reprinted, limited edition, hand signed and numbered prints. Limited to a series of only 10.
You can see the other limited edition prints by clicking here or visiting http://dizzybearcreations.storenvy.com and clicking on the "Special Edition Prints" link on the left hand side.
"The Return" is available as a series of specially reprinted, limited edition, hand signed and numbered prints. Limited to a series of only 10.
"The Cherry Blossom Bride" is available in 3 different sizes at the Dizzybear Creations Webstore.
Two more paintings next week! Thank you again for sharing my artwork/posts with friends that you think would like my artwork, on your social media accounts: Facebook, twitter, blogger, pinterest, tumblr, ello.... It is INCREDIBLY helpful in getting my artwork out in the world, and is greatly appreciated.
As a little thank you to those who've been reading this blog, in the week before I release the new paintings, I'll be doing a trivia contest, asking questions that you'll be able to find the answers to in my blogs.
Direct link to all blogs: http://dizzybearcreations.blogspot.com/
ANSWERS TO YOUR QUESTIONS:
A couple of people have sent questions, though not exactly the kinds of questions I was expecting. When I first opened the webstore a couple of months ago, I had several back to back sitewide sales where everything was discounted 25% to 30% off, because I wanted to thank my followers on facebook for having "liked" my artist fan page, and to get the word out that my webstore was finally open.Facebook treats fan pages differently than the normal, personal pages, in that it restricts the number of how many fans of my art page will see my posts (typically restricted to 2% to 10% of all fans), unless I pay to increase the distribution. The other way to get my posts to more people without paying money to Facebook, is to find ways to get fans to share, "Like", or comment on my posts, and the sales helped that to happen, as many of you shared my posts. THANK YOU!
I do my best to keep prices as low as possible, so advertising is one thing I dont invest in, as it's quite costly. I'm always very grateful when someone helps get my work out into the world through their own personal social media, whether it be facebook, or any of the many others, and try to do things to show my appreciation by having contests, giveaways for free prints from time to time, having sales, or including free gifts with orders in the hopes a happy customer will tell others.
The question one person asked was: "why dont you just leave your prices marked down to what they were during the sales?" The answer to that, I cant afford to. The costs of all the items I need to make the items I sell continue to increase, just like the price of everything else. I work really hard to keep those costs down and spend anywhere from 10 to 20 hours each week just networking and shopping for discounts on the items I need to make what I sell, without diminishing quality. I research, experiment, and test the quality of everything new I use, making sure I use products that will last. I work hard to make things of quality, so instead of using things like monofilament, or cord to string the jewelry and ornaments, I use 7 strand wire cables that will last years longer. I make sure the metals used will be hypoallergenic and lead-free, which cost more, I use solid color glass beads, instead of coated glass beads, archival quality inks and paper for the prints, that I hand mount, mat, sign and package myself, and so on.
There's the additional costs of shipping items. I do charge a fee for shipping, but what I charge, doesn't usually even cover the expense of what the post office charges me to ship items. Then figure in the cost of packaging, gas to the post office, even things like printing out packing slips and address labels, tape to seal packages. Also the fees I have to pay to Paypal and Stripe to accept credit cards, commissions to storenvy for hosting my webstore, money charged for domain names, and business licenses... It goes on and on.
Beyond the monetary costs, there's unfathomable time invested in everything I make. From the time to learn how to make and design new things, working on packaging designs, and something you probably would not have guessed, that I typically spend a minimum average of 60 to 70 hours, working on each painting, most clocking in with between 100 to 250 hours each.
In the end though, it actually ends up being less profit, and takes a lot more time, for me to sell an item to an individual customer through the webstore, than it does to sell the same item, with many other items, to a store who then puts it on their shelves to sell to you. I mostly made the webstore for all the people that write me about purchasing something of mine that they saw and regretted not purchasing while traveling.
The other question was: "when's the next sale?" For those that have been waiting for the next big sale, I have plans to do one on Dia de los Muertos in November of 2015, but in the meantime I have been rotating different prints each week to be offered at a reduced price while writing these blogs, but that is not going to be an ongoing, constant thing. These sales will end in March, and I will be streamlining the website in the coming months, removing a lot of the jewelry and ornaments, focusing mostly on the prints.
Thanks for the questions!
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