From Idea To Market
The behind the scenes process of what all goes into the art before someone buys it
I was supposed to have a local market last night, but we had a line of storms come through with more threatening behind it, so I decided to not risk going out and getting all of my stuff soaked. Turned out, it was a nice night after the big line of storms went through. oops.
It occurred to me that when people there see my prints, they don’t really know the process that went into that before they saw it in my booth. Likewise, the people who watch me stream my art only see that part of the process - the creation of the art piece. So I thought I would walk you through the process of how I get from idea to a print you might buy at a market. Let’s go!
Ideas and References
Ideas for art pieces come from all kinds of places, but usually not when you sit down to work on them. they come at inconvenient times, or when you happen to see something out and about. Or, while you’re browsing the internet for something else, and you see something cool.
Most of the time, ideas don’t come when it’s convenient to do something about them. At least for me.
So I have a google doc for art ideas that I can access from anywhere on my phone. That way, no matter where i am, i can add a new idea to the doc and come back to it later. Or if it’s a picture i see on the internet, I have a folder on my computer for drawing references, or drawing ideas. That way when I inevitably forget about this genius idea five minutes from now, and will definitely not remember it when I can’t think of what to work on, I can go back to my ideas doc and references folder to remind me.
Sketching it out
The next step is sketching it out. If it is a particularly complicated piece, I might do some rough sketches in a sketchbook to try and figure some things out, but otherwise I prep my paper and start drawing lightly with a 4H pencil. 4H because it is a hard lead, which means I can get very light lines with it. I don’t want the pencil sketch dark, because I want to be able to remove it easily before I add marker or watercolor.
Sketching it out gives me the chance to get proportions down and details accurate before I go in with something more permanent. For me, that’s typically ink. And with Ink, once it’s on the page, it’s there. Like THERE there.
If I think the sketching process might be a bit messier than normal, I will do this on a separate sheet of paper, and then use my lightboard to add the final clean linework to my final paper without all the scratch marks showing just how many times I had to draw and erase and draw and erase to get things to look right. The sketching can be a pretty frustrating phase sometimes.
Ink and watercolor
If it’s a ink piece, or ink and watercolor, the next step is inking over the sketch. If I sketched on the final paper, I’ll just ink over the pencil sketch. Otherwise, like I said, I’ll put the sketch and final paper on my light board and trace the ink linework over my original sketch. That is what I did with the sharks on this piece.
The inking process for me is a bit stressful because I want to have good line control. This is probably because of my background in architectural drawing, but precision seems to jump to the forefront of priorities for me, for good or ill. on rare occasions, I’ll just grab the pen and start drawing , throwing caution to the wind without a pencil sketch, but those are few and far between.
With clean lines on the page now, I can add my watercolor paint, or markers depending on the piece. as it gets closer to being completed, every step of the creation of the art feels a bit stressful in not wanting to screw it up. so adding color to a nice line drawing, you wonder if you’re ruining a perfectly good drawing by adding more.
But hopefully in the end it all works, and we finish off a piece with the signature. This whole part from the sketching to the finished piece is the part of the process that I stream on my twitch channel. It’s nice to be able to work on my art and having conversations with people at the same time. Admittedly, there are a few more distractions this way… but they’re good ones. :)
And then comes the administrative stuff
Every job has parts of it you won’t like, and for my art, this is that.
Once you’ve finished a piece, I need to get a good photo of it, which means getting outside on a clear and sunny day without wind, and getting good high resolution photos of my art. It’s one of those annoying things that shouldn’t take long in theory, but the effort of making it happen is much less enjoyable than making the art.
Once we have photos, I bring them into photoshop to clean it up, crop the image, make any color correction (you’d be surprised how much colors change from the original to a photo), and getting them formatted for printing.
I upload my images to a printing company and order my Giclee prints. I also create print on demand items for purchase through my website for people who can’t make it to the markets I set up at. But once the prints arrive, we’re still not quite done.
Packaging the prints
One I have my prints in hand, I need to get them packaged for market. This means matting the 5x7’s and putting backing boards with the 8x10’s before putting them into their protective sleeves. Those sleeves have little strips you peel off the sticky part to be able to seal them, and those strips are like little static magnets. they’re such a pain when you’re packaging a bunch of prints at a time.
When the new prints are all packaged, they go into my bin so they’re ready for my next market, where i’ll display them on a gridwall and in a crate to flip through for people to see and hopefully purchase!