Even More Pre-Season

The end of the book is upon us and we are in full production of the pieces we are going to be hanging in our traveling gallery and of course all the different products we will be selling. We will start off the season with larger pieced together pieces (just a side note: I need a better name for these pieces so help me out if you can, so far polyptych is the best or nemoptych), we will also have small prints and necklaces. We still have a few pieces left over that we wanted to put on eBay but will just use them as filler till we can make more pencil drawings on Claybord.



here are some small prints



I feel so drained right now, this book has taken everything out of me, only time will tell if all this hard work will pays off. The good news is that in about a week of posting this blog all the first round of drawings should be done. Then 100% of our time can be spent on building inventory, or as I like to call it, the First Line Of Defense.

The latest piece is a re-do of the first Colorado piece I did to start off the whole Circlescape Series. I really love this piece and so do a lot of people. The image itself in reproduction form has sold very well all over the country. I even did another lager piece with just the windmill and it moved pretty quick. I just might have to make another one to have waiting in the wings.



hannah painting the egdes black

Once I finish up a few more of these bigger pieces we are going to set up our tent out here on the ranch and get some new booth shots. I have heard that the bigger better shows like big art in the booths so lets see if it works. Plus the booth shot we are using right now shows a lot of smaller pieces so lets hope no one calls us out on them.

Why Yes, Yes She Is

Most of the time people are surprised to find out I’m the artist. I hear comments like “you don’t look like you would make such finely detailed work” or something to that effect. Most of the time they think Hannah is the artist and half the time I’m even sitting there working on a piece. But these days Hannah does most of the work, I only draw the circles. There was a time when I did everything and she had a real day job but ever since hitting the road all that has changed. She now has a strong influence on what subjects I draw, what colors I use and give or take how many circles I use to cover the piece. She actually draws each piece and hands them over to me like a coloring book page and I fill them in with circles. Most times she even fills in the solid parts. Then, once I’m done putting in the circles she takes it away and hands me another one. We are a great team.

But when asked if she’s an artist we stumble to answer. I always say she’s my manager, because in reality that’s what she is. She handles all the stuff a manager would handle. But once in a while she can actually be caught making her own pieces and I wanted to take the time to show her latest piece off.

It’s a beautiful piece too. 24 inch by 24 inch mosaic of Frida Kahlo made with aluminum cans. She hole punched each piece and nailed them to a board, leaving space for each one to move, so if the wind blows or if you move it, each hole punch moves and rattles. This piece is for sale, so please send me an email if you are interested. We will also display it at the shows that aren’t too strict about what we display, so come check it out.

Also we just saw the Frida Kahlo movie with Salma Hayek, oh my god, I love me some Hayek but come on, did Frida ready had a great pair of…….. eyes like that? However, I really didn’t know anything about her and her life so it was pretty eye opening. If you haven’t watched it go watch it now.

More Pre-Season And Finding Shows

Well, we pulled off another piece using the new piecing together method, which is a re-do of the sunflower piece from Kansas. I am really loving the look of these.

Also with a left over canvas we put a fun Twitter Bird on it just to have something for my Twitter Fans to enjoy.

I was also asked the other day about how we book our shows and since we are right in the middle of planning this leg of the tour I wanted share with you folks how we do what we do and how we do it.

First of all we apply using Zapplication, in most cases, to shows that fit the time and area we need a show and where we want to be at that time of year. Like this year, we wanted to head to the Northeast, however most shows we applied to we didn’t get into. We did get into one show but felt it wasn’t worth it to us to drive all that way for only one show.

But when we do get into a few more shows than that, we head to the state. Like we did in Minnesota - we booked 2 shows with a weekend in between and had a weekend off before having a show back in Colorado. So we headed there to see what else we could get into. At the first show I walked around and chatted with every local artist I could find and found out what shows, if any, they were doing the next weekend. We happened to find a guy with the same work ethic as us and he gave us the number of a lady to ask if we could get into her show last minute - and she let us in.

Then after the second already “planned” show we found ourselves slowly making our way over to Mount Rushmore before we headed back to Colorado. So Hannah went online and just did some old fashioned Googling and came across a little event going on in South Dakota.

However, the Colorado show was found by a curator we work with in Denver. I meet this curator on Myspace right before we moved to Denver and have been showing with him for years. He books a lot of my Denver shows, talks and events.

Hope that gives a little glimpse into what and how we do it. I know this is just a small piece of how it works. Each show is different, half of the shows are found using Zapplication, but out of the 40 to 50 shows we do a year are all fly by the seat of our pants type things. We roll with the punches and when we hear of something good we jump on it. Don't hesitate to post a comment if you have any other questions about how we book our shows!

So, More About Branding

As an artist who is always thinking about what else we could do to help get us that much more out there, that much more seen and that further along in our career, I keep coming back to branding. At times I feel branding is just another term people like to put out there so they can seem like they know what they are talking about. Its a buzz word of our online generation and people line up to hear what they are talking about. I, on the other hand, have fought to stay away from this in my blog although I have blogged about it a few times. I have been told by a few people that it seems like I know what I’m doing, but its all trial and error, I just do what I feel like doing and hope for the best. However I do know the true meaning of it which isn’t something one can easily define.

Whataburger comes to mind when I think about branding. Oh boy, can you tell someones been there - their bags, their cups all have their famous Orange and White Stripes. You don’t even need to see the logo. I have also been trying to come up with something like this so people can tell you just purchased art by nemo. We use to have white bags with our logo on them but we have since gone to clear bags, which you can see the art piece thru them. I’m still fighting for the logo on the bag but we also need to pick a color of the bag or have a design put on them, who knows.

I have been thinking maybe uniforms or something. I know I try to have something on at all times with my logo on it. But if your're into sports you know a professional is marked by a uniform, every sports person wears one, from individuals to teams. You can tell they got it together because they look together. Same reason you dress up to go to an interview, a business professional wears a uniform and their teammates wear the same uniform, sure they wear bright colored ties to help them stand out, but it’s the same thing. So I’m trying to come up with something in that vain. Would love to hear suggestions or see examples or would love to hear what you do.

Do you have an “Artist” uniform? Is there something you put on at every show that sets you apart from the crowd? Is there anything else visually to do that builds a brand?

Making My Print On The World

Ok ok ok, by popular demand, we bring you Prints By Nemo. More and more we have been hearing “if you had a print, I would buy it” and “if you sold prints online, I would buy them”. So we want people to put money were their mouths are. We posted our best of the best of the best pieces online and will soon be posting more till we have almost everything on there.

Prints are a nice little thing to offer these days when we are super overwhelmed with everything and prints help pick up the slack. Since Society 6 is a print on demand company, they are only made when ordered so I don’t have to carry them around with me at all times.

So go check them out and pick up one of each to display in your home, your office or take one to the gym with you. For 20 bucks a pop, hell buy all your friends one so when you go to their house you can have something great to view.

Pre-Season

Welcome to a new year, we have many great things planned for you. And the first thing we have for you is that this year we are going BIG. However, you folks know I live in a 96 square foot van, so going big is a little hard since storage is a problem. We store our art in bins under the bed, which can house pieces as big as 12 inch by 16 inch. Which doesn’t give us much of a big piece but if we put a few together it’s a different story.

At one of our last shows we saw the same thing in another artist's booth and it hit us, if we can make 4 small pieces to fit in our bins and hang them next to each other on the wall, we could have bigger pieces and still keep our living space. As of right now we have a 30 inch by 40 inch and a 24 inch by 24 inch piece we keep on the bed during the days and move (every night) to the front seats then back to the bed (every morning) to drive. This moving back and fourth crap is getting old.

We hear over and over how bigger pieces are needed at fairs and festivals. They can be seen from across the street which pulls people in. They can see right away what it is when they see them. I have a hard time getting people to come in and look at the detail of a piece, so they can understand what it is they are looking at. So in an attempt at drawing in the bigger crowds and hopefuly making the bigger sales we bring you the first piece in this vain. (Hannah mentioned the piece looked like a window frame).

It’s a re-creation of the Arizona drawing I did from my Circlespaces series. These larger pieces are basically going to be copies of older pieces (except created with markers on canvas, instead of pencil on paper). I use the term copies as loose as I can. More like re-do’s of some of the more popular pieces I have done. Since I feel I need a more “focused” on subject approach, I am only re-creating the Circlespaces we had developed in our travels since they come with a built in story. Its a lot easier to talk about a place you've been to than one you made up (at least for me). So I’m sticking to stuff we see while traveling, the best part is if I can catch it with my camera its fair game to use in a piece of art.

eBay

We have been diligently posting older pieces in pencil on paper on eBay at the amazingly low 99 cent first bid. People ask all the time about if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. The way I see it is that I’m not trying to make a living off these pieces. However, as of this blog, most of the pieces are worth about $350 and I’m letting them go for pennies on the dollar, but only because we no long offer them in that medium and don’t want anyone to see them with us.

Also most of the pieces we haven’t shown in years anyway, last time was the Bryan show where we had to fight hard to fill a huge café with art work.

Old art holds me back, I hate seeing art that hasn’t sold and most times I just want to burn them (I have in the past).

I donate as many pieces as I can but I really don’t like giving free art away and especially not art I have to pay shipping on. So next best thing is to put them on eBay.

Since I have little to no faith in eBay driving traffic to my post, I talk about them on Facebook and Twitter which means one of my combined 6,000 friends, followers, family and fans are some of the only people who get a chance to win an original piece at an amazing low price. And who can argue that that’s a bad thing?

I am just glad my pieces are going to people who love them. So don’t feel bad when you see one of my pieces go for 10 bucks because a good friend won the piece...and most artists give their art away for less than that anyway.

February To Go

With a March 23rd show set as what could be the first of the season, we now realize we have less than 2 months before we set sail. Even if April is going to be spent in Texas, all near our home base, we still treat home shows as away shows, since we are still on the road and still in new and different lands. As there is tons and tons of stuff we want to do there is even more we need to do. Applying for the shows is the biggest part since without a show we don’t go, waiting to find out if we got in or not is the hardest part. We are still trying to head Northeast but it isn’t looking too good for us. We will see.

Van and RV maintenance is the next thing. We need tries, batteries and soon, an oil change. Talk about starting a road trip spending money. We have a long list of maintenance stuff which needs to happen before we tackle a 2000 mile drive. This is one of those unplanned expenses I didn’t take into account when we first hit the road.

Art wise, we did a whole brainstorming session over a few days, and a few too many bottles of wine, and came up with a new way of setting up our booth, different products, more prints and bigger originals. We reorganized all the art stuff we store in our van. Switched out bins and redistributed art and supplies. So the pre-season begins, this is where we see who’s going to be in the starting team, who is the back-up and who gets cut. As an artist on tour and needing to make an income we have to carefully pick which art is a winner and which ones are holding us back.

Our last show over Thanksgiving’s Black Weekend has been over 2 months ago and our goal of getting our children’s book done might have been an unrealistic goal for us. However we are still working hard on it and will continue to work hard and somehow get this and all the other stuff done. It feels like forever since we have done a show and we might be rusty but I am so excited to get back out there and excited to see what awaits us.