Some Good News, But More Bad News

So Hannah checked out fine after her surgery and we both feel its ok to continue with a few more shows on our tour. So the good news is that we are going to Colorado for a few shows. So once again you can find us at Frisco Art Fair, July 7-8 in Frisco, CO then in Art on the Rockies, July 14-15 in Edwards, CO and last but not least Open Arts Fest, July 21-22 Boulder, CO in which they will be using one of my images on the poster. That is something that could drive traffic to us, plus we get a booth with lots of room all the way around to hang art up. Lets just hope the fires don’t discourage people from showing up and buying.

Bad news, after these 3 shows Hannah needs to go back under the knife and have 2 more surgeries. We are keep positive about these and hoping that after this we can keep going full strength and pull 40 shows in 40 weekends in 2013. But for now we are canceling the 6 remaining summer shows on our list. This has been a really difficult descision to make since having these shows is how we make our money to live but we will make it work, it always works out. Plus we are selling Art Tags and Prints online and our children’s book is due out in a few weeks, so keep an eye out for that too.

Thank you for all the well wishes and happy thoughts.

Building A Community

I was once jumped on for not knowing this so called term one day on Twitter. A lady asked me if I was “building a community” for my book. I asked her if she was talking about sending out press releases, thinking “community” like where I live, and getting word out in newspapers and such. She told me how press releases weren’t what I needed to do and continued to go all (as she called it) “shark tank” on me. She never did explain what "building a community" was, but you know me - I asked more and more people about it.What I heard over and over was “networking” which to me is just another buzz word designed to complicate our simple existence. I have tried hard to stay away from calling anything I do networking; it sounds like you don’t care about the people you talk to, don’t care about the people you add to your friends list and people you follow. So if “building a community” is “networking”, we all know real networking is just meeting new people and making them friends. Well, my dear young lady twitter friend, I am building a community, I just don’t call it that.


So my advice in building your art community is to think about your real community first. Do the people you live near and talk to on a daily basis even know you’re an artist? Do they know at any given time you have art for sale? Do they know that when a birthday, Christmas, or any holiday comes up they can call on you to provide a well thought out and personal gift?
My biggest challenge, as I have said before, was going from just a guy who paints on the side, to being an artist and proudly saying it. I also started with friends and family. The people who showed up to some of my first shows were only coworkers and my best friend and mom and dad. But with the more and more shows I had, the more and more people I needed to tell about my work and have them come out. Now just about anywhere I can be caught talking about my art.

However I never just out right start talking about it. I plan carefully how I bring it up. But that’s easy to do when your whole life revolves around it. Everyone wants to know what you’re doing. Its an easy thing to talk about, like talking about weather or gas prices. When I say I’m an artist, most times people ask what kind of art I make - here’s were I whip out a business card and share with them my freakish skill of drawing a circle and they genuinely seem impressed. Depending on where we are or what we are doing I can always bust out my necklaces or show them originals, talk about my book or shows that are coming up. I also try to bring up that we take credit cards. Do they take the card, go home and look me up? Who knows, but I did my part.

Then, like magic, every now and then we find a friend, someone who buys a piece, someone who continues to buy piece after piece, someone with a great opportunity or someone with really great advice. Sometimes they are in your life just a few minutes, sometimes they stay a life time. But no matter how you see it, you need them, you need their help, they are your community.

Get Outta Here and Get Out There

The greatest marketing anyone can do was marketing 6 months ago. So if you’re not marketing your art, start today and reap the benefits in the future.

That’s what this tour is all about - building the "art by nemo" brand and spreading the circle of love. I got a pretty easy job being that my style is different than a lot of other pencil art and circle art but that doesn’t mean I can let up at anytime. I am always trying one person at a time to get more out there. The biggest thing I see in evidence it is working is that I get tons of links sent to me of other artists working with circles or something with circles in it. It’s a great thing to know people can see a circle while shopping and with the magic of smart phones, bam it's in my inbox or twitter stream. The best part is when I’m showing somewhere and someone comes up to me and says something about seeing an artist with the same style at some gallery or at another show somewhere and its my work they are talking about, now that’s one hell of a feeling.

People love to name drop so becoming a name someone could drop only helps your fight in becoming a big name artist. People want you on their walls if they can brag about your piece to all their friends. Yes, people buy art cuz they like it or it moves them, connects with them, however people don’t spend upwards of a 1000 bucks not to show it off.

So what can we learn about all this? Lets say you are trying to build your own name and you wanna do a few of the things I’m doing, say becoming the “whatever” guy or girl (I’m the circle guy) maybe you want to be the square guy or the line girl or whatever it is. You gotta stick to your guns and make it happen, you can’t be the girl who draws red cows one day and the girl who paints purple mountains the next, unless you’re the girl who draws red cows in front of painted purple mountains. To build a name and a brand around your art you must build a look or style first. You must stick to it as close as you can. Like, I can jump from the cow to the mountains very easily since subject is not what’s pushing my brand, it’s the circle. Think of the blue dog guy, yes George Rodrigue paints nothing but blue dogs and we would all feel betrayed if he painted a red cat. Much like me I’m sure he get pictures sent to him everyday of dogs and blue stuff and blue dogs and probably even blue cats.

So go out there and set your stage and fill it with the most like items as you can and maybe one day people will call you the guy with the stage filled with the same stuff.

Back To It…

So what’s up you ask? Well, its really been an overwhelming month or so. First we need to fix the inverter in our van, something happened to a wire and its not giving power to the outlets, which we need to live in a parking lot or rest stop comfortably. Then the check engine light came on the other day, maybe something with the glow plugs, I was hoping it was glow worms since they are cuter. So now we need to run around and wait to have these things fixed.

We were not able to get art works printed on the dominoes like we wanted, so we opted for another way, which in my eyes came out a lot better and now we have a great product for wholesaling. So on the plus side we got something better than what we expected. These pendants look about the same as our dominoes but are thinner and lighter. The image is laser printed on acrylic and will last forever.

Oh, and not to mention they found pre-cancer in Hannah, and that needed to be taken care of so we had to cancel our first 2 shows in Kansas. And before you say anything stupid, we did look at our options and we did get a few more opinions. The first suggested to do nothing and it got worse. So we were holed up at the "bed and bike" house here on the ranch for about a week after a surgery she needed to have. We watched a lot of cable TV and Hannah was on a pain killers and juice diet. I did get to work on a commission in between getting stuff for her and helping her do stuff. We are still waiting to hear back from doctors but we plan on keeping on.

So we are back on track as of right now to return to the road and do a few more shows since we really need to make some money. We are going to Utah for the first time and leave in about a week and we should get back to normal, well as normal as it can get around here, at least we should start blogging more and posting more videos.

So coming back with more art at ya, hold on tight its going to be a crazy ride.