I bought my first SLR in 1980. It was a Pentax 
XG7 and I loved it. I wanted to attend the Ford Institute of Photography but life had different plans for me. I used it for years but eventually moved on to an easier to use point-n-click, then various digital cameras.
I worked at the Shutterbug camera store in Coddingtown and the most expensive camera we sold was a Nikon. Needless to say I coveted that beautiful thing but it's price was always out of reach. Fast forward 30 years. Last week I found an almost new Nikon D40 on Craigslist for a very reasonable price. Ironically it cost about the same as my Pentax did in 1980.
So now I can make much better photos of my art...yay.
Denton Loomis Original Art
Denton's Etsy Shop
Denton Tweets
I love being creative. It's fun making stuff...art or whatever. And I love figuring out how to do things myself. For example, I like to stretch my own canvas and I learned how to silk screen this weekend. More on that in another blog post.
Where I get myself into trouble though that I research everything and I over analyze. Oh...and I blog surf WAY too much. Shouldn't an artist be obsessed with making art and tend to struggle with the business side of things? Not me. For whatever reason I spend too much time looking at other's websites. I research business models. I look at how other artists are marketing. And the net result is that I don't create enough.
So here are my goals for the coming year. Notice that I'm not calling them resolutions. Resolutions tend not to be measurable. Goals are more action oriented. In no particular order:
ONE: Be creative every day. Creative is defined as doing something artistic or otherwise meaningful that only I can do.
TWO: Be more organized in my home, art and work life. In my home and office life that means getting rid of things I don't use. There is way too much clutter in my life and it gets in the way of doing things I like to do.
THREE: Manage my time intentionally. I l.o.v.e. reading other artist's blogs and Etsy shops. And that's okay...I get great artistic energy from looking around the creative world. But what I will begin to do is limit myself to four 15 minute "blog blocks" per day. The rest of my time will be focusing on the tasks that I need to be working on.
FOUR: Build a business that I love. This means that I need to stop treating my art as a hobby and build it as a business. I can [and must] still enjoy it as my hobby but I want to build it into a business way of life. It is time to stop regretting that I didn't pursue an art career when I was young.
These four items are only a starting point...goals. The actions required to meet these goals will also be written and acted upon.
It is going to be a good year.
Denton Loomis Original Art
Denton's Etsy Shop
Denton Tweets
I can absolutely drive myself nuts and waste a bunch of time playing with the layouts and colors on my website and blog. I have made a conscious effort to update my blog to more accurately represent my style and I ran into a couple of tools that you might find helpful if you are doing the same.
My Blogger layout is a topic for another day, but as for color you may want to take a look at these:
MySpaceDev offers a very large selection of colors and their hexidecimal codes.
ColorPicker will give you the hex code for any color you can find on using their color selection tool.
And just for fun ColourLovers will give you the hex code for Crayola Crayon colors...quite fun.
Have a colorful day!
Original Abstract Art Paintings
Denton's Etsy Shop
Like most of the things I find online I don't remember how I found Handmadeology. I'm glad I did though. Every artist and crafter stuggles with the business side of their work. Handmadeology has tools for promoting your site and even some time management ideas. I have attended one of their webinars and I was able to implement a single idea that has improved my twitter traffic and traffic to my Etsy shop.
Every day I learn a little bit about how to get my art before the eyes of people who want to see it.
Now I just need to minimize the time I spend looking at other artist's work.
Original Abstract Art Paintings Denton's Website
Denton's Etsy Shop
