After I finished art school there were not a lot of options open to me. Basically, they boiled down to this… get a day job in an office. After an 8 to 9 maybe 10 hour day come home, eat dinner, do chores, and then if your still awake work on art. What if you want to make art a career? Then added to that work week, find time to hustle what you created around the galleries in hope of landing a show. By that, I mean go to all the art shows you can, network and pray that someone might take an interest in your work. If a gallery does give you a shot with all that effort those pieces still might not sell. Such a dismal prospect!
Most of my classmates after leaving school were so burned-out on making art that they wouldn’t pick up their media again for maybe six months after graduation. Then IF they did they were so tired after work that more than likely they would only do artwork on the weekends. Then life gets in the way rent, and children become far more important than any esthetic pursuit. Slowly and surely, the dream is strangled and fades until art school is just a distant bittersweet memory. A little joke that HR people, and the family snickers at when you feel your lowest.
This is what I feared. It is also why I probably put off graduating as long as I did. I knew the second I stepped off that campus my options were slim to none. More than likely I would become another casualty to a world that DOES value art, but makes it very difficult for you to make a living at it. This all changed one day when a friends showed me Etsy. It took so much courage for me to open my own shop. I thought about it for at least a year and a half. What would I sell, would anyone actually buy it, would they hate it once they received it. Once I did I was hooked. It was a ray of hope to help me continue to create. A venue that helped me reap a little profit for all the effort I had put into learning my craft over the years.
A few months from now it will be a year since I opened my shop. There has been about ten years of knowledge crammed into this one little year. It has been a crash course in every single area of business. On Etsy, as a seller, to succeed you have to do it faster and smarter or you just get left behind. Out of this trial, most shops rise to the challenge and surpass expectations. There are just so many amazing people making creative imaginative off the wall items that I have to share a list of some of my favorites. This blog is my little platform to showcase the gems I have found on my travels through the web. One little laundry list of amazingly artful items that I have found irresistible that need more attention, along with some of my own creations along the way.
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