Market Research

Camping table and chair were lent to me by a good friend

Yesterday I attended my first market / street festival and I've learned a lot:

- Little kids love stones (the stones were only on the table because of the windy conditions)
- People like my ornaments/tribals
- I need to present my cards differently, make the access and the foraging easier for the customers (a turnable postcard stand would probably be best)
- Art fairs are preferable sales points for my stuff not normal street festivals and certainly not the Kö street festival. However the Westpaket on the Karl-Heine-Street might be a possible street festival, since it is kind of an art fair.

So, essentially yesterday afternoon was an afternoon in market research. I learned a lot and I'm sure I will put my new knowledge to use.

Now I'll enjoy a piece of strawberry cake, tonight I'll enjoy a concert and tomorrow I'll enjoy another Offline - Sunday at my coffee shop with an amazing mango milkshake and Caffé Latte.

Have a great weekend.

Street Festival at Leipzigs "Kö" on June 1st

The "Kö" is the Könneritzstreet in Leipzig's west and there will be a street festival at the afternoon of June 1st this year. The big news:

I will take part with a stall and offering my (printed) postcard-sets, ornamental drawings and photographies there!

Exciting, eh? Well at least it is for me. And there'll be a whole lot of work during the next few weeks. I'll have to draw a lot and decide which drawings and photos to print, etc.

Getting to the next stage

I can already see the next stage of my career path and getting there means boring work. Which meant dilly-dallying yesterday to avoid it. However today I feel quite upbeat and fired to get to this next stage and doing things.

As you can see in the following two postcards I have made it to the next stage of ornamental art: overlapping ornaments. It took me years to get to this stage. I'm quite excited to have finally made it. Though they still need some work, I'm quite happy with my first works.

Tonight I'll meet with some photographers and I'm really excited about it.

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Lukas vs Winsor & Newton vs Schmincke

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This weekend was filled to the brim with artwork. Especially my Sunday, I started with painting right after breakfast, then went to my usual coffee shop to enjoy my Sunday treat (Caffe Latte and nougat waffles), do some pondering and drawing, after that I went home and painted until sunset, after my dinner I immersed myself in the beauty of islamic architecture and ornaments.

During the painting I did get the chance to test three water color manufacturers against each other. Lukas, Winsor & Newton and Schmincke.

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In postcard 93 you can see colors from all three manufacturers. Lukas = turquoise, Winsor & Newton = blues, Schmincke = purple. Lukas (cobalt-)turpuoise misses the shine (and the cobalt hue), obviously the pigments aren't of the highest quality, which isn't that surprising considering that the colors cost only 1 third of the Schmincke or Winsor & Newton colors. I guess if you just start out and haven't used Schmincke or Winsor & Newton before, Lukas water colors are just fine. But I started out with Winsor & Newton and find that Lukas colors are inacceptable. I like water colors for their brightness and shine, if I wanted dim colors I would have gone for gouache.

Winsor & Newton vs. Schmincke? Well, I like Schmincke more, the colors have even more brilliance and my local artists supply sells the half pans of them too. However, they only sell full pans of Winsor & Newton, irritatingly most of the W & N paint-boxes are half pans. So when I run out of several colors in my sketchers box I'll switch to a Schmincke paint-box. After all the purple and gold hues are amazing, as you can see below in Postcard 92.

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Yesterday evening I started to truly experiment with watercolors and got totally excited about it.

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So this morning I booked a water color class at our local adult education center. It starts tonight and I'm quite excited about it.

Now, it's time to get down to my other business. Have a great new week everyone. Do you have any exciting plans?

From monochrome to colorful: an Epiphany

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For years I've been searching for the right word for these doodles that I do. During the last year the name search became even more pressing. Since yesterday an epiphany grew within me and finally revealed itself this morning:

these are ornaments.

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Finally I have the correct term for them! You can't imagine how elated I am about this.

Enjoy your weekend everyone. I certainly will, we've got fabulous weather and I'm brimming with ideas for San's Visual Art.

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