The risks of building on anything less than a sturdy foundation have been evident and written about since pre- Biblical times. This has been on my mind for a couple of reasons.
I encountered the lesson in practice yesterday when I spent a whole day painting a picture and came a cropper in the final phase, the background which happens to be my bête noire. If I don't know how to reasonably manage to put down a background, all the flair and fancy footwork in the foreground really are a waste of time if I'm going to make a dog's dinner of the background. I have to work this out. It's always an issue on my bigger pieces and it's something to do with the unplanned way I work. Which I think is inconsistent with watercolour, in which you really need to have done some planning, so areas can be masked off and that sort of thing in order to avoid running into the problems I routinely encounter. Nevertheless I will overcome this obstacle. I just need to persevere.
Secondly thinking about the foundation of this business. The duck's legs paddling beneath the surface of the water. That all needs to be put in place. I mean, at this point there's me and my accountant and a spreadsheet and the fractured web/email/domain set up I mentioned in an earlier post. But I still don't have a plan. I know I need to create streams for passive and active income. I know I need to put a shop into my website, apart from the Etsy shop that really only seems to capture sales of one sort of print. I'm excited to do either a podcast or YouTube videos as well as this blog to talk about all the things I'm learning as well.
I found a fantastic video the other day, Making Money as an Artist it pretty much outlines everything: a success story, so I have a sort of roadmap to follow.
Onward.