Hey, all! Long time, no post. I’m still so terrible with keeping up with my social media. I’ll work on it, I promise.
So, couple updates: I have new stickers for Pride Month! For those who don’t know me IRL, I’m an aromantic asexual. Each of these stickers has nine flag variations, but if you like a sticker and don’t see your flag, message me and I’ll see what I can do to get your flag out there too :)
Shop is here: https://www.nolasteuerart.com/stickers
I’m also moving in late June, so any proceeds from these stickers are gonna be helping me with moving costs.
Reblogs really help here, since I don’t have very many followers.
So, my sister and I decided to dip our toes into the world of skateboards. We each got a used longboard (because apparently they are easier to balance on and I am a ROYAL KLUTZ) and we decided--after trying one out and making sure that we actually still wanted to learn--to give our boards a custom paint job.
I decided to put one of my weird ink drawings, but upgrade it to a full-color painting :) and I really love how it turned out! Give me weird art in primary colors any day and I am SOLD!
Bonus: my sister’s board is the red one at the end! Her board had dyed wood I guess, so when we sanded it this beautiful red appeared :) I really love her abstract shapes and I cannot wait to have this whole process finished so we can put our boards back together and go out skating :D
So friends. In light of these strange times, might you enjoy some strange art? At a discount, of course in honor of the Quarantine. I've finally gotten my site working the way I want it to (for now) and the shop is officially live.
I'm having a 20% off sale till the end of March to help me make up for lost wages since my workplace is closed down. Use the code QUARANTINE20 at checkout for 20% off prints (digital art only at the moment) and stickers! Tell your friends :)
We'll all get through this somehow. Now go wash your hands :)
So, I haven’t been able to do much to support the Black Lives Matter movement. I avoid the protests because I live with three high-risk people and I don’t want to bring COVID-19 home to them. I haven’t been able to donate much because I’m saving for a big move at the end of the month.
But I want to do what I can, even though it will probably end up being just a drop in the bucket.
From now (June 11th) until the end of July, I will be donating 50% of any sales made in my shop to the BLM movement.
I have *prints and *stickers, and hopefully I’ll be able to do enough color testing to get some of my traditional work ready for printing before the end of the next month as well.
**All of my Pride themed stickers will only be available until the end of June, so if you want one of those, you gotta jump on them quick!**
Just some thoughts about the future....a ramble really.
I’ve been doing a bit of thinking over the last few days since I officially sent in my application to grad school. The last few months have been so full and stressful, it’s made me take a bit of a step back to assess.
There’s a lot of thoughts bouncing around in my head right now, so this is just a big, unstructured brainstorm at this point.
This might get long, so I’m gonna put the rest under a read more :)
For those who don’t know me IRL, and I can’t remember if I’ve been super clear about this online: I just applied to an MFA program so I can get the degree that allows me to teach at a college level. This has been my only concrete goal for a while, but after the last 5 months of working to get my application prepared, I’m starting to have thoughts.
Like, is this what I really want to do? Do I love the idea of teaching or do I just love the idea of being paid to have art as my career in some capacity?
I’ve been following plenty of artists that make their living through YouTube, Patreon, and selling prints & merch of their art. I see what their lives look like as full-time artists working for themselves, and the more I see, the more attractive that particular path is looking. I mean, it’s a lot of work--being your own boss sounds a bit on the stressful side--but it seems so fulfilling at the same time.
I’m very happy with the direction my art has taken in the last couple of years, but I really miss learning new things! I miss being around other artists and creative people with different life experiences. I really miss having a studio space where it was mostly just me there.
SO, here are my things to think about in the coming months:
If I don’t get into the MFA program this year, do I immediately start researching other schools and prepare for another round of applications for the year after? That was my plan up until about a week ago.
If I decide that I want to either wait on the MFA thing or ditch it entirely, what do I do then? I still want to grow as an artist. Some things I could think about would probably be: artist residencies, taking some more community college classes in media that I don’t have experience with, taking online classes, try to get my art out in my own community.
If I do want to make it my new goal to be a full-time working artist, what are the steps I need to take for that? How long should I wait before I try and make that happen? What do I still need to learn/do before making my living through art can be a reality?
I moved to where I’m at now specifically to be near to the college I’m applying to--do I want to stay here or try striking out totally on my own somewhere else? And if so, where?
Being a naturally anxious person, I overthink pretty much everything, so thinking about my future has a lot of “well, if I did this, I also have to think about THIS, so I don’t want to get stuck into THIS, but I may not be able to find a place that allows me to do both of these things at the same time. This is mostly in regards to finding a new living situation down the road. I really REALLY want to live on my own (with a cat, of course). I want to have full control over my space and my life. But then I think--okay, what about doing full-time art. I need somewhere to make art, I need somewhere to film videos, I need somewhere to store finished paintings and projects, so I need “X” amount of space. “X” amount of space in a single-person living situation costs “Y”, so that means I have to be making THIS much every month, so I need to be doing this many hours of art making and I’d need to have this many patrons and regular buyers.
Anyway, it’s a lot. I need to do some hard thinking about what I really want for myself in the near future. Problem is, this is all really dependent on information I won’t get for a few months. I guess I gotta come up with some Plan A, Plan B, and Plan C goodness here.
Ok, the rant’s over. I’m done. Hopefully soon I’ll have some more art for you all. I think I need a bit of a rest first tho :)
Going on a slight tangent from my last text post about portfolio art vs. marketable art:
Just a note to myself: I want to get to a place where I don’t feel the need to monetize every single concept I make. I’d like to sell my art, yes, but I don’t want to JUST sell my art. I want to share it too.
I want to be able to make a thing and not instantly think “Ooh, how could I make this a print, or a sticker, or a coffee mug”
Capitalism has really fucked with my brain to the point where I can’t just create “because” anymore. There has to be a reason for everything, and I think that’s kind of a toxic place for me to stay. It’s stopping me from having fun with my art and enjoying what I create.
“It’s un-American not to want to get something for nothing!” --Frank Burns, M.A.S.H TV show. When I catch myself thinking about the monetization of my every little creation, I think about this. I don’t want to think about money first and everything else second :(
Ok, so I’ve been doing a lot of thinking over the past week about my art, and how many things I think I’d like to do with it. I’m that kind of indecisive person who likes to do too wide a range of things to have a cohesive body of artwork. My art can range from surreal to cartoony and stylized to “basic graphic art”, and I have trouble deciding what to “stick to”, because I enjoy making a wide array of visuals.
I see successful artists online making cool things like stickers and enamel pins, and selling lots of prints and cool merchandise, and I go “I want in on that!” so I focus on those kind of “marketable” artworks. I see artists making seasonal or holiday-related merchandise and I clumsily try to make and sell my own.
The problem with that is that I lose myself down these rabbit holes. I get so focused on the achievement of “success”, whatever that means, that I forget who I’m making art for--me.
At some point in my life (ok, let’s be real, a LOT of points) someone has made it clear to me that I would never be able to make a decent living as an artist. I’d be much better off getting a degree in something useful and marketable--something I can make money off of. And that’s awful because even though I agree that it is difficult to do, it is not impossible. But somehow, that thinking echoed down through my actions as an artist to become a constant, subtle, sneaky background chatter of “gotta make money, gotta make money, what can you make that people will want to BUY?”
This egg sticker design, for example. Based on something I did in school, that people responded positively to! So I made the egg a Thing™. I love the concept and it’s fun, but it feels a little less like “mine” than something like these:
This sneaky “marketing” voice in my head makes me lose sight of what I want to actually DO with my art. And I find that I don’t really have an answer for myself when I ask myself what that is. The problem is: I like both things. I enjoy making fun little illustrations like the egg, that are quick and simple and easy to offer up to people to buy.
So, I guess my dilemma is how to do both. How do I reconcile both styles? How to make the art that I want, and make art that will sell, and to keep these things separate. I know that a lot of my “me” art could potentially be sellable, but the problem lies in how easy it is to mass produce (on my own small scale), and my more complicated paintings are harder to do that with than the stuff I doodle in Procreate.
My next hurdle is how to have an online presence for both of these types of art. I already have a professional website, but it’s doubling as a store for a lot of my market-y art too. It’s too expensive to run two business websites through Squarespace (where I have my site and domain), but I don’t want to use this expensive site as just a portfolio either. I have to weigh the cost of keeping the site with how much it can make for me, and try to figure out what to do on that front. I’ve considered things like Redbubble, but every artist I’ve seen who talks about third-party sites like that says they’re not really worth it to keep up with, since you only get a small portion of sales.
I don’t want to lose myself completely to become a “for the money” kind of person, but I want to be able to support myself in part with my art.
If anybody out there has any advice for me, I will take it eagerly.
