Holiday fair preparation & collection release
Preparation for this upcoming holiday fair season is well underway. I’m also releasing the six ocean waves paintings, which I’ve called “The Thought Collection”, on my website for sale this Friday. I feel pretty ahead of schedule in terms of getting ready for the holiday season and I’m looking forward to the first holiday fair on Friday, November 25th in Santa Cruz.
What I’m working on
I think my booth setup is complete. For 10’x10’ spaces I have three tables, which I will be placing my pegboard displays on to display prints and cards. I finished building out the pegboards and shelves, but I forgot to take a picture.
I reviewed and approved of the photographs and prints of the “Thought Collection”, so prints are being made of those six paintings in two sizes, 12”x16” and 5”x7”, and those will be available at the holiday fairs and on my website.
Since I approved of the photographs of the “Thought Collection” paintings, I was able to take the original paintings home. I titled and signed each of the paintings and installed wire hanging on the back, so they are ready to hang. I also picked up the custom boxes I had made for them for shipping, so I have everything I need to ship them once my collection is released on Friday. The six paintings will be going live on my website on November 11th at 3pm PT. If you’re interested in a piece, definitely leave a comment or send me an email!
I started sketching out the tidal pool creatures for the new “botanical” watercolor painting that I’m working on. This one is a little bit more difficult for me because I haven’t sketched many crabs or sea anemones before, but the challenge is fun.
I finished painting the remaining coasters I had and I just resined the last batch of coasters this morning. I have accepted that I don’t really enjoy any part of the process of making the coasters, so I think this will be the last time I make these for the foreseeable future.
I also painted 5”x5” alcohol ink paintings on yupo paper that I framed in square matted frames that I plan on selling at the holiday fairs. I think they turned out nicely and something I probably will continue to do in the future. Unlike the alcohol ink coasters, they’re much less time consuming and it feels like something new, so it’s more enjoyable.
Inputs
I started to listen to podcasts again and I’m catching up on episodes of “No Stupid Questions” hosted by Stephen J. Dubner and Angela Duckworth in no particular order. I just listened to the episode about Seasonal Affect Disorder and was reminded that I should probably go outside more and take more walks.
Outings
I went on a hike this past weekend, which was quite challenging, but I greatly enjoyed it. I think I had gotten used to hiking and walking around from visiting Joshua Tree and I felt like I needed to go on a hike, or at least a more strenuous walk, again.
I’ve been quite busy with getting ready for my collection release and holiday art fairs that I haven’t been thinking about going out and doing much. I also know that I’ll be out and busy every weekend starting November 25th until December 24th, so to avoid burnout, I’ve been preferring to stay at home and do lower energy activities. Something else that I’ve been thinking about, thanks to James Clear’s 3-2-1 Thursday newsletter, is productivity. Specifically, one of his ideas in the past newsletter was:
"Your net productivity is the balance of the productive and unproductive forces in your life.
A great deal of time and energy is spent thinking about how to increase effort, but there is a lot to be gained by reducing friction.
A car will travel faster not only if you press the accelerator, but also if you remove the speed bumps."
I felt like this quote came at a good time for me because I was feeling a lull in productivity during the later half of last week.I felt unmotivated to work on my coasters (which I generally feel unfulfilled by), but because I had made working on my coasters one of my projects for the week, I felt blocked to do anything else. I kept unsuccessfully thinking of ways to motivate myself to do more (i.e. increase effort), but this quote helped me reframe the problem solving thinking to how to reduce friction. So I did things like buy oil paint pens to speed up the painting process of the edges and batch as many coasters to resin at once by finding creative ways to cover them (I’m limited by how many coasters I can cover to protect them from dust while the resin sets). These are small things, but I think it’s useful to remind myself to find ways to make things easier and more enjoyable and sometimes to let go of things that are not enjoyable.
