About Making Art That Sells...

It's been a while since I last stepped into blog land and that is because I have been so very busy with work & life... Everything I do is always about finding balance and from all the things I juggle I sometimes have to drop a whole lot of them to focus on the two that are most important: My beautiful family & my work. Over the years I have learned that doing my work, spending time with my sketchbook and behind my computer, is vital to the well being of my family. But after my busiest ever run up to Christmas I had to take some time to re-evaluate. What is it that I want to do? And at what cost?

I love working on my line of products that I sell in my Not On The High Street Shop. I love getting prints ready and packing up orders. I have been so blessed to be part of that platform and I have been able to grow my prints into a proper little brand. Hooray! But how do you go from there? To infinity and beyond? Nope, sorry. I need to be back in the school playground at 3.15 to pick up little Miss Mouse and her handsome big brother. I need to listen to their stories, their bickering and their chatter, I need to help with homework and cook their supper.

So I decided to take a different direction, whilst still selling my work (which has calmed down a bit after Christmas.. phew..), and so I joined the wonderful people at A Fresh Bunch (an agency where you can buy & license art from a global bunch of designers) in the States. So I can just make things, and send them off, and leave the selling to someone else all together. I have loved it so far. I have made a lot of new work (that I can't share) and I have learned so much in the last few weeks. And come next Christmas I will have to get myself an assistant to help in the studio with all the orders, but until then I will hopefully be able to stay on top of it all myself.

I also joined Lilla Rogers who knows like nobody else about Making Art That Sells, in her Bootcamp course which gives you a different assignment every month, with little golden nuggets of information here and there, to build portfolio pieces. I just finished the first assignment which was to make a phone cover with the Cuckoo's clock as a theme. I saw so many cuckoo's clocks passing by in our little facebook community that I had to push it into a bit of a different direction. And so I started with sketching gingerbread clocks, and then just went for the little gingerbread man. (Whenever I need to get the kids up the hill to school in the morning, which sometimes makes me feel like I am a shepherd, I still use the gingerbread man... Run! Run! As fast as you can! You can't catch me... I'm the gingerbread man!!)

And then there are some new bits in the shop. I won't bore you with it.. Just pop over and have a look. This one is a new favorite on our table...