This guy is one of my new favourites – but he’s been big shit around town for way longer than that.

Oooooh… and I like it. And here’s the History of Rap poster in all it’s awesome mcawesomeness:

©Kagan McLeod

Sometime last year my cousin started selling health supplements. What ensued were a dozen Facebook messages and an inbox filled with unwanted emails about the wonders of product X and how it would change my life.

“Shit” I thought, “I’m getting spammed by my family…”

What he’d done was just blast everyone in his address book and all his friends on Facebook.

The emails have since stopped, so I guess someone finally told him:

…hey Buddy, That’s Not Your List

Damn straight.


Your address book is not your list.

Your Facebook friends are not your list.

Your Twitter and Tumblr followers are not your list.

Your deviantArt watchers are not your list.

The thousand people that have you in their circles on Google + are not your list.

The people you meet in real life who give you their business cards?… Not your list.

If you don’t have an email address AND the express permission to contact – you do NOT have a list.

Opt-in (permission) + contact email = PRECIOUS GOLD (aka your list)

 Next week, I’ll show you what you can do with all the rest of the contacts in your address book. (but they’re still not your list.)


Sign up here for my mailing list.<--- permission
(see what I did there?)

On it’s own, this is a blip on the promotional radar – but it’s a start. It’s a beginning to reaching out beyond your current networks and showing your work in new and interesting situations.

Patti has a substantial following and there is the potential for many eyes on your art work. Combine this with other small, incremental promotional opportunities, and you’ll begin building some momentum and link juice.

Small, cumulative moves is the way to promotional strength.

What can you do to make your booth more visible? more visually engaging and look more attractive to buyers?

Cut through the clutter and get more attention at your booth or table at the convention or art show.

Video Art A&A #24

Lately artists have been going berserk over Pinterest.

I have to admit, I’m on the wagon and pinning the crap out of everything.

It’s GREAT… and inspiring and fun and easy. I lurv it.
Lurv, lurv, lurv…

However.

There are issues.
(caveat – there are issues in early March as I write this… now it’s May, maybe issues are resolved… or Pinterest is no longer…)

Anyways…

Firstly – Pinterest… WTF?

Okay, Pinterest describes itself as an online pinboard… Really?

BORING.

What Pinterest is…
is an online playground of colour and images that are a breeze to organize and share and find later!!

Here’s a look at my boards:

I’ve organized my boards into stuff that I’m interested in. I’ve got my own art up on a couple boards…

Here are the boards of Lori McNee – the fine art social powerhouse:

Same thing here – Lori’s organized her boards into topics she’s interested to collect images about, she’s got a board of her own art and anyone can ‘pin’ these images to their own boards.

The really funsies part of this site is how easy it is to aggregate gobs and gobs of beautiful, inspiring art and photography and have them easily findable again. All the awesome art you can find and re-pin, all on one board, at your finger tips…

…aaaaaaahhhhhh…. (collective artist sigh – I heard you)

The Problem… darn it

So, it’s not all love fest on Pinterest. There’s copyright whojit-whatsit-cornholios in the Terms of Service.

I’m not a lawyer, I don’t want to get into it. I get it, but I don’t care… not really. You go read if you want:

Lori McNee presents a balanced view on her blog, Fine Art Tips.

Kirsten Kowalski is a lawyer and tearfully deletes all her boards.

Alyson Stanfield talks about it on her Art Biz Blog and basically has the same view on the situation as I do.

Pinterest offers you as an artist another (free) venue online to show and share your art. I will continue to put my work up to be shared and pinned by anyone that wants to. I’m happy to think that my illustrations inspire another artist. I’m glad that I’m being inspired by the incredible art that I see being pinned.

In regards to pinning the art of others, I’ve decided that I will only pin off the internet if the owner of the site has a share button for Pinterest on their site. That seems like an okay to share from my point of view, and that will be my barometer.

I’m not a lawyer – I’m not giving legal Pinterest advice. I’m just sharing what my plan is from here on.

(notice that I have Pinterest pins on my site…) Anyhooo… onwards.

Fancy (bitches)

Fancy is upscale, techy Pinterest. With a less intuitive interface and annoying “I’ll make a category for you – that you’ll just have to delete anyway” function. Fuck you Fancy.

It’s pretty cool, but I feel like the loser at the party with the rich kids. It’s very high-end gadgets and vacation destinations and starvation-thin models in designer clothes being bored with their excess.

But pretty pictures. Here’s my “catalogue”:

Great… there’s a ranking system on Fancy. I’m a 10. Out of what?

…100.

Awww, geeeeez….

Easy peasy.

Acrylic Videos

Cynthia and I at FanExpo with our overly crowded hive of images.

• payment methods
• display options
• give aways
• mailing lists
• and more!
• (25 minutes more! holy hell)

*******edit*******

I just saw this today: Paypal Credit Card Readers for Smartphones!!

I don’t think it’s released yet – but it’s coming, and it’s the BEES KNEES at an outdoor art show or comic con. Woo!






Download the Exhibitors Checklist. [right-click for 'save link as']

The Video Podcast Version:

Photos of Stuff Mentioned in the Podcast:

These are the grids used at FanExpo. Cynthia and I did a test run in the back of the store to see what-what.

I bought more grids – next time, not so cluttered.







The purple one is the rollie bag luggage I used to cart around my merch for the Chicago Wizard World show. It works spectacularly.













This is Sarah Martinez (and Kevin Bolk – shown in cartoon only) from Interrobang Studios at the Chicago Wizard World show.

Sarah and Kevin have a pretty awesome display set-up that gets a lot of attention: bright, beautiful colours and illoz, up super high (you can see it from 2 aisles away – great for finding your way back to the table after a bathroom run). Sarah’s learned a thing or two from her years and years of conventioning with Kev.

Then I bought her book.

Children are not allowed to touch it.

Awesome… right?

Over the next few posts, I’m going to share with you some of the free services I use regularly for business.

Today – Hootsuite and Buffer App, two Twitter apps that will make me cry if they ever go away.

Hootsuite, The Hard-Ass

Personally, I think someone screwed up.

There’s no way that the people at Hoosuite WANTED to give away all that functionality FOR FREE.

Nope. Someone fucked-up, someone got fired.

It’s the only thing that makes any sense, because Hootsuite is AMAZING. And it’s FREE.

Here’s all the awesome free stuff that Hootsuite does:

• Add pretty much unlimited social networks… (I don’t actually know if it’s unlimited – but it’s A LOT). Such as….
• multiple Twitter profiles
• Facebook profiles AND pages
• LinkedIn
• Tumblr… others that I don’t use. AND you can post and interact with all of them from Hootsuite. Wow.
• Add “streams” to organize lists and groups and stuff you’re searching.

You can create a:

• home feed
• sent
• mentions
• direct messages
• inbox and
• outbox “streams” to view all the tweets coming down the pipe separately.
• You can import all the lists you’ve created on Twitter and view your follows that way.
• You can create search term streams, or key word streams to keep track of it all.

• Hootsuite allows 7 streams across, but you can add as many tabbed pages of streams as you want. It’s really limitless.

Here’s a screenshot of my set up:

Hootsuite can also:

• Schedule tweets in their publisher section.

I’d waffled between Hootsuite and Tweetdeck for awhile… but Tweetdeck didn’t have the schedule tweets functionality that I really wanted. (they may have it now – I stopped caring what Tweetdeck was doing when I decided on Hootsuite)

I create all my standard posts 2 months in advance; blog posts, videos, podcasts, images… most all of the ‘foundation’ stuff is organized, planned and created 2 months in advance.

I wanted to be able to schedule all that to publish on a timely basis and Hootsuite has that.

This is my publisher page and everything that’s all cued up and ready to go:

You can schedule the day, time, links and images and determine what social networks Hootsuite will publish to. It’ll also give you free ow.ly click stats. It’s pretty ballsy.
That’s why Hootsuite is the Hard Ass. 

Buffer App, The Hippie

Buffer’s been around for over a year, but I noticed it on Twitter a few weeks ago and checked it out.

Essentially, the idea is that Buffer is a tweet scheduler – you determine when and to what networks you want your tweets to publish and Buffer will shoot them out at those times until the ‘buffer’ is empty. (Get it… huh? Huh? Buffer… get it?). Right.

The free service only allows 2 networks to be added, and a buffer of 20 tweets (10 per network). The paid service seemed a bit pricey to me ($10) for 50 tweets and unlimited social networks… so once again, free rules.

Here’s my schedule all ready to go with both my Twitter and my Facebook hooked-up:

And here’s the scheduler page so you can see how it’s all set up:

There’s a wee applet to put on your bookmarks bar that’ll you can click to add links to your Buffer as you wing your way about teh interwebz.

I use it a bit differently… (though I’m sure it’s nothing ground-breaking).

I Have a Conversation… (derp)

I use Buffer very simply… and to good effect. I talk about a subject that I’m thinking about at any particular time (mostly art or art related). I schedule small tips or observations or encouragements about art and let them tweet out over a couple days.

They’ve been some of the most commented upon and retweeted of anything I’ve ever published. It’s fun for me to sit and reflect for awhile on a topic and then throw out my ideas for others to share (or ignore, you know, whatever). I enjoy a dialogue, so I don’t hesitate to post polarizing ideas.

The method of broadcasting is one that I really enjoy… it’s soft and a bit hippie and it’s really simple to set up the schedule times, plug-in my thoughts and let it go.

What social platforms do you like to use? Why do you think they resonate with you?  

This is a subject that motivates me the most in the world. This is essentially the core of what I think is most important in life this is what I think life is about.

It’s your Art and your, OUR creative participation in life. This is for me, core and foundation and fundamental to life, well being and purpose.

Joseph Campbell Again

Joseph Campbell is one of my favorite people in the entire world – he died in the 80s, but he is just such a fantastic mind and he never ceases to amaze me – even still going on and on forever. He probably always will amaze me.

He was a professor of comparative religion at Sarah Lawrence College. He is the author of a tonne of books; Hero with 1000 Faces, Masks of God, the Power of Myth – that is an interview series he did with Bill Moyer that you can find video for as well. He wrote about comparative religion and mythology and he basically wrote about the stories of being human in the world. Campbell admitted that he wrote specifically for artists and that included all the creative arts writing poetry dance acting directing whatever… he was writing for the creatives. Everyone else could take it or leave it, he didn’t care but he was writing for artists because he believed in the purpose of art.

George Lucas wrote Star Wars based upon the ideas that Campbell wrote in his book called the Hero with a Thousand Faces which is essentially the symbolic quest that we all go through as we move from childhood into adulthood. That is the basis of Star Wars… the fourth fifth and sixth episodes we won’t talk about the first three…

***Edit – I speak of The Hero’s Journey and A Hero with a Thousand Faces as 2 separate writings, but the Hero’s Journey is written about IN a Hero with a Thousand Faces. My bad. Sorry.***

Okay in the hero’s journey Campbell writes, “The role of the artist I now understand is that of revealing it to world surfaces the implicit forms” …oops, sorry… let me start again.

“The role of the artist I now understand is that of revealing through the world-surfaces the implicit forms of the soul and the great agent to assist the artist was the myth. It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Myths are the world’s dreams. They are archetypal dreams and deal with great human problems. Myths and dreams come from the same place. They come from realizations of some kind that then have to find expression in symbolic form. A real artist is the one who has learned to recognize and to render the radiance of all things as an epiphany or showing forth of the truth.”

I love this guy I really do. He’s just so fantastic. He believed that artists communicate myth today. They are the shamans and the seers of our world. Artists communicate to us where we are, and where we are going, and how we’re doing in the world. Artist’s take the untouchable and they open it and they immerse us in that untouchable field with an ability to understand and connect. Artists connect us with the unseen, the intangible, the underlying patterns of creation.

Creating Art that Speaks

Like Prometheus, artists go down into the dark and comes back with fire for humanity again and again – that’s what artists do. Artists provide the fuel for the evolution of our species. This is difficult and valuable work and requires bravery. Creating art that speaks is not for the faint of heart at all. It’s not always a sense of making pretty pictures, I mean that is part of it for some people but that’s not the driving force for arts in the creative world.

tuli nishimura / Foter

My business coach asked me once why I like working with artists, why it was so important to me?  I responded by saying there were far less douche bags in the art world than there are other areas of life. Oh, there are still jerks, there are ego issues and pissing wars and competition and ambition, but on the whole it takes a different kind of person to go deep and be vulnerable and bring that out to share with the world. I don’t believe you can share your deep personal interior landscape with the public and continue to be a douche bag. You can try, but you’ll likely produce crappy art and you’ll move on to something else.

The act of making authentically connected and resonant art requires a type of person that I love being around. There’s no room for shallow BS with these people and I love it.

Dance with Pants Off

Making this kind of art requires bravery courage and a strength of purpose.

/ Foter

I know. I’m an artist who’s been putting my art out into the world on a regular basis for years. It’s been an an exposing activity. It’s very vulnerable to put your interior visions and work on public display. It’s like taking your pants down in public and encouraging everyone to come around and criticize and take potshots at your ass.

But please be brave, we need you.

If you have something to say, if you have something to share – be brave enough to share it.

We need all the voices speaking of that interior reality, of bringing to form those hidden truths.

We need your inspiration and your connection and the beauty that you can create.

We need your vision.

We need you to be brave and persevere even in the face of rejection and ambivalence because it’ll probably take us a while to get what you’re saying.

It’ll take us a while to get it.

We need you to be passionate about your vision and believe in your message.

We need you to connect us to one another. To connect us with a bigger reality than our own stupid tiny little lives.

We need you to show us how to get to the next step and how we get there together.

We need your artistry. We need your vision we need you to show us what you see.

We need you to be strong and brave and persevere because what you’re doing is important and vital and necessary.

Be brave my artists because your art is so f***ing important.

Okay, that’s all I got right now, ‘cuz I’m gonna go cry.

Your Own Personal Lurker Bot

Google Analytics is a little bit of code that you put into the header of your website. From there it’ll peep on all your visitors and bring you back pots and pots of gold… in the form of demographics and info about your site visitors:

• location – Bulgaria is in my top 5 visitor location sources… that was unexpected.
• total visits
• average time on site
• average pages per visit
• bounce rate
• duration of visit – my numbers are large at the top and bottom of this list… if my site isn’t what you’re looking for, you bounce pretty quickly… however, if you start looking around I’ve generally got you on my site for over half and hour (who’s caught up in the comic archives?)
• browser OS of visitors
• Visitors Flow – which I’ve never looked at too closely until tonight. It’s a fucking FLOW CHART of how every visitor from different regions flows through your site; what pages they look at, where they go, where they tend to drop off. Holy crap. You have got to get this if only for the cool.
• traffic sources
• keyword search results – sadly “accidental cleavage” is one of my top 3 keyword referrals. :c
• pages – most viewed and where the bounce rate is highest…

…and that’s only a bit of what’s available. There’s no way you can get these kind of metrics on a site that’s not self-hosted. This stuff is gold if you’re looking to grow your business.

Knowing is More Than Half the Battle

You want and need to know what is most interesting to your viewers – because it may not be what you think it is. You want to know how your visitors are navigating through your site – these metrics can help you test different layouts and headers and content to try and guide visitors to where you’d like them to go while they’re on your site.

You can’t make any changes if you don’t know. Google Analytics gives you knowing on about 80 different levels.

(another top 5 post visit that was a total surprise)

Next week – what to do with them when you’ve got ‘em – your email list.

Click the image for more detail.

Check out the Library for more art demo videos.

Download the first part of a 7 part Marketing Lab Foundations Mini Course.  Spend some time connecting with the core of your art business and answer the why, what, who and how of your most successful art business.

Return your completed pdf’s for a chance to work with me, one on one in a free half hour Rock Solid Core phone consult.

CasualCapture / Foter

Today I’d like to talk about testing your marketing. This is probably the most important thing that you can do in your marketing plan aside from having a plan to begin with. It’s often overlooked because frankly, it’s not the most glamorous part of the job – by no means. All the action jobs gets all the attention and the flash and the broadcasting thats, you know, the fun part.

But if you don’t know what’s happening with your marketing and where you’re getting the most hits and what’s working versus what’s not working, you’re never going to be able to really utilize the tools that you’ve got at your hands… at your hands? At your disposal.

Feedback is Key

ul_Marga / Foter

So for example, (and I talked about this on the blog early in the month and I’m kind of replicating information but I wanted it to be on the podcast as well is because it’s really important). It’s really necessary for you to have some sort of analytics tracking analytics tracking on your website. There is  Woopra, W O O P R A, that you can install on your website – it’s also available for your WordPress as a plug-in. That it has real-time analytics happening where you can see who’s on your site and where they’re going and what they’re doing. It’s  pretty crazy but it’s great if you have a lot of people coming to your site or you’ve just published a launch and you want to see where people are going and if your funnel is working – if people are clicking where you want them to click and going to the page you want them to look at.

Are they looking at your art or you know following the “trail of breadcrumbs” you want them to follow to learn about what you’d doing and what you’re selling or your event that you have and posting or showing your art? You need to have a way of tracking all this stuff and unfortunately social media by and large has almost 0 tracking built-in.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is one of the few that I know of that actually tracks clicks if you shorten your URLs with their ow.ly shortener. So you can open Hootsuite on your browser and shorten all your URLs, all your links with their shortener and it will track the clicks for you. But that’s it, pretty much. Well it does tell you where they’re coming from like if you publish your tweets from Twitter and Hootsuite and Facebook and LinkedIn, it’ll show you where the majority of your clicks are coming from. It’ll show you how many clicks happen on each of those platforms so it’s pretty useful. It can help you with open rates and when to publish.

We’re Global Now

ecstaticist / Foter

You need to test your tweets for times of day because people from all over the world are reading your tweets and you may want to publish more than once a day so the same information hits both sides of the pond, on both sides of the world really. Test your open rates by testing a rotating schedule.

What I do when I’m a pre-publishing (or saving to publish because Hootsuite has this great publisher stream where you can save tweets in advance). You can schedule tweets up the 50 tweets I believe, it could be more… but I will have a rotating timetable where I’ll:

• publish the tweets an hour differently each day

and that’s to test what open rates are better on what days, at what times, and you have to do this over several months – especially if your audience is small. Mine is not huge, but there is an audience and I do have feedback and that’s good.

If your audience is giant sized and you’ve got 50,000 followers or even 20,000 followers you’ll see really quickly where you getting the biggest amounts of hits. But if you don’t have that many follower,s you need to test for longer periods of time.

Google! Google! Google!

Another great key is Google Analytics. It is free. It is awesome and it is the biggest provider of all kinds of information that you want for your blog. So it is imperative if you have a website (you should have a website but we’ll talk about that later), for you to install the little bit of code that Google Analytics provides you install it in your header.

It will track all the movements on your site where the traffic’s coming from, where it’s going on your site, where people are leaving your site, how long they stay, what keywords are bringing people to your site… This stuff is so important I can’t even get over it. I’ll write about Google analytics later -  much more in depth because I’m just scratching the surface of it and the more I dig, the more amazing it is. You can really get really clear and drill down on a lot of information about who’s coming, and what they’re looking at, and what they’re interested in.

I have the craziest keywords that are bringing people to my site. Like sadly, accidental cleavage is one of them. It’s one of my top three, but everyone’s on the Internet looking for porn right? So now they get a comic convention instead – ha. ha.

Kred and Klout

Anyway so there’s other aspects that can help you a little bit there’s Kred and Klout. I am I’m still out on the fence about how useful they are. Generally, what they measure is your so-called influence and they give you your true reach – they let you know who you are influencing in your network and how many people you’re actually connecting to with your tweets.

What I find is most interesting about it is they give you a breakdown of whether you are retweeting other people or whether you’re bringing out new and leader-worthy content. I think that is worthwhile because it will be important depending on what your goals are. If you’re publishing because you want to be a thought leader, you want to be an authority in your niche, you need to be creating the content and not just retweeting and sharing other people’s content. So it can give you a good indication based on what tweets you’re pushing, whether you’re what role you have in social media.

So this is getting really really long – it took a lot more time to talk about this than I thought and I had way more points than this that I’m just not getting it to. I’ll have to come back to this. I want to talk to you about how to test your e-mail list and how to..I guess that’s enough -  how to test your email list.

Okay, so thanks a lot and I will talk to guys next week.

If you have questions please leave them on the blog I would love to answer your questions and the website is lezleydavidson.com or Peeling-Onions.com it’s the same place. Two addresses, same place. Click on the podcast tab in the menubar and you can leave a question. You can e-mail me too at lezley@lezleydavidson.com.

Okay, so thanks a lot for listening and I will talk to guys next week.

Beautiful use of wood grain. This is a style copied by many.

It’s great if you have a heavy web presence and you’re active on all kinds of social media networks, making friends and sharing valuable art information…

But if that’s all you’re doing, you’re leaving a lot of internet mojo on the table.

The golden nugget truth is that… your website should always be the primary publishing source for new art, news, events, promotions, sales and all things related to your art business.

And I don’t mean ‘oh, I’ve got a Facebook page, or a Tumblr… or I’m on deviantART.

THAT. IS. BALLSACK.

You don’t have control over those sites. Your content is uploaded to servers that you don’t control or have access to. Free services can go out of business, close for no reason, change format, change direction, limit your services, block or delete your account… These do not make for good platforms on which to base a business.

You need a website over which you have full control. Made from scratch or wordpress.org self-hosted types are the best choices. The key is ‘self-hosted’. You control your content upload, you can access and back up your content.

If your service provider goes out of business, you can just get a new host and upload your website to the new server provider. Certainly a pain in the ass, but well worth it when compared to the alternative.

The Horror

Imagine for a moment that you’ve been publishing images to your Facebook page or your Tumblr for the last 2 years. You’ll throw up a blog post every couple weeks or so and talk about whatever is currently turning your crank in the art world. Maybe a new artist, a technique or process or maybe it’s events that you’re attending. You didn’t know you were doing it – but you’ve become a pretty fair content marketer. Good for you.

You’ve been engaging, people like you, they like your work, they share your content, comment, come see you in the real world, buy your stuff and you’ve done a healthy amount of commissions that you mail out all over the world (yay Internet!).

You’ve got several hundred people subscribed to your page and interested in what you’re doing…

Then your Facebook page suddenly gets hijacked and used by spammers – poof!

No more page, no more content, no more web presence. This has personally happened to 2 people I know. Facebook can also decide to block you, limit your subscribers or just delete your page due to infringement issues that you had no idea about. Seriously.

This is the risk that you take on any site that you do not host yourself.

All of the work and the content is just gone. And you have to start again from scratch.

You can still get hacked on your own hosted site, but at least that way you’ve still got all your content and your wordpress indexing, theme and formatting.

Free Sites Limit Access to Your Audience

A free site like Tumblr or Facebook severely limits your access to your awesome audience. You’re dependent upon your readers maybe seeing your post in the news feed. Or they need to be motivated enough to choose to visit your page again and again.

A free site doesn’t allow you to gather any information about your viewers at all. You don’t have access to them outside of the free site, you don’t have any idea what they’re interested in when they are on your page and you have no way of contacting them on your own.

All of these capabilities are integral for your art business to grow.

Next up is Google Analytics – the secret lurker on your website.

(and we love it)

Today I’ve got an art question from Surit in Toronto and Surit asks:

“I wanted a really thick texture and I’m using molding paste with acrylics but it keeps cracking? What I do to fix the cracks?”

Molding paste is awesome… I am going to be doing a variety of videos through March and April showing all the acrylic mediums I can get my hands on including modeling paste. Now the only modeling paste I’ve ever come across the cracks is by Liquitex. And I’m sorry to call them out but I hate their modeling paste.

Liquitex vs. Tri-Art vs. Golden

I’ve used it extensively or rather I used modeling pastes extensively – I tried Liquitex once and when you try and use their modeling paste thick it does crack because it is very chalky and it is almost identical to drywall compound and its very very heavy. It’s like putting concrete on your canvas.

It’s a nice surface it’s really a little abrasive so it takes the paint really nicely but it is terrible except in small quantities. So what I’d recommend Surit is that you use a different molding paste, ‘cuz molding paste is a great way to get really really thick texture.

Use one by Tri-Art or Golden. They are very light, they’re polymer-based as opposed to whatever is in Liquitex that makes it feel like drywall compound but they they hold their peaks.Tri-Art has a little bit of a weird surface it’s very very polymer rich so it tends to have a little bit of a glossy surface which initially can make really thin glazes difficult to stick so just make sure that your glaze has some polymer medium in it to make sure that it sticks if it’s a problem.

Sso that’s what I’ve moved to, I use the tri-Art and the Golden which work great. If you want super super thick texture you may have to do double applications of the molding paste – put it on then let it dry and then put a it on over top. I’ve always use molding paste as a surface texture and I put it down before I paint. You can mix it with the paint but there’s a lot of whiting in it which turns your paint pretty much pastel, which I find offensive so I don’t do it.

It’s very opaque, very white and right this is another thing – molding paste is better used on a firm supports. I will never use molding paste on a canvas above about 18 x 18 possibly 24 x 24. Molding paste will crack on a flexible surface, so that’s a drag -  but you can get around that by using a canvas panel or a wooden support.

Solid Supports

Solid supports are like plywoods that are braced with frames behind them. They’re becoming very very popular and they’re not that expensive – they’re about a little bit more expensive than a stretched canvas of the same size. You can also make them yourself  if you’re handy by going to you know, Rona or Home Depot or whatever and getting plywood and making your own bracing on the back.

I am not handy so that I would never do that.

Matte & Gloss Gel

You can also use heavy body gels or superheavy body gels to get your texture. They dry translucent or transparent. If you’re buying gels and you want them to be completely transparent get gloss, gloss dries completely transparent. Matte gels depending on how thick they are will dry translucent or like frosted. Okay so that’s good to know depending on what your goals are.

Cheap?

Now if you are wanting something cheap and you’re using a big support and you don’t care about a little bit of cracking, use the Liquitex molding medium molding paste or actually go to the hardware store and buy drywall compound. It works really well. I textured my walls in my house and I started off using molding paste.I realized that it would cost me $1 million to texture the living room the way I wanted to with molding paste, so I went and bought drywall compound and

Ta Dah!

…big giant gallon for like five bucks!

Iit was awesome and I textured my walls, painted and glazed over them and they look beautiful… so yeah that’s what you can do for texture.

Hhope it helps please send your questions to the website head over to lezleydavidson.com or Peeling-Onions.com they’ll lead you to the same place click on the podcast tab and give me a question I’d love to help out. Okay thanks a lot I will see you guys next week

They may have been ‘in the game’ for years, but their pearls of wisdom are coated in bile.
If you recognize any of these characteristics, smile and exit – quickly.

Handy Jaded Artist Checklist:

• every good word towards an artist or show quickly degenerates into what sucks or how it “should” be different.
• “should” shows up a lot with this artist – they feel that there’s a lot that is wrong in the art world
• they will never follow up a “should” with offers to help or a plan to change it
  
  

• they will say derisive things about other artists – especially the ones who are doing well, or in the public eye. The successful have invariably “sold out” or “lost their edge.”
• this will result in a tirade about the blindness and hypocrisy of the art world and the stupidity of the public at large
  
  

• their work has not changed or evolved in years – but they blame everyone else for “not getting” what they’re doing
• they haven’t shown in years
• dismissive scorn appears in response to any mention of the marketing and promotion strategies you are trying
• they have “done it all” and it “never works”
  
  

• they blame individuals, galleries, or ‘society’ for the current state of their art career

These artists may be sweet and charming people, but beware the jaded, bitterness – run away!!

You want to cultivate nourishing, nurturing encouragement and grounded, solid advice from people who want to see you succeed, not add you to the reasons why the art world is doomed to fail.

Do you have any other ways to identify the bitter artist? Please add them to the comments – thanks!

This is key – ‘cuz we can’t always get feedback from trusted artists, so exercising our own critical eye is essential.

This will help.