I wanted to see how other artists had helped promote themselves so I looked into two illustrators/artists who had gone about it successfully. I first looked at Miss led's facebook where I found she was using facebook to help showcase her upcoming work and other things she had worked on. Firstly she post a lot of her actually making or with her work giving a face to the name, I like this idea it feels a bit more relaxed while keeping it professional. I also found after getting a lot of followers she runs competitions where you share her page, this not only promotes her more but involves her followers keeping them more active. The competition is also to meet her and ask for her help on being professional, this is a good idea to meet other artists and make contacts. She also runs workshops at a college where she helps aspiring artists, this is good to help promote you'd just need a facility to do it in. Another thing I liked was she posted about fellow artists who also did the same for her, this helps you reach audiences that might not have found you before. Miss led has also been featured in magazines and had one of images made the tumblr home page.
The other person I looked at was Peter Slight, he has promoted himself a lot my doing pop up exhibitions in galleries and museums around the Uk such as; Northampton and Gloucester. He also entered competitions local and far, like the Worthing tourist board design a postcard competition. He has also run workshops on paper craft and how to make it.
After going over this I think I need to come up with cleaver ways to promote myself, like making contacts and sharing each others work and running and entering competitions to keep my viewers interested and involved.
Another problem I have come across is the access to a laser cutter once I have finished university, as I will no longer be based in Cheltenham. This means reproducing my work could be a problem if I can only do it when I can get down to Cheltenham. I will be living near Birmingham though and from some research found a few companies that will laser cut your work if you send it them, http://www.lasercutit.co.uk/. But this could be a costly service so I looked at what other artist and illustrator that use a paper medium, and I found a rather successful illustrator Rob Ryan. He replicates his work by scanning and then applying them to other mediums making his work more marketable. He puts his work onto home items like mugs and clocks but also dose greeting cards, I feel I need to consider this as an option so not to limit how I reproduce my work. I think this is a good market to look into as the images can be decorative or narrative and would work nice as a side market I do work for to break up creating children's books and comics. This would also offers a small income that would help combat the cost I will come across when creating the paper illustrations for my children's books. Another thing about printing home items would be that I would be offering work to such a larger audience, helping promote my name and making it more recognisable when I publish books. I also wouldn't have to print the items myself if I didn't want to I could use an on demand printing serves that would sell my work for me while I worked on other projects. The only problem with using these kind of sites is they will take a cut of the sale as they print the items and ship it and I wont see what the items look like unless I order one, so this could have its set backs and would take a lot of consideration into which is better. At the moment I think using one of these sites would good especially because I will working on children's books and comics along side this, so having time to self print the items wouldn't be ideal. So the commission price they take wouldn't be such an issue because it would save me time that I could put elsewhere.
Sites I could use: society6
etsy
zazzle
I like the look of Society 6 but will need to see where my work is most suited once I create the images to go on the products.
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