The Holiday Zone

There is a signpost ahead....your next stop....The Holiday Zone! It's that crazy time between Christmas and New years again. It is the Twilight Zone for self-employed artists like me. No one wants to buy art right now, no one wants to take art lessons, and my part-time cleaning job doesn't start until January 4th. I am in search of a "normal schedule." So I have been concentrating on two things: Marketing and advertising my art for 2008, and getting rid of paper clutter and reorganizing. I reorganized and cleaned out two drawers worth of stuff in my art files drawers. This was a much needed task because the last time I did anything like this was in 1996! You should have seen all the junk that I tossed out! There is something about getting organized and cleaning out files that gives me the hope (or illustion?) that I may have a successful year in 2008!

It is always a challenge to financially plan for this dead zone/twilight zone time, but I think I have done pretty good this year. I managed to save up enough money to take advantage of some really great after Christmas sales on the 26th. However, next year I am going to be even better prepared because I'm going to set up a Christmas Club account in January. I recently read something that describes how I sometimes feel as a self-employed artist. "This job is only a test. Had it been an actual job you would have received bonuses, raises and promotions..."

I got a really cool gift from my husband for Christmas! It is a book called "How to Survive and Prosper as an Artist" by Caroll Michels. I started reading it and it is much better than other books I've read on this subject. The author use to be a self-employed artist herself. It is exactly what I need right now. I am going through it chapter by chapter and implimenting everything the author recommends. Let's hope this brings some positive results in 2008!

Now that Christmas-related projects are over and done with (except putting away the Christmas decorations) I have resumed work on art projects. My latest project is an illustration for the last poem in my family poetry book, "Measure of Man." This illustration has a bit of a "castles and knights" theme to it because it illustrates a poem I wrote called "My Forever Knight." It is about a very exciting incident that occurred in my life. It is almost done and when it is, I will post it here along with the poem in a future blog.