Friday, November 12, 2010

Going to the Dogs

Border Terrier, coloured pencil on Arches watercolour paper.

This year I added several venues to my sales strategy, one was a Game and Country Fair, one a Craft Fair and one an Art Festival.
I wanted to see what worked best and decide where to target in 2011. I recognise that the current economic climate doesn't help with sales and that exhibiting once at each type of venue isn't really enough to decide what works, but it did give me a taster.
From a sales point of view non was overwhelmingly successful, but from a learning perspective all had something to offer.

There was a common lesson relevant to all three: my portfolio is too cat orientated to generate large print sales away from the cat shows.
The Supreme cat show next weekend is my last exhibition of the year so I have several months to add some diversity to my range of prints.

One avenue I want to explore is returning to the dogs and adding to the breeds I offer as prints.
Gun dogs and working dogs as groups were numerically greatest at the country fair but the one breed I saw the most of was undoubtedly the Border Terrier so that's the one I decided to start with.

I'm not sure if I want to do any more craft fairs but that's another post.

3 comments:

Sue Clinker said...

Interesting views Gayle

I recently attended a lecture by professional artist Chris Christoforou. It was his opinion that game birds - grouse/pheasant etc and also hounds were good subjects to draw/paint because the people who purchased these pictures were the ones least affected by recession/credit crunch - ie the hunting/shooting country folk.

The Wildwood said...

That little Border Terrier is adorable! They are such sweet dogs and there aren't many here in the States where we live, but our friends in Scotland have one named Archie and he is adorable and smart little guy!

Gayle Mason said...

Funnily enough Sue I have a Pheasant next on my agenda. I took a photograph of one on a wall last year with lovely lighting.