Show Your Work
So I took a post-graduation trip to New York, and while investigating a charming little book store in Greenwich Village I picked up a book called Show Your Work by Austin Kleon. It's a quick read-- I finished it over the course of the two flights it took to get from LaGuardia to McCarran. It's basically a ten part essay on self-promotion and the process of developing a presence in the art community.
There was a lot of helpful advice and I'd highly recommend picking up a copy. But my biggest takeaway was that I need to be posting work more often. I'm a slow artist-- I very rarely finish work in a single sitting, and often my pieces take several weeks to complete. I like working this way; it places a lot of personal value on the finished product. I have a hard time valuing work that takes me less than five hours to finish.
But that kind of attitude limits the quantity of work that I produce, and diminishes my regular presence on the web. In Show Your Work, Kleon recommends a process that he calls Stock and Flow. Stock is the big projects-- the pieces that take a lot of dedication and care. Flow is the little stuff-- the sketches, the correspondence, the regular posts that keep you in the forefront of people's attention. And to achieve success, it's a good idea to have both.
So I'll be starting my own daily drabble from here on out, visible on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and the blog of my website. Sketches, studies, speedpaintings, or even just glimpses of the process on my bigger pieces-- I'd like to keep everyone caught up on what I'm doing.
To start off, here's a quick study of one of the architectural facades I photographed while I was in New York. Took me about an hour to get this far. I laid down the sketch on black matboard with a white charcoal pencil and filled in the rest with gradually lightening steps of grey Prismacolor.