Artistic Life Choices

            The day after ConBravo!, a friend of mine commissioned a chainmaille shirt – the catch being that he wanted the shirt for an event that was next weekend. Because of the time required, both for production and for the materials to arrive, this posed an interesting challenge. Luckily, I had a few advantages in this situation: I had enough materials on hand to start the shirt, I have Colleen working with me to make chainmaille, and we both are making chainmaille full time.

            This got me thinking about the difference between people who are artists as a hobby and artists who are making a living off their art (or trying to, at least). The challenge with making money through art is getting paid for your time. That’s the biggest problem with every form of art – there is a lot of time involved. It has to be a labour of love.

            The result is that many artists undercharge for their work, because not many people are willing to pay even $200 for a painting with eighty hours of work in it. Yes, there a few people who will, but even if that painting is sold, the artist is only getting paid $2.50 per hour, and no one can live off of that.

            So, most artists use their art as a hobby, some of them making money on the side, while working a full time job. This limits their time to produce art, but it also provides them with a secure income. They can charge less for their work if they want to, but they don’t have as much freedom when it comes to rush orders.

            On the other hand, there are full-time artists – few and far between. They (or we) need to make a living off of what they sell, so they have to charge for the time invested in their products. Unfortunately, this means that prices are higher, but it also means that they have a lot more time to hone their craft, which in turn means more speed during production. The costs get lowered a bit, but still stay fairly high for larger projects.

            Chainmaille shirts are very large projects. I first started making chainmaille as armour. When I look back at the first shirt I sold, I am appalled that I sold it for $160. The materials alone cost $100, which means I was making about $1-2 per hour. On the other hand, I was still learning my craft and I was a high school student on summer holidays with no job.

            When I started looking into making chainmaille for a living, branching out into jewellery was almost mandatory. It’s simply because there are more people who will spend $15 on a bracelet that cost $3 in materials and took an hour to make than who will buy a chainmaille shirt for $600 that costs $120 in materials and took 40 hours to make. Especially when you can get one that was made with slave labour for $150 on EBay.

            Nevertheless, armouring is what I truly love about my art, so when opportunity knocks, I’ll answer. Here, being a professional artist pays off. The armour was needed within a time limit. There probably aren't any people out there with full time jobs that could make a full chainmaille shirt in under two weeks. My wife and I managed it in five days (well, six, but two of them were more like half days).

            Technically the shirt still needs a little more work on it that will have to wait until after the event – unfortunately my supplier was busier than usual and the materials for finishing it won’t arrive on time (the worst part is there’s only a few more hours of work to put into it). However, the shirt was complete enough and fully functional in time for the event – and if the materials had shipped when they normally would have, it would've been complete with all the bells and whistles as well.

            I was silly enough to hand off the shirt prior to getting a picture of it in its neo-complete form, however here’s what it looked like with 15 hours of work in it. It now has 42 hours and is much, much longer.

            Now, I don’t want you to take out of this that full time artists are better than part-time artists. We’re just a bit crazier and usually a bit hungrier. All arts are labours of love and deserve respect, attention, and purchasing.

            My instinct says I should end this blog with something along the lines of “Support artists”, but since you’re here and reading this, I don’t really need to, do I? You’re here because you support my chainmaille, my writing, or both – at least, I assume you do, otherwise I've got no idea why you could possibly be here.

            So, instead I’ll finish with saying, thank you for supporting artists. Especially me ;)

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.

In Praise of Con Organizers

            I'm just back from a fantastic weekend at ConBravo! where there were loads of friendly people. Lots of them liked chainmaille, too, which was a plus for me.

            I could spout about how wonderful the convention experience is, but you've heard it all before – at least if you've read my previous blog posts about them. Instead, today I’ll tell you about the people who run them.

            Fan-run conventions vary in size, but the popular ones inevitably grow. The amount of work that has to go into one is monstrous – panels, guests/celebrities, artists, vendors and volunteers all need to be organized and coordinated. The location has to be secured and paid for, contracts written and signed. Security must be arranged, marketing needs to be done, and far more that I either can’t think of right now or don’t know about.

            All of this is done by a handful of people and they usually don’t even get paid for it – more often than not, they’re spending money to make the convention happen. Whenever something goes wrong, no matter how big or small, these are the people who get harried about it until it’s fixed. They’re on their feet, running around, making sure everything runs smoothly for the entire convention, not even able to enjoy the product of their hard work (I had one of them visit me on the only break they could steal and tell me that if anyone asked, she wasn't there).

            Yet, these same people do this again and again, year after year – sometimes even multiple shows every year! The ones I've talked to say they’d like to eventually make their living at it, but until that’s possible it’s just a lot of hard work for other people to have all the fun.

            So here’s a shout-out to all those con organizers out there. You people are extraordinary and, I must say, more than a little crazy. Keep up the great work – I hope you get all the appreciation you deserve.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.

A Callus Remark

            There is a danger to taking a month off your regular work to renovate, particularly when your endurance to work relies heavily on calluses – such as the ones made by holding pliers while making chainmaille. If you don’t use ‘em, you lose ‘em.

            I've got a lot of metal to bend before ConBravo! next weekend, so that’s about all I can say. Long story short, my hands hurt.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.

Road Trip to Ikea

            Have you ever been to Ikea before? I haven’t (at least, not until this weekend). Those stores are enormous and terrifying for introverts like me – although still fun. I especially enjoyed all the subtle sales tools they used.

            For anyone who hasn't been to Ikea before, the bulk of the store is set up as a huge showroom. A path winds through a maze of beautiful sample kitchens, living rooms, dining rooms, bedrooms and bathrooms. Every item and piece of furniture in these rooms has a price tag accompanied by information on where to find the product in the “shopping” part of the store.

There are regular stations throughout the showroom with pencils and papers set up to write down all the information you need so you can find what you wanted. Using this brilliant method, you can go through and find everything you want without hauling it through the entire store with you and then simply pick it all up at the end. This is very convenient for the customers, and from a selling perspective it helps customers remember what they wanted to buy.

            So, this is the store that I went on a road trip to with my wife and her sister. Three introverts in a huge, crowded building, browsing the furnishing for what we needed. It was an interesting mix. We all had a great time and, of course, found lots to buy (well, not my sister-in-law; she was along for the ride).

            Something that stuck out a lot from this trip was the discovery that it is apparently necessary to have signs on the showroom toilets declaring that they are for display purposes only. This is one of those small things that make me weep for humanity.

            We also discovered how wonderful the staff there was when we made a little mistake at the checkout – specifically, we forgot that we had a gift card until right after we’d paid. Up until that point, it had seemed like your usual store with employees doing their jobs, but to correct this situation a supervisor needed to be called in. In spite of how busy they were, they solved the problem and were very friendly about it. It was really nice to see the personal side of the workers there.

            After that, we (barely) managed to squeeze everything and everyone into the car and headed for home. Where, of course, we had to build one of our new shelving units – what’s a trip to Ikea without putting together furniture afterwards, right?

            The moral of the story is: shop at Ikea – it’s like a furniture theme park – and make a mistake at the cash register so you can see how nice the staff are. But make sure you’re at the same Ikea as we were and that you have the same cashier otherwise you might get different results.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.