Cherry Blossom, Laptop Skins and My First Art Pendant Sale

I am so excited that I sold my first art pendant, the Peony and Butterfly pendant.

Order the Pendants

This is my first time that I get my hand on jewelries. I can see that there many more jewelry makers out there than art and others. It is very difficult to get attention to your creation. Thus, I am super excited that I can managed to get one sold.

Coming back to my art work, I am thinking of coming up of some welcome spring series. The Spring print is one of them. These days, I'll concentrate on Cherry Blossom. It always makes me excited when I see cherry blossom pictures and paintings. They are just so beautiful to paint.

If you are in the mood of welcome spring and would like to change or apply some spring on your laptop, you can order the laptop skin here. To understand how to order, please read "How to Order Laptop Skin and Wrist Area Skin".

I spent sometime to tide up my labels, you can browse through the labels for more designs and other information. For example the labels related to laptop skins are;

• Best Sellers Laptop Skins (2)
• For Her (1)
• For Him (1)
• laptop skin flower (6)
• laptop skin bird (21)
• laptop skin customer testimonials (1)
• laptop skin examples (8)
• laptop skin female (1)
• laptop skin flower (10)
• laptop skin owl (9)
• laptop skin wrist area skin (4)
• laptop skins animal (1)

Order the Skins

I am in Two Treasures

Iris Heart @ Karen Fulkner Original Art

Thanks for Karen from Karen Fulkner Original Art . I am in two Etsy treasures right now. The unique art of Karen is demonstrated in the image above. Please check her site for more pretty and special watercolors.

The treasures include one of my original paintings and another is the Spring Print. They are:

http://www.etsy.com/treasury_list.php?room_id=42838
http://www.etsy.com/treasury_list_west.php?room_id=45053

Please check them out!

Order the Skins

You can order the Spring laptop skin and Laminated Print on Wood Block here (using the Buy Now button).

Taking Photos for My Online Shops

It is easy to show art work such as print or painting. There is no need to take photos in a surrounding environment and you just display the images.

Now I have to learn how to take nice photos of objects that I am creating such as the Wood Block Print. People are talking about frontpage friendly photos, which means you should take a good photo that can be chosen by other people into an Etsy frontpage.

There are a lot of guidelines out there. I read some. One thing you can do is to try different versions and ask some opinion at the Etsy Forum. There is a Critique Forum section. You can ask people to tell which one is more attractive.

This what I did, most people told me that the wood block on wall is nicer than the garden one. I really love the garden one. But if you are aiming on Etsy frontpage, you have to make it simple.

The article, Are Your Photos Frontpage Worthy? in Etsy told us a good way to see if your photo is good or not. You can use the tool of Treasure Poster Sketch to pick some of your favorite items and put your item into it to see if it fits into the other items or not.

I did this of this Owl Print on Wood Block and realize that the plain background one is better.

What you think?

Trying out Twitter

I read something about Twitter long ago and haven't figure out how to use it. Recently, I just used it a bit and find it is quite interesting and want to try out more.

I am very new, I guess the good thing about Twitter is that you will instantly know what other people are doing and their concerns. You may offer help or share your views. You can also share what you are doing right now. If you need help or you have any questions, you can ask. Someone out there may provide some help.

It takes time to build friend circles there. Once you have bunch of people to talk with, you will be busy talking and knowing what they are doing. I think at that time, it will be very addictive. So be careful if you want to use it.

My twitter account is http://twitter.com/lilypangart. If you like, you can follow me.

Great Chance to see Different Artist Styles

As I mentioned before that we have a September challenge in our watercolor works team from Etsy. The above are photos that we can use to paint. It is very interesting to see that different artist interprets very differently the same topic.

I compile the paintings from our group and attached here for your references. It is a great chance to see how different styles reflect the same objects.

You can click each image to go to their stores if you are interested in more of their work.

Which one do you like? Or you like all of them?

As for me today, I painted this simple tree landscape:

The Gaze and The Singapore Arts Street 2008

The Detail

The last two days I was at the Singapore Arts Street 2008. It was a very interesting event. It was held in the HDB heartland and I was able to get some feeling of how ordinary people in Singapore viewing art.

Many people came to see the exhibition. A lot of them spent quite a long time viewing paintings one by one, especially for those modern abstract art created by art school students. I think Singaporean are really art loving people.

I am very happy to find some very interesting exhibitions. One is the Peranakan art created by the famous Singapore Artist Tung Yue Nang. I had a very good conversation with him and got some valuable advises from the veteran artist.

He has been spent last 10 years focusing on the Peranakan series that depict the beautiful Peranakan culture. The following is one of them at the exhibition.

The another interesting show is the folk art painting. There was a demonstration by the artist on the site. I got to see the whole process of developing some beautiful flower, bird, and landscape motifs. If you are interested, the artists also hold classes for you to learn. Just drop by next weekends to find out more.

About the "The Gaze", long time I have been thinking of creating something very beautiful and warm in colors. I love to paint beautiful girls and this how the painting is created.

Acrylic on Stretched Canvas,

Size: 16 x 20, $350 + $40 S & H

Sea View and Changes in eBay Singapore

This work is inspired by the following photo:
I guess many of us using photo references for our work.

Today I just found that Singapore Ebay starts charging fees now. It used to be free. I didn't sell anything through Singapore Ebay. The viewing is very low. Basically very few Singaporean are buying art through Singapore Ebay. I guess I'll stop listing in Singapore eBay now. But I'll continue to do in US or other eBay.

Acrylic on acrylic paper
size: 8 x 12, $65

MAAD - Market for Artist and Designer Experience

Me with my store

Some paintings are displayed in cloth rack. I am surprised that people like to browse them a lot.

It was a very interesting two day event in MAAD. I found that people do love arts and want to own them when they see something nice. But they like to have them in really cheap price. They don't value original as much. If they like a piece, they don't mind to have it in print.

The MAAD experience gives me a lot to think about of my direction in painting. I am sure I want to do paintings only. I don't have much passion on other things such as painting on T-shirt although they are selling well as the crow to MAAD is filled with most young people.

Fan Shao Hua Art Exhibition

No finished painting today and will not have a painting post for the next few days. I started to tackle a large piece of landscape (40 x 50 cm) and I estimate that it will takes2 to 3 days to finish if I concentrate on it.

I also went to the art exhibition of my teacher Fan Shao Hua and met some new and old friends. In Singapore, the art circle is not big, you always get to see the same set of people on the art events that you managed to go.

It is not easy to sell art in Singapore. People rather spend $100 or $300 for a nice dinner than spending on an original painting. If you go to see paintingss listed in ebay, no one is bidding on them. I occasionally see one bidding, but it is on a Ikea poster. Only those very rich people are buying and for investment. They are buying foreign artists work, seldom local ones.

How to survive in such a market is something that each artist in Singapore needs to find out.