Errands kill me.

I go to the store to get milk, I swing by the insurance place to pay the renter’s insurance, and suddenly it’s lunchtime. Where did the morning go? Why have the things I needed to paint not been painted? How do people who can’t just wander off in mid-work day to run errands manage without having their brains explode? How did I manage this sort of thing when I was a corporate drone working in an office? And while I’m on that question, why was there that one stairwell in the office building that always reeked of Formalin for no apparent reason? Were they growing upper management in vats in the basement, as we secretly believed?

These are the questions that plague my days.

I think I want to paint a portrait of an African porcupine. Doing nothing. Just sitting there. Being spiky. Hey, people bought the camel and the takin, somewhere, someone must love the African porcupine in all its hostile rodenty glory.

Speaking of buying art, I finally got a price list up on my website of the originals for sale. (It took a few months, but I needed to do it.) If you’re looking to buy art for someone for Christmas, may I humbly suggest mine? (C’mon, you know your elderly fundamentalist aunt needs a pregnant mandrake root painting! And what small child won’t thank you for having a hulking Twigjack on their nursery wall scowling at them through the dark hours of the night?) This DID teach me that I need to do some midrange stuff…most of it wanders around under $100, there’s a few in the $100-250 range, and then suddenly it leaps up to the huge acrylics with attendant price tag. I need to do more midsized frogs or something for people who want a bigger piece of art, but don’t wanna drop a grand. Strangely enough, pricing art so that you have a range of prices can apparently be more conducive to sales of originals than hitting the popular animals or something–I was chatting with a guy at Trinocon who works in the niche of aviation art, and he said that every time you add a series of paintings or prints in a specific price range you hadn’t filled before, you’ll often see a jump in sales because there are people for whom that’s their specific range of what they’re willing to spend on art. Which was an interesting marketing idea, for me–I had been thinking almost entirely in terms of size and subject matter prior to that, because that’s what affects how I actually paint. You learn something new all the time…