Sock Gallery Exhibition Entry

After my success last summer with getting one of my drawings accepted into the Sock Gallery Open Exhibition, I thought I would give it a go this year too. Admittedly, I put off the task of producing something to submit probably for longer than I should have. In fact, I only knuckled down and got going with this two days before the submission date.

I followed on the theme from last year and stuck to dog portraits. I have noticed french bulldogs are quite in fashion at the moment and I thought the texture of their short hair would fit well with the detailed process that I was keen to work with. I hadn't got my own reference imagery for this so opted to pull together some images from the internet to try and piece together a brand new, unique image. These were some of the images I used as reference and I have circled the aspects which built the framework of my drawing. The composition and pattern of the fabric was just from my head. 

I can see that in relation to my practice as an illustrator, this work sits somewhat outside of this discipline. I do still like to draw for enjoyment and I think producing pieces of work like this for the purpose of being displayed in a gallery is a breath of fresh air from the much more in depth process of producing illustrations. For me, its good to have a focussed practice but also do a few different things outside of this. 

Unfortunately because I am at home for summer I did not have access to a big enough scanner to document this piece of work well before I framed it for submission. After trips to various places around Loughborough, I couldn't find one that could scan my piece without the risk of damaging it. I had to photograph my work instead which was disappointing as the quality is clearly compromised. 

This has been a good couple of days for me, I have been focussed and productive and I’m thinking that this is what I needed to get me into shape to be more productive and motivated for my college projects. 

'Art This Way' Weekend

This weekend was great, I was there all day Saturday and Sunday (2nd and 3rd July) selling my work, talking to people interested in the same things as me and looking at the varied work of other practitioners. What’s more, I managed to sell quite a lot of my products, a lot more than I was expecting to seeing as this was my first attempt at an event like this. It has been a really positive experience and I have learnt a lot from it thanks to the other more experienced creatives selling their work too. 

I wrote down the quantities of everything I took with me so that I could work out how much I had sold at the end. I decided to be organised and I made some tables. From these I can look at what is selling and what isn’t. I am bearing in mind though that the audience at this art fair is quite different to the audience I am able to reach online so I may see some different results with what is most popular on my Etsy shop. 

I did make a profit this weekend after selling around £60 worth of my products. I learnt a lot from this event and the preparation that went into it. 

Pricing: I am gaining a better understanding how to price my products. I was wary that I had overpriced my handmade notebooks as I didn’t sell very many but actually considering the amount of quality paper in the product I feel it was reasonable and I wouldn’t want to sell them for any less. 

Communication: I have noticed that I am becoming more confident when talking to people, this may be because the conversations I was having this weekend were about things I was interested in and had something to say about. I think this is going to be really important for me to keep up, especially if I do another event like this. 

Local networking: I didn’t realise before that there is actually a decent creative scene in my hometown. For the size of the town and surrounding villages, I got the impression that there is quite a lot going on that I could be more involved in. I want to look into doing an event similar to this around the Christmas period, i'm not sure whether this would be in Leeds or Loughborough.

(I think there was some miscommunication with whoever printed the map leaflets but I do consider myself an illustrator, not a graphic designer!)