I’m thinking this week will be short and sweet. March marked the official beginning of art walk prep, and there’s a lot going on! If you haven’t seen/heard me talk about it, I have two art walks coming up this late spring/early summer. They are a month apart, so I’m trying to do as much prep ahead of time as I can.
I thought it might be fun to do a little series about how I go about prepping for these art walks for a little behind-the-scenes action. For the first one, happening in May, I plan on having 15 dragons available for show. I’m just about there already! The second one is happening in June, and I’m going to try to have at least 20 dragons, maybe 25 or 30.
Because these events are back-to-back, there’s a lot of planning I try to do ahead of time in order to get everything figured out. I like to write out my ideas for dragons ahead of time so I can spend little time in between dragons trying to figure out details. I don’t want to get caught spinning my wheels when I’m on my last week.
This is my second year having Sculptober themes leftover, so that’s usually where I start. I had enough themes leftover this year to cover almost all of the dragons for the first art walk, and about a fourth of the dragons for the second one. Most of my ideas for the Sculptober themes are in my notebook, so I refer to that pretty frequently. Lately, I’ve been using Trello to help keep different aspects of JSThreads organized, including custom orders, my social media posts, and ideas I have for both crochet and polymer clay.
Here, I’m able to gather a quick look at which projects are done, which ones are in progress, and which ones are left. Most of the details are either in the notebook or my planner, so I can refer to those for more information.
Besides now using my planner to brainstorm more concrete ideas for my art walk pieces, I can also use it to roughly schedule my time and see how many I can fit in my time frame. For example, I may start a dragon on Monday. I will most likely work on it throughout the week and finish it Friday evening. I can then start a new one Saturday and have it finished by Sunday night. This starts over on Monday and the cycle continues, allowing me to anticipate how things will move.
While I am almost finished with the dragons for the first show, I am still working on planning for the second show since my Sculptober themes run out here. I started pulling ideas from my list in Trello, as well as from older lists in my notebook, but I need to work on the details now.
Some ideas outside of the Sculptober themes include some more fruit and flower dragons, a seasons series of dragons, and some local football team dragons :).
If you’re local, the first one is in Pullman on May 13, and the second one is in Moscow on June 16. I’ll be doing blog posts after each event so you guys can see what’s going on as well.