This week was a BIG week.
Elli gave us a full checklist of branding material we needed to have before we started building our website, and one of the big components was our artist's signature.
It took me two solid days to arrive at a design. First, I worked out the way I was going to write it and, with the help of my community on Instagram, I got some good feedback, and then I uploaded it onto my website. But it actually looked really boring, so I went back to the drawing board to play around with adding ligatures and tried it with different brushes. In the end, I created my own custom brush in procreate.
I’m not yet sure how that is going to translate into my paintings, as I haven’t practiced actually painting it yet- but I will be getting lots of practice because this week I need to sign all my paintings for my portfolio!
Other things that we need to have from the checklist are the hero image, tag line (which I agonised over for ages), artist statement, artist bio, photos of all our work ready to go on the website, blurbs about various collections and each painting (which I haven’t done). I wanted to get as much of this together as possible before I draw a line under this week and move on so that I can do next week’s task, which is building the website.
If I don’t actually complete most of these materials and just move on, then the backlog of work just builds up.
Although I may be moving through the lessons, I’m not actually progressing with launching my business and will still have to take extra time after I finish the program to complete all this stuff anyway (or maybe my launch won’t be as successful).
So, for sure, this last section may only be 12 weeks, and it may only take 12 weeks to learn this information, but it will take more than 12 weeks to implement this information. And each of these decisions is a big decision because we are going to stick with this for the foreseeable future. You may create paintings over and over again and your style will evolve, but the branding should be the same and consistent, and once you’ve decided on it, it’s pretty set in stone. The artist's signature is going to be what I will stick with for my whole career, so it requires some careful consideration and reflection.
