thoughts after a year of crowdfunding
April 11th marked the first anniversary of my crowdfunding debut, and it was probably the most consistently busy year I've ever had. I've posted over 150 paintings and sketches, received thousands of feedback comments, unexpectedly won a Rose and Bay award, and met a lot of really creative people. I've sold prints, done private commissions, and received tips from over a dozen generous patrons, including three K-fans, each of whom contributed over $120 to my various art projects over the last year. The Kickstarter campaign for my first picture book exceeded it's funding goal and raised over $11000. Your support and enthusiasm has far surpassed my expectations. Thank you all!
As you have undoubtedly noticed by now, the Story Sketches project has been largely dormant for a couple of months, but fear not! I have no intention of abandoning it. I've been sort of waiting for my workload to lighten, but after taking stock of my plans for the next year, it's become clear that that isn't really going to happen. The challenge is to figure out how to manage more than one ongoing project at a time, and I appreciate the patience you've all shown while I try to work out a solution.
I know that several of you are balancing multiple projects and/or offline jobs and families, and it's encouraging to know that it can be done - I just have to come up with a better workflow than
Participating in SketchFest (run by champion multitasker ellenmillion -Thanks, Ellen!) has shown that I can be very productive within a limited time period, so I may try to apply this model to other types of activity. Setting a timer while I work on posts like this, for instance, will hopefully stop me from spending days on composing and editing an informal piece of text that my writer friends probably wouldn't spend more than a few minutes on. :P I'm sure I had more to say, but this post has been in-progress for nearly a week(!) which is long even for me, and I expect to be afk for most of tomorrow, so, ah...consider it a 'sketch'? ^_^;
If those of you who are more organized than I am have any advice, I would certainly appreciate it!
Crossposted from Dreamwidth. Comments are welcome either here or there.
As you have undoubtedly noticed by now, the Story Sketches project has been largely dormant for a couple of months, but fear not! I have no intention of abandoning it. I've been sort of waiting for my workload to lighten, but after taking stock of my plans for the next year, it's become clear that that isn't really going to happen. The challenge is to figure out how to manage more than one ongoing project at a time, and I appreciate the patience you've all shown while I try to work out a solution.
I know that several of you are balancing multiple projects and/or offline jobs and families, and it's encouraging to know that it can be done - I just have to come up with a better workflow than
- start working on something
- receive message about another thing to be done, start working on it
- get distracted by a third thing
- belatedly remember what I was working on in the first place
- repeat :P
Participating in SketchFest (run by champion multitasker ellenmillion -Thanks, Ellen!) has shown that I can be very productive within a limited time period, so I may try to apply this model to other types of activity. Setting a timer while I work on posts like this, for instance, will hopefully stop me from spending days on composing and editing an informal piece of text that my writer friends probably wouldn't spend more than a few minutes on. :P I'm sure I had more to say, but this post has been in-progress for nearly a week(!) which is long even for me, and I expect to be afk for most of tomorrow, so, ah...consider it a 'sketch'? ^_^;
If those of you who are more organized than I am have any advice, I would certainly appreciate it!
Crossposted from Dreamwidth. Comments are welcome either here or there.