Go Big or Go Home

Go Big or Go Home. It's the secret to having confidence in what you are doing with any project. It get's you noticed, and it get's the job done. Now it's my motto when it comes to Wyrdhaven Studio. Set your way-back machine to about 1995, and you would find me working as a picture framer in a Wildlife Art store, where I framed large prints of other artist's realistic work for the store. As an artist I would look at the prints, and say to myself "someday I'll have prints like these of my work".

How it worked was that a publishing house would take on an artist, do all the printing & marketing and the artist would get a portion of the sales. That way the artist is free to paint to their hearts content, only going in when they needed to sign prints or something. That was always my dream. Now switch the machine to 2000. This is when I started to have prints made of my work. I had to pay out of pocket for 50 prints at a time to get enough of a discount to make a profit. My small budget meant small prints, not the large ones that I had been dreaming about for six years. I had to do all the marketing and distribution myself, so I showed them at SF&F conventions.

Jump to 2003, the year I was laid off from my job as a web designer and you'll find I bought my own printer, the Epson 2200 in order to do print on demand. I never wanted to be a manufacturer, yet that's what I ended up being. I also created the following image:

Well now it's 2008 and the Epson printing system is going strong in the marketplace, people are learning what a giclee is, and the Wildlife Art store I worked at is virtually out of business and it was a national chain. Due to the dip in the economy which began just over 7 years ago, not 7 months ago like the pundits would have you think, many artists like myself are working day jobs again.

So what does this all have to do with my mantra Go Big or Go Home? I now have big prints being produced by someone other than myself, and though I have to do lots of marketing on my own, the company is marketing all the artists it carries through it's website. Now you can get Blue Moon Faery in a whopping 16" x 24" print, have it framed to your specifications on the website, picking out your own mats and frame or use my suggested combination above. There are smaller sizes of the same image available too, because some people wanted to pretty up smaller spaces.

Not only are the prints bigger, the prices are actually smaller than what I had to charge myself. Though they aren't signed or numbered, I will still honor the limited edition number for each piece. When they sell out, I will retire the image, for Blue Moon Faery that means I have 120 more to sell before it's all said and done. This was my dream, only I didn't know it, because I have more control than those wildlife artists did, and no upfront costs like I've had for the past eight years.

So now I'm dreaming of big paintings again because I know that I can make big prints of them. Go Big or Go Home...yeah that's what Wyrdhaven Studio is all about now.