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Monday, January 3, 2011

Happy New Year

It's 2011 and I finally got around to doing some review of last year to see what goals I have accomplished.
As I looked over my art business goals and crunched numbers, I found that I accomplished most of the art business goals I had set down for myself.  I also discovered that some of those goals were a bit subjective and needed to be a little more specific.
Here are some things I accomplished:

- My goal of working an average of 10 hours a week in my studio over a 48 week period (that's allowing 4 weeks off for travel, visitors and other misc. events) was accomplished averaging 10.47 hours a week.  I would like to try to increase that to 15 hours a week this year.  It really doesn't sound like much, but gosh, it was kind of hard for me to find the time to average 10 hours a week with everything else that goes on.

- In addition to the studio time, I wanted to average 3 hours a week working on art business/technical stuff.  This time was spent on stuff like marketing, getting documentation ready, applications, installing exhibition and artwork at gallery, etc.  I didn't quite meet my goal by only averaging 2.64 hours over a 48 week period.  Will try again this year.

- I didn't have a volunteer time goal but I did about 70 hours of volunteer time over the year.  That's not as much as usual because I really cut some of that out to concentrate on my own artwork.

- Another goal was to have my income from art sales and the extremely minimal BAM work cover all my art expenses.  That did not happen as I have a bit of a loss, but it wasn't as bad as I initially thought.  Someday, I actually hope to make a nice amount of money from my art, but small baby steps occur at the start.  Will have the same goal for this year and hope to have some net gain.

- I had hoped to create 20-30 pieces of art over the year and I accomplished that by creating 30 artworks (in varying sizes, of course).  Would like to increase that amount this year but will probably stick with 20-30 pieces again.

- I did keep track of monthly expenses/sales/studio time, etc. but not in a computer program as I had hoped.  Old fashioned paper and pencil worked just as well this year as it did last year.  Maybe this year I will get it on the computer so I can print out lovely pages.

There are quite a few other art goals I accomplished by won't list them all.  Some things occurred last year that were not even on my radar at the beginning of the year, like being in the gallery at the end of the year and doing a commission piece. Nice additional accomplishments.

 Since I was concentrating a lot on my artwork, many of my personal goals didn't get done (ie. getting caught up on scrapbooks).  I'll try again this year. 

The one major thing that didn't get done in the art goal category was getting my website up.  That is something I should have done.  Frank set up a site and I was suppose to learn Joomla so I could create my own website.  Um, I really don't like spending time to have to learn a new program, I'd rather create artwork (that would have eaten up more of my studio time).  This year I will be realistic and look to pay someone to set it up for me.

Besides what I've already listed above, I now have to sit down and create new goals for this year.

2 comments:

Brenda Gael Smith said...

Congratulations on measuring your studio time. If do you decide to move to computer timesheets, I have found the Harvest application very good. You just have to remember to turn it on and off at the relevant times!

Pam McKnight said...

Happy New Year to you to! So this post has got me thinking about my art goals as well. I still need to do a website as well. I did buy a computer program that was to help me with my art business but it takes so much time to just get it all set up to start with that I probably never will finish the input and am enjoying paper and pencil. I hope to someday make money with my art, for now I am happy to break even (just about). I don't know how much time I have spent in the studio. Do you write down every time you work?