I started two new paintings this morning: a nocturne of a church and a pet portrait. The thing I want to concentrate on with the nocturne are the lines. There’s no building, just beams where the building once stood. Behind it are trees and of course a dark sky. The beams are white so they stand out even at night. But when I paint them they’re probably going to be a dark gray color as opposed to pure white. They also have white lights on the outside, running up the sides and up the arches. That will be fun to play with. This is going to be a challenge, but I’m up for it.
The pet portrait is pretty simple. I should probably do more of them as pets make great subjects. Mine is called ‘Minnie’. She looks like a chihuahua mixed with a lab. She’s a mutt, so she could be a mix of a ton of things. Who knows. She’s much bigger than a chihuahua but she’s still a small dog. Same coloring as a chihuahua. It seems like on the streets of San Antonio there’s chihuahua in every stray dog you see. Minnie followed my owners home one day and after trying to find if she belonged to anyone else she was declared ‘home’.
Tomorrow I will drop off both my house portraits. I won’t have time to visit with my first clients as I need to be at the next client’s house 30 minutes later. Hopefully things will work out. I left it up to fate and this was what manifested.
Yesterday I spent time taking care of business. After I figured out how to print on my newish computer I decided to open a savings account associated with my business checking account. I want to transfer money to pay income taxes whenever I make a sale and it’s one of those things I’ve been meaning to do but hadn’t gotten around to. It felt good to get that established. Now I have a safe place for that money until April.
I also went through all my payment apps: Venmo, Cash App, Apple Wallet, and Zelle. I made sure that a) I know what my ID’s are so I can give them to clients, and b) my business checking and debit card are connected to them. This took some time, and it wasn’t what I enjoy doing, but it was necessary. That’s one of the hard parts of being self-employed: when do I do the things I don’t like doing? Like running numbers and organizing receipts? Like printing out invoices? I can fantasize all day about having an assistant but I don’t have one, so I need to set aside a time do the work myself.
Right now I don’t have a set day and time to do them. I know a lot of self-employed artists who set aside a day of the month, like the last Thursday, to run numbers and print invoices; to make sure their accounting is organized and up to date, but since I haven’t been doing a lot of business yet I haven’t started doing that. My focus has been on money generating actions steps. When these commissions came in this week I knew it was time to buckle down. I look forward to the day when I can regularly juggle all these things and really feel like I’m in business.
Last week I reached out to an artist I follow on Instagram. I had told a mentor about the commissions I’d gotten and he asked I had written contracts. I didn’t and I got really upset, thinking I’d overlooked something any relatively competent person would have thought of. So I reached out to a professional painter to ask some advice. He graciously responded. I told him of my situation - painting house portraits with no written contracts. He shared that when he was an art student he would do pen-and-ink drawings of people’s homes. He would ask for half the money up front and the other half when he was done and they liked it. But, he didn’t do written contracts.
The conclusion I came to is that my agreements were done via messaging and therefore, informal contracts. Plus, in my gut I just don’t think it’s a problem. Maybe I’m naive, but so far the clients I’ve met with have been really cool. It feels right to do this via verbal agreement and a handshake. Perhaps I will learn differently in the future, but until then I’ll stick with what I’m doing.