Forum

My wife & I have been painting for a couple years. We've developed a style you could say. We paint ocean inspired beachy stuff in acrylics in a punchy cartoonish way.

Well, at first we did. We also paint waves from a realist approach too, more recently. Also we've been painting abstract backgrounds with butterflies as the foreground...

We make our own canvases and also paint skateboards. We also sell and make various reproductions of our stuff, and we're over the moon so far with the response we've had for the initial time our little biz has been running; about 10 months.

Our problem is as we progress and look to other avenues of advertising and getting our name out there, we find ourselves needing to be in more art festivals and looking at the possibility of licensing, we're afraid we're stretching ourselves too far.

It's a dilemma we're happy to have being able to sell varied styles of our work but it's really untested as to whether we'll get into as many art shows as we hope to when we have conflicting styles in our application pictures. Most shows allow 4 images and we tend to offer 1 skateboard and 3 canvases, either 2 butterfly and 2 waves..or realistic waves and 1 butterfly..It gets confusing, and is probably as equally disjointed to the potential jury that decides our fate too. 

So how to know which subject matter to stick with or whether to risk going with them all and hoping people see the similarities in style that relates to all the pieces?

Maybe what we lack is discipline, we should faze out some categories and stick with others?

Here's a picture giving an example of too many styles...

Let us know if you have a similar problem and how you over came it...