About The ArtistsCenter

What is The ARTISTScenter?

The ARTISTS­cen­ter is a blog (weblog) web­site designed to help visual artists learn how to mar­ket their work by pro­vid­ing cut­ting edge artist focused content.

You will find:

• A repos­i­tory of use­ful arti­cles for both emerg­ing and sea­soned visual artists. The arti­cles are designed to help you with all aspects of brand­ing and mar­ket­ing your­self as a thriv­ing visual artist
• A col­lec­tion of prac­ti­cal lessons designed to help you imple­ment the con­cepts pre­sented here. Like how to use social net­works to build a strong following.
• A col­lec­tion of audio video record­ings about crit­i­cal issues related to brand­ing and mar­ket­ing your art. You can lis­ten to the  record­ings at any time on your MP3 player or through your com­puter speakers.
• A place for build­ing a com­mu­nity of sup­port, learn­ing and con­ver­sa­tion for visual artists.
• A col­lec­tion of tools and resources cho­sen specif­i­cally for their use­ful­ness to work­ing artists.

How to use this site.

This site is built on the pow­er­ful blog­ging pro­gram Word­Press which for quick updates and post­ing. There are spe­cific orga­ni­za­tional to be aware of in order to help you nav­i­gate eas­ily through  the site.

The con­tent of the site is orga­nized around cat­e­gories and pages. The cat­e­gories and page titles are designed to reflect par­tic­u­lar sub­ject areas rel­e­vant to work­ing artists.

CATEGORIES — are like file fold­ers that hold both posts and arti­cles that fit the cat­e­gory. The cat­e­gories are iden­ti­fied by the tabs along the top of the page. More detailed nav­i­ga­tion is along the right side bar.

• Work­shops & Events — An on going com­pi­la­tion of work­shops and events that catch my eye or are sub­mit­ted to me for inclusion.
• Fea­tured Artists — Artists who have demon­strated not only out­stand­ing skills in their medium but also have embraced the scary world of using the inter­net and other cut­ting edge tools to sell their work. A new artist is fea­tured monthly with week­ly­in­ter­views and daily show­ing of their work. They also become life­time mem­bers of The ARTISTScenter.
• Mar­ket­ing Mon­day — A weekly series of arti­cles with a focus on pro­vid­ing con­cepts and tools to help artists develop and mar­ket themselves.
• Tech Tips — This is a col­lec­tion of arti­cles and tips rang­ing from using social media to blogs to use­ful software.

PAGES - are used to orga­nize one or more series of com­mon post­ings orga­nized to pro­vide a sin­gle loca­tion for all rel­e­vant infor­ma­tion. For exam­ple the Work­shops & events page holds list­ings of all such hap­pen­ings until they occur and the Arti­cles page holds fea­tured arti­cles that are par­tic­u­larly worth reading.

A word about com­mu­nity and you

As I men­tioned above this site is designed to encour­age sup­port and com­mu­nity for work­ing visual artists, so I invite and encourge your con­tri­bu­tions. You can con­tribute in the fol­low­ing ways:

• EVENTS — send me an e-mail con­tain­ing the infor­ma­tion you would like posted, it must be related to visual art.
• ARTICLES — Send me an e– mail with your pro­posal, mak­ing sure to include a descrip­tion of how it might fit into this site and ben­e­fit work­ing artists.
• COMMENTS — Com­ment­ing on an exist­ing post or arti­cle is an excel­lent way to cre­ate dis­cus­sion and con­ver­sa­tion around a spe­cific sub­ject. I encour­age you to com­ment by click­ing on the “com­ment”  label found just below each post.

Who Is behind The ARTISTScenter?

Me in action

Bill Weaver …A sea­soned boomer

This site  is  the labor of love of a sea­soned self taught 63 year old geekzer who cut his  teeth on punch cards, for­tran and main frame com­put­ers all the while design­ing, draw­ing and pho­tograph­ing .  Early on he saw the value of join­ing his right brain visual acu­ity with his left brain lin­ear­ity to cre­ate a weird  mash-up of  tal­ents and skills.

The ARTISTS­cen­ter con­tent is pro­duced by Bill Weaver, an award win­ning pho­tog­ra­pher, visual artist and designer. Bill has worked as an artist, designer, teacher and pho­tog­ra­pher begin­ning at a very young age. His mother was a pro­lific painter and his father was an architect/engineer and inventor.

Bill Cre­ated The ARTISTS­cen­ter after 15 years as a work­ing clay artist and over 50 years as a  pho­tog­ra­pher led him to ques­tion the stan­dard ways artists mar­ket their work. In 2004 along with 3 other artists he explored ways to edu­cate the pub­lic about the value of hand made work and fine art. Since then he dis­cov­ered a num­ber of issues that were lim­it­ing artists’ success:

• A com­mon mind­set that encour­aged artists to see them­selves as less than valu­able and rein­forced their self-view as starv­ing and strug­gling artists.
• Reliance on the ran­dom nature of art fair and  gallery sales as their pri­mary source of income was not work­ing and also rein­forced the starv­ing artist image.
• There was not a reli­able busi­ness or mar­ket­ing model for artists that could give them the tools to brand and mar­ket them­selves and their art consistently.
• They were not up to date with the changes in mar­ket­ing and gen­er­ally tended resist those changes because of the tech­nol­ogy  and time involved in the learn­ing process.
• Their view of mar­ket­ing was stuck in an out­dated and aban­doned model and that did not lend itself to the nuances of the work­ing artist life.
• When faced with the choice of mar­ket­ing vs. stu­dio work they always chose stu­dio work due largely to an absence of cur­rent busi­ness tools avail­able to the solo busi­ness owner.

Bill works from his home office and draws on a large net­work of busi­ness col­leagues pos­sess­ing a deep array of skills. As a result, he can tai­lor his pro­grams, work­shops and writ­ing to the spe­cific needs of work­ing artists.

How to use this site.

This site is built on the pow­er­ful blog­ging pro­gram Word­Press which for quick updates and post­ing. There are spe­cific orga­ni­za­tional to be aware of in order to help you nav­i­gate eas­ily through  the site.

The con­tent of the site is orga­nized around cat­e­gories and pages. The cat­e­gories and page titles are designed to reflect par­tic­u­lar sub­ject areas rel­e­vant to work­ing artists.

CATEGORIES — are like file fold­ers that hold both posts and arti­cles that fit the cat­e­gory. The cat­e­gories are iden­ti­fied by the tabs along the top of the page. More detailed nav­i­ga­tion is along the right side bar.

• Work­shops & Events — An on going com­pi­la­tion of work­shops and events that catch my eye or are sub­mit­ted to me for inclusion.
• Fea­tured Artists — Artists who have demon­strated not only out­stand­ing skills in their medium but also have embraced the scary world of using the inter­net and other cut­ting edge tools to sell their work. A new artist is fea­tured monthly with weekly inter­views and daily show­ing of their work. They also become life­time mem­bers of The ARTISTScenter.
• Mar­ket­ing Mon­day — A weekly series of arti­cles with a focus on pro­vid­ing con­cepts and tools to help artists develop and mar­ket themselves.
• Tech Tips — This is a col­lec­tion of arti­cles and tips rang­ing from using social media to blogs to use­ful software.

PAGES - are used to orga­nize one or more series of com­mon post­ings orga­nized to pro­vide a sin­gle loca­tion for all rel­e­vant infor­ma­tion. For exam­ple the Work­shops & events page holds list­ings of all such hap­pen­ings until they occur and the Arti­cles page holds fea­tured arti­cles that are par­tic­u­larly worth reading.

A word about com­mu­nity and you

As I men­tioned above this site is designed to encour­age sup­port and com­mu­nity for work­ing visual artists, so I invite and encourge your con­tri­bu­tions. You can con­tribute in the fol­low­ing ways:

• EVENTS — send me an e-mail con­tain­ing the infor­ma­tion you would like posted, it must be related to visual art.
• ARTICLES — Send me an e– mail with your pro­posal, mak­ing sure to include a descrip­tion of how it might fit into this site and ben­e­fit work­ing artists.
• COMMENTS — Com­ment­ing on an exist­ing post or arti­cle is an excel­lent way to cre­ate dis­cus­sion and con­ver­sa­tion around a spe­cific sub­ject. I encour­age you to com­ment by click­ing on the “com­ment”  label found just below each post.

SUBSCRIPTION OPTIONS

There are two ways to sub­scribe to this blog both forms  are located  just below my pro­file photo to the right:

• Sign up to be on our list using the top form,  you’ll receive our newslet­ter, early noti­fi­ca­tion of work­shops and dis­counts only avail­able to list members.
• Sign up to receive reg­u­lar updates using our RSS feed by using the form just below the newslet­ter form. You can sub­scribe to this blog using your favorite feed reader through RSS . To receive your feed through your favorite feed reader click here. If you have no idea what RSS is read this — What is RSS and How Do I Use It?
  

CONTACT ME: you can send your pro­pos­als and event list­ings to me at : bill@theartistscenter.com

All work con­tained on this site is licensed using the Cre­ative Com­mons Net­work click the link below to read the require­ments for using any of the arti­cles posted:

The ARTISTS­cen­ter by Bill Weaver is licensed under a Cre­ative Com­mons Attribution-No Deriv­a­tive Works 3.0 United States License.