ADVERTISING, ARTWORK AND MARKETING

All my good intentions expressed in last week's post came to very little, in spite of much better weather and light conditions this week. I did a little work on the two tall ships paintings. One is going to be of the two Danish full-rigged ships "Georg Stage" and "Danmark", the other is going to be a composition of various distant vessels, on a sloping horizon, viewed from the deck of another tall ship, parts of the rigging of which will be foreground features. The sea will be lumpy. I still hope to have these finished by Christmas, if only as some kind of target date for completion.

I'm taking out advertising space in the RYA magazine (which should be out round about now) and in the Aberdeen-based Press & Journal in the run-up to Christmas. I have to remind people that I'm still here, although the financial benefits of such campaigns are difficult to quantify and seldom immediate. I know of people who cut out adverts for products which interest them, tuck them away somewhere, and use them to contact the suppliers months, sometimes years, afterwards.

The fact that I am able to afford such extravagances as newspaper and magazine advertising is due in no small way to a multiple painting sale which I was able to conclude earlier this past week. As well as improving my bank balance (which had a distinct reddish hue about it until the sale took place), I can now issue a cheque for the prints which my friendly downtown graphics firm has produced for me. This also meant the application of quite a few more red dots on the Gallery pages of the website http://www.tait-gallery.co.uk/. (Feel free to take a look - comments, good or bad, are always welcome!).

One of the maketing gurus, whose advice I occasionally heed, persuaded me that it would be a good idea to open a Googlemail account, as this can convey certain benefits in terms of online marketing, if one goes about it in the correct manner. I duly obliged, and I now have another email address (jimtait18@googlemail.com) and a profile, although I still have other interactive things to set up, in order to reap the rewards of using this facility. I think I should connect it to this blog somehow, although I have yet to discover how.

My faithful old printer (which I paid £15 for second-hand about two years ago) died last weekend, and, realising that death in this instance was terminal, I ordered a new Epson multifunctional device from Staples last Sunday. It duly arrived on Thursday (not bad for a remote location like Shetland) and I am now in the process of learning how all the bells and whistles work! I hope that your life is campanological and insufflative this incoming week!