Note: Tuesday is Art Planning day. Every Tuesday we will publish an entry geared towards planning, whether it be an art project or a business venture.

In the last entry, we focused on coming up with big, overall themes for your “year of drawings.” Now it’s time to start fine tuning the details, in preparation for getting your brushes dirty and pencils sharpened.

Start breaking down your goals and creating a timeline by asking yourself:

1. How many paintings/drawings will you create per theme? Think about whether these pieces of art will be their own exhibit or if you are working out an “art” problem and will focus on just the best 2 or 3 pieces out of the collection.
2. What sizes/dimensions will each theme be? Are you working towards making bigger pieces and if so, will you jump from a small 16×20″ canvas to a 4×4′ piece, or will you gradually move upwards? Is there a small-canvas competition that you have your eye on (like the typical 20 pieces on 8×8″)? Does your typical customer shop for bigger single pieces or do they look for smaller collections of groupings?
3. How long does it take you to plan a theme,  get ideas for all your drawings, purchase materials, do working sketches? If you’ve planned out a collection of art pieces before, you can use that time as a starting point for your planning. If not, think back to a single piece of artwork that you completed and break down the process – or start taking notes on your next painting. Does your planning process take longer than the actual painting? How often do you revise the final painting itself?
4. Will the commercial aspects of art be an integral part of your planning or not? If you are a fine artist and just draw, then this won’t really play a part in your planning. If, however, you sell your art through commercial venues (like product placement or licensing), will a consistent theme/pattern/style, etc., need to be evident in all of your themes so that you can market all of your drawings and be creating a recognizable brand? This may affect the sizing of your drawings (keeping in a 3/4 sizing ratio, no squares or unique shapes). It may affect the placement of items in your drawings (greeting cards have the most important part of the drawing on the upper third of the card). It may affect the coloring scheme (will a 2-color print job be less expensive than a 4-color print job?).
5. What other things do you have going on? If you have art agents and marketing experts at your beck and call, then you know that you have 100% of your time to dedicate to art. If you are like the majority of artists who are working, painting, marketing, selling, etc., than you know that at least 50% of your  time is dedicated to other “business” things that have nothing to do with holding a brush or doing some plein air painting.

After going through these five questions, you should have a basic timeline for how long 1 painting will take you. If you have a set goal of how many paintings per theme you are going to do, then you can start to figure out how long each theme will take you. Pull out a 2010 calendar and start penciling in when you will tackle each theme. You might choose to do all the fun themes consecutively or alternate between drawing what you know with what you will want to experiment with.

Your overall theme planning may have produced more themes than what fit in one year. Keep those ideas close at hand, however, because they might be beneficial when thinking of artwork for exhibitions or competitions. Knowing that you have a sketch that doesn’t fit into your yearly themes but is the perfect entry for a national art competition will have you one step ahead!

Now that you’ve started to schedule your days, it’s time for the fun of sketching and creating to begin.

Pia