I finally finished up my last prints and cards for my upcoming Queen West Art Crawl 2025 exhibit. I’ve previously written about all the takeaways from my first exhibit here and there are things I’ve thought about the second time around that are changes from my previous time.

1. Not bringing every single piece of art with me. One of the major pains for some outdoor art shows is hauling your stuff in and out, especially when you can’t drive on to the grass. What I realized is that I won’t sell every single piece with me, and so I only need a certain number of originals to have on me at a time.
2. Keeping energy levels up. I’ll be expecting to be on my feet all day today which might be a bit more difficult for me this year! Having snacks and something to eat with me will be important. I’ll also be wearing compression socks which I think will help with my sore feet.
3. Easing the check out process. There were so many people at certain times that I had sincerely wished I had some kind of barcode system. I learned that Square has a way to generate SKU numbers and then I can use Avery to make free labels with barcodes. I’m hoping this will be a lot easier this year and will make payment a lot less of a hassle!
4. Less worry on social media. I’ve done a lot less of social media this year and perhaps that might be a bad thing. But I’ve learned that most of my sales come from in person visits. The work behind social media is a lot, especially for videos, and I felt that I’d rather focus on making my art rather than making videos.
5. Less worry of the little things. I think for my first show, I had originally thought precisely about how the art descriptions had to be parallel with the plastic, and I realized that people were just turning the art pieces around to read them easily anyways. So sweating about the tiny issues is really not a good use of time nor is it really that important anyways.
6. Making a helper to do list. I haven’t yet done this but it was very helpful in previous art shows. Putting a list of things to do and the order to them was really helpful so I wouldn’t have a bunch of people who were well intending asking me what to do, while I was trying to also help set up.
7. Having options to help support the artist. As this show allows me to have reproductions, I’ve thought a bit about how people are losing their jobs and that having more lower priced options might be a better idea. I’ll see how that pans out as I’d still love people to help support my work even if they can’t support buying originals.
8. Being true to your message. I’m really interested to see every time what hits home with other people and what other people like. So I’m curious to see what people’s reactions are to my newer pieces. I don’t think everyone will like everything, but staying true to what I want to create is important. I have still sometimes thought about what people like to buy, but I’ve also included some odder pieces this time as experiments. Part of me thinks that art is all unique and it is always impossible to figure out what people will like.
9. Keeping a live printed inventory. I also still need to do this, but having a print out of cards and prints was something rather helpful last time so I could tell people if we still had certain originals in stock.

So there you have it, the next things I’m learning from the show and hope this helps you prepare for yours!