Life of Art 2015: the year in review

Happy New Year! I hope your 2016 is full of laughter, adventure, and excellent company.

For the past 308 Fridays, I've been tracking my efforts to create a life of art for myself. Here's a look at what I accomplished in 2015.

I created 16 new patterns for my shop Rocklawn Arts:








A welcome new addition to Zazzle this past year were Collections. They allow me to curate groups of related products together. For example:

Cool Custom Calendars
by Claire E. Skinner

Purple Geometric Gift Wrap Supplies
by Claire E. Skinner

Bold Custom Fabrics
by Claire E. Skinner

I created 19. See All of my Collections together and click on any you want to see more of.

I added 2703 products to my shop Rocklawn Arts, and

10 new product types:

•Table Runners

•Fabrics

•Water Bottles

•Wine Totes

•Samsung Galaxy S6 Cases

•Accent Pillows

•iPhone 6 Battery Cases (alas, no direct link to them all available but they are intermingled with the iPhone 6 Cases. Most if not all of these are also iPhone 6S compatible.)

•Magnetic Invitation 2016 Calendars

•iPad Air 2/iPad Air Folio Cases. There are many more on the first couple of pages of the iPad Cases when sorted for "Newest."

•Pillowcases

Though I have been focused on adding more and more products to my shop over the past years, I actually culled a tremendous amount in 2015 in an effort to streamline my shop and make it more attractive to search engines. It's still too early to tell how it's going, and I still have a lot of work to do updating descriptions, tags, and the like. In the meantime, it's a process I consider worth doing to create a better experience for potential customers, making it easier for people to find what they want.

The more fun life of art experiences in 2015 were the numerous exhibits, museums, gardens, and houses I toured. Tallying them up, I think it only amounts to 10 days spread through the year, but they were soul lifting days. I need to make time for more of them in future. Visiting Frederic Edwin Church's house, Olana, was a definite highlight as was an exhibit of Van Gogh.

As usual, I watched some Creative Live workshops though mainly in the first half of the year.

I imported most of my photographs into Lightroom and look forward to sharing more of them as I get the hang of the program and develop a workflow.

After all, I created over 3000 photographs and 56 videos in 2015.

How was your year? What would you like to do more of in 2016?


8 years ago on TTaT: No more hibernating