This week is the last of the LAN/Onlincolnshire workshops. Yesterday we invited Paul Wilson from the Onlincolnshire network to offer advice on making an income from blogging – useful for participants not familiar with social media at all, and for those of us that already have blogs etc, it was useful to work out how to make the best use for it, although it still seems that it requires a lot of time investment and effort for very little reward, especially initially, but there was an example of a successful blogger that does earn a substantial income, so it is entirely possible as an avenue of generating an income for your expertise.
There was a second last minute drop out for an artists’ talk at The Collection, and I was mistaken for a lecturer.
I’ve been invited to run some after school workshops at local schools, on comics, as part of my illustration practice, and I need a copy of my public liability insurance – not sure which bit of a-n I need to go to find that – please help!
Thursday’s first LAN/Onlincolnshire social media and digital arts workshop went very well indeed! Sarah and I arrived early to set up, and artists were so keen, they’d arrived early! And it was well attended – we had enough artists involved for a small group, and was well received.
I’d planned to do some live tweeting in the gallery space to make use of the recently addition of wi-fi, and it was slow starting. All details have been uploaded to the LAN blog
The workshops are popular and I’ve received interest from others, so I hope to extend some more if possible. I’ve also been invited to deliver some after school comics workshops coming up in May.
Looking forward to this weeks’ workshop, however, and I’ve come up with another idea for something that might become a collaborative project, but we’ll see how much time I have to make it worthwhile!
I don’t really want to create a new gallery, but I don’t seem to be able to insert individual images on here any more!
Yesterday I attended the Lincolnshire Digital Conference 2015 at The Showroom.
As I’m currently working on a KTP with Lincoln Technology Hub, I’d been invited to this event, which transpired to include guest speaker Jason Bradbury, who is now a visiting lecturer at the University of Lincoln, working mostly with Product Design.
However, it was interesting to see what he’s been up to since I met him last year at an alumni event, along with promoting the LAN/Onlincolnshire social media workshops that are now all set to go for tomorrow.
After much stress over the last few weeks, on Friday, I finally had a new fridge freezer installed. After four months of waiting for the Lettings Agents to get that sorted.
And finances have returned to normal (if you can call still having a considerable overdraft and struggling to afford all the random curve balls life keeps throwing at me on a zero hours contract normal).
So I’ve added £36 a-n membership to my ever-growing overdraft, because everything is mostly organised for our first LAN Onlincolnshire Social Media and Digital Workshops, so obvs. I need Public Liability Insurance. I totally forgot to renew membership anyway, as I’m in the process of trying to minimise outgoings by switching dual fuel provider, and I had thought I’d stopped a Direct Debit that went out anyway, leaving me overdrawn on my “good” bank account – the one that I keep in credit to offset my constant reliance on an overdraft.
So I had to waste time ringing up the bank to ask why that had gone out when I’d cancelled it, and they kindly offered £50 to help out – which was just over half the amount that went out. Then some other money went in – some money I’ve been waiting for all month.
I know, it’s boring, but these workshops will hopefully pay off my overdraft, along with funding applications I’m still working on – which I can’t afford not to be successful with now.
Between organising this, and Bikeability Instructing all week at my son’s old school, I went for a post grad open day over the weekend, and it seems I’ve applied to do a masters. Not in fine art, though, it’ll be to follow the more commercial arm of my illustration practice. I can’t guarantee that being an artist will ever pay itself off, so I’m taking the most economically viable option. I do, however, hope to continue to use the knowledge gained to feed into any fine art projects I may pursue, along with the LAN, as I will always be a joint honours grad, and that will always inform my work. I’ve watched too many fine art post grads fade into working at Tescos to risk that outcome. If things start to change for the better, I’ll be able to continue with fine art projects, but with the terrorist threat of Universal Credit and no guarantee of having the time to do anything, we’ll see.
The Ayscoughfee proposal has taken a back step of late, however, I need to finalise the budget and gloss over it, along with a funding application for the LAN between doing the workshops.
