I must be on an art kick. Today I discovered Etsy.com, a sort of online store/eBay for the handmade hipster crowd. The stuff on there is gorgeous and all of it handmade. I’ve especially enjoyed the Black Apple store, though that’s probably because the artist, Emily, has her own blog. To the left is her Anais print, which is still available for $13. I like the way it’s printed on a fabric. It reminds me of this painting done on an old book cover, which is just a cool concept.

Seth Godin talked about Emily, how she just graduated with an art degree and has her own blog and MySpace profile and Godin guesses she’s made more than $20,000. [Every time a dollar amount comes out people start to pay attention, though you also have to realize she’s sold more than 800 items, only two of which were over $100 (neither over $200) and only a small percentage over $50), and has to make most of them herself (though she also has a fair number of prints and the like that I assume she has to order from somewhere). She’s probably made a decent amount of money, but she’s also a talented artist and obviously a hard worker.] Godin’s point was that the Internet is raveling, which I think he intends to mean that it’s all coming apart–the giant structures that make famous people famous and keep unknown people lik Emily unkown. Though Godin says raveling means the same thing as unraveling, I read it to mean to opposite–that things are coming together for unknown people like Emily. How many artists could do what she’s doing 20 years ago?

Continue reading Etsy.com, Black Apple and Raveling →

This has to be the funkiest, weirdest, coolest idea: One Thousand Paintings.

The guy made 1,000 individual, unique paintings all featuring a different number, 1-1,000. They’re all painted in the same style, in the same font, just a different number on each one. He one made one of each, and he’s selling them based on some mathematic formula where the lower the number the more it costs and the more paintings sold the more expensive the remaining paintings get.

So painting 960 is $40. Painting 16 is $295.20.

It’s a pretty brilliant idea. So far he’s sold 258 paintings. At $40 each that’s more than $10,000, and of course most of the paintings have sold for more than $40. The math-inclined can check out his formula themselves and figure out how much he stands to make.

I love ideas like this. Of course coming up with them and pulling them off is the hard part. I’m tempted to buy one, but I have no idea what I’d do with it and I can’t decide what number to pick (and I’m cheap, so I’d be looking at the high numbers, which really limits my choices).

Update: I bought one. #985. Call me a sucker, but I’m buying inspiration. I love the artistic and mathematical ideas behind it, and just the downright cleverness. Plus I like the idea of being one of a thousand people to own one. I’m in good company. See if you can guess why I picked 985.

Update 2: Turns out I didn’t get #985. With the flood of traffic PayPal hasn’t been fast enough in verifying funds, so somebody else bought #985 and their funds verified before mine did. So they get the painting. Doh.

Now that the lowest price is over $100, it’s a bit rich for me, so I won’t try again. I have noticed the sales have slowed (it’s at 449 sold right now, it was at 401 last night, down from the 10 per hour the site was doing for a while), and I’d guess it’s due to the rising cost. It’s an interesting little experiment, and I’m curious if the continually rising cost will mean fewer and fewer sales. Or will the limited availability kick in and make that cost worth it?

Oh, and for the record, I picked #985 because I started blogging on December 5, 1998. 98-5. It’s a stretch, I know, but my wife’s birthday was sold and my daughter’s was too expensive. And 1985 is a fun year, immortalized in that Bowling for Soup song and Back to the Future.