'Gross' Print Fair

Katie and Abbey organised a print fair as the second 'Gross Studio' venture at Hyde Park Book Club which gave me the opportunity to try and sell some work there. I also went and manned a table with a few other people so generally got an idea of what it's like to do print fairs. It feels like something that lots of illustrators do so I thought I should give it a try, but my work typically doesn't involve printed work, or even pieces of work which work as items that make sense without a context. This meant I ended up making stuff specifically for the print fair so it didn't really feel like my work, it became a little contrived.

I do like the print but it isn't really something I could use for anything else. I also don't really like having to make a big run of prints/printing the same thing over and over again, I tend to get fed up and careless which means the prints end up being registered poorly or smudged/ dirty etc. I also found it difficult to price things. I think it's easy to underestimate the value of your own work. the fact that these prints were all a bit scruffy was frustrating as well because it meant I had to account for that in the price. Another factor that affected the price was the location of the print fair, which is a very student orientated place, meaning I couldn't really get away with charging the typical price for an A5 lino print (probably about £20-25) because students don't have any money (especially not to buy art with). as a result of these factors I ended up charging £8. Some of the prints were two colour and whilst I considered charging more for those I ended up charging the same price because the two colour ones tended to be more smudged and messy whilst a lot of the one colour ones were neater. it was easier to just come up with one price. 

Doing the print fair did give me the incentive to try and screen print some t-shirts as well and it turned out being way more straightforward than I thought it might have been. I actually found it a lot easier than screen printing onto paper. I was really happy with the t-shirts as well and sold a couple. I would also probably try it again.

Design that I printed onto t shirts

I do find that the overall experience of working a print fair isn't really my bag I don't think. My work doesn't naturally sit in that realm and I find it pretty boring sitting around all day manning a table. I'm also not very good that the whole social side of it and still kind of feel a bit awkward talking about my work/ selling myself in that context. It always feels kind of weird sitting there on display whilst people walk around, I never know what to say. Although that's my problem and I expect I would get over it if I did enough of them, there isn't really an incentive for me to keep pushing it seeing as its unlikely this is the direction my practice will go in. Having said that I am doing Jamie's 'Print stuff' in York with my house mates but I think that will probably be the last one for a while. I am going to print another run of the lino prints though and make a real concerted effort to be careful and neat when I'm printing them so I can charge more as 'Print stuff' is likely to attract clientele with more money and who are definitely willing to spend it on art.