An idea to promote Etsy and a bit of progress on my painting

Lately, because I'm so busy with other things, I've limited my painting to one day a week. Which doesn't mean I don't paint on the other days. I do, but I don't work on my bigger paintings. Because I don't have a studio and work in the kitchen, I need to cover everything before I can start dribbling and spraying, so before I do that I need to know that I have at least a few hours to keep working.

Yesterday, I started too late. So by the time I was really getting into it, I had to get the kids from school. I wished I'd done more, but I'm afraid it has to wait again till next week. Kinda frustrating.

Nevermind. This is where I got last week:

After looking at it for a whole week, I felt it was a bit too dark in some places and could do with some brightening up. And then my eye fell on my spray inks. Aha. What if I used those ...?

Oops! The colour was stronger than I'd expected. But since yellow is one of my absolute favorite colours, I didn't mind.

Decided not to use the face that was there beside the tree, and paint a bird instead...

And this is where I got. Not much further, but at least now I know which way I want to go with it. Looking forward to next Thursday!

And now for something else (read on if you have an Etsyshop please ....):
As I mentioned in my last post, I've been brooding on an idea how we can help eachother promote our Etsyshops. I started thinking about it after Maria was so kind to feature my Etsyshop on her blog. A lot of us have an Etsyhop, and most of us would be happy with more sales, right? And we usually have blogs and Facebook and Twitter (well, not me ....) too, all with different followers and also "people from the outside world" .... Meaning: people who are not artists themselves. Before I started a blog last year I had no idea there was such a thing as Etsy. And I think a lot of people in our environment don't know it either. Now that I have been studying Etsy a bit more I'm really amazed by all the beautiful and unique things you can find on there.

Sooo, to make a long story short: I think in order to make more sales, it's not enough to promote our shops on Etsy, we need to get the word out in the world. And we can help eachother with this so that it's a win-win-situation for all.

How do I want to do that? Well, the idea I have in my head, is that I create a separate page on my blog with a Mr Linky. The linkylist will stay up until the 31st of March, and in that time you can add the link to your etsyshop. On the first of April (and no, this is no April fool's day ☺), I will send you the links to 4 etsyshops from other participants. You commit to doing a separate feature on each of these shops during the month of April. One a week preferably. Meanwhile, 4 other participants will be featuring your shop on their blog during the month of April. I will let you know the links to their blogs.

Hmmm, I'm not sure I'm explaining this the right way. This is one of the times that I'm having trouble with English not being my motherlanguage. If only I could explain it in Dutch ... ;-)

But anyway, I guess you get the idea. So what I would like to know is whether you would be interested in something like this. It's free promotion for your shop, you have something to talk about on your blog, and who knows how many interesting shops you'll discover by participating..... Please let me know what you think.

I'll end this very long post with another oneliner

Linking this to Paint Party Friday. This week is the Paint Party Friday Auction Blog Hop, to benefit the Sandy Hook Elementary School. So you really need to go and have a look there!

Hope you're having a lovely Friday, and will enjoy a beautiful weekend. Thanks for being here! ♥ ♥ ♥