Affordable art
A chat with Dawna Gardner, founder of Blue Collar Painter in Wayne.
Founded: January 2008
Employees: None
Startup costs: $2,500
Projected revenue, year one: $7,000
Projected revenue, year two: $10,000
Contact: 685-3613
153 Pond Rd., Wayne 04284
www.bluecollarpainter.com
What kind of paintings do you do?
I do portraits. I do pets and portraits of people, and my slogan is “affordable paintings of your favorite things.” I can also do house portraits. But everything is from photographs. I don’t have people come in and sit live. I wasn’t trained for that — in fact, I have no formal training. I’m self-taught. But the people will look exactly like they do in the photograph so I always ask, “Do you love this photograph? Because that’s what your painting is going to look like.”
Why have a painting that looks like a photograph — why not just have a photograph?
There’s something about a painting. If you love art and you love that look of oil painting or watercolor, because I do both, it’s just, there’s just nothing like it. It’s an heirloom kind of thing, too. I did one of my son laying in bed with his bear when he was six years old and he will hang that in his child’s nursery when he gets older. He’s 13 now, but it’s one of those paintings that everyone loves when I take that with me [to art shows].
What is your price range?
The blue collar part is my schtick. It’s so affordable — I don’t know if you’ve ever looked online and looked at gallery portraits, they start sometimes at $2,000. Or they have these sitting fees for $500 and then they start the painting, and I know that I can create a painting from a photograph that looks just as good if not better than those. So my prices start, for a person, 11” x 14”, single person is $175. For pets, my 8” x 10” size is $95.
Why are you able to charge less than other artists?
Well, probably because it’s new to me — not new to me, I’ve been painting for 10 years — but trying this [business] out. I want to work, I want to get better at it, the more work I do, the better I get, and people are very happy with the price. And I’m able to do it because I’m married. My husband has his job so we’re giving this a five-year shot. And I can paint pretty fast.
From start to finish, I can do an 8” x 10” pet portrait in probably three days. But a person is different. It’s more tedious and you have to get it right, so those prices are higher. Right now, I want to be known as someone who can paint really well. And they don’t have to, you know, sell their first born in order to own a painting. Eventually the prices will raise, but they’ll never go to the gallery prices. I just don’t see that.
How do you market the business?
I advertise in a local paper, I buy a $40-$60 ad, I run it once a month. And I paint at Petco in Augusta, so I’ll go in there and I spend the entire day painting pets. Right in public. And people are fascinated by that, and it makes people stop and watch.
I’ll do paintings for people so that they’ll hang the paintings there with cards. My hairdresser — I painted her two cats for her. So she has the paintings of her cats in the salon and people come in and I’ve gotten paintings from that.
Where did you get the idea for the business?
I worked in an art gallery down in Plymouth, Mass., for two years. People would come in — and [the owner’s] work is astounding, seriously, beautiful — and they would want to buy his painting. And Plymouth, Mass., is a blue collar town, so people would leave kind of upset over the fact that they couldn’t buy his work. So they would buy prints of it or something smaller. They also used to come in and ask if [he] would [paint] people or pets, and he didn’t — he just did scenery and boats.
So I started thinking, because I was doing people and pets myself on my own for fun, and my boys — as soon as they were born, I started drawing them and learning to paint. Going into a gallery and buying a piece of art is one thing, but to actually have [a painting] of your own family members or your grandparents or your children, that is so much more.
Interview by Kerry Elson
New Entrepreneurs profiles young businesses, 6-18 months old. Send your suggestions and contact information to editorial@mainebiz.biz.
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