Invitations and getting your event into the Newspaper.

Soooo...........those of you who read yesterdays ramblings will remember I am not feeling too crash hot. I am still feeling pretty crappy, perhaps a bit of blogging will help to distract me form feeling sorry for myself.


As mentioned yesterday I am going to talk about invitations and getting your event into the local news paper. My invitations for my up and coming event are already delivered. My last exhibition was overshadowed by a terrible death in the family about three weeks out from opening night.

My laptop died!!

Yip, I know, I shouldn't joke about things like that. You have no idea how much trouble this caused. Well the less said really the better, but lets just say that the invitations only just made it into the post in time!! I had to settle for creating and printing out my own, which where fine, but not nearly as nice as the ones I had been working on on-line. Needless to say I was really on the ball this time around!! I had them designed, created and delivered six weeks out from opening night. Vistaprint postcards make excellent invitations!! I have used them several times and they always look nice and professional. They often have the postcards offered for free, so it ends up costing you very little, apart from your time and they fit nicely into a larger sized envelope for posting. You can up load your own work which will cost you some where from $3.99 to $7.99 for the image you end up using. Note- you can upload as many images as you like, you will only pay for the one you use.
Once you have ordered one lot you can take advantage of any other offers they send you and order more with out paying anything for the second order, just postage. It pays to be organised and order early because they always send you more offers and you can simply go back into your Vistaprint portfolio and reorder more.  Mine have a photo upload of one of my art works on one side and the invitation write up on the back but you are not limited to this layout, there are lots of different layout options. The actual write up is pretty brief, stick to the basic's.  You want to grab the readers interest straight off. Your reader should be able to pick up everything with a quick glance.
You will be able to write up a full page bio to be displayed at your event for anyone who wants a more in-depth explanation of what you do.

A title and brief explanation, the date, venue, times and any contact details is all that's needed. You may also want to add an RSVP message for catering purposes. The last venue I exhibited at was a Winery here in Marlborough, Highfield Estate, here's a plug for them
http://www.highfield.co.nz/restaurant/
Their food is wonderful and sitting out in the courtyard with a coffee or climbing up to the top of the viewing tower is a nice way to waste a bit of time in the weekends. They support local artists by hosting exhibitions throughout the year.
For my Highfield invitations I cut and pasted a small map form their website into my invitations because I was concerned that some people may have been unsure of its location.
Double, triple, quadruple check EVERYTHING, especially those sneaky am's and pm's. Once they are ordered there is no turning back..........................

If you are exhibiting through a Gallery or established venue that holds regular exhibitions they will inform the local papers about your event. At least that's been my experience to date. If your doing your own thing and exhibiting at a cafe or some other establishment that doesn't have someone officially in charge of running the art side of things you will properly need to do it for yourself.
Contacting the local papers is easy, you can find them all on line and a quick e-mail or phone call is all that's needed. They are normally more than happy to find some news to cover that doesn't involve "Flossy the Three Legged Goat" or "Sam's Giant Spud"  I normally wait until I have set up a few event listings on line so that I can send through a link in the body of my e-mail as well.
I unfortunately live a considerable distance form the venue that I will be exhibiting at next month and will have to interview via the internet and phone but that is a thousand times better than just not bothering at all..............
If there is more than one local paper approach them all! I have never really liked approaching the papers. I find there something quite discomforting about talking about yourself.  But it is important to inform the public if your serious about your art and you want to be taken seriously as an artist and be recognised for what you do.


Well!! that is a disappointingly small amount of text for the amount of time it has taken me to put it together!!
Next time we can talk about Bio's and write ups etc . Its a good idea to print a bio off and get it laminated so it can be displayed at your exhibition as well as any other items of interest such as news paper stories, awards, charity events or any other interesting things you might have been involved in.