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Risking Your Credit Limit for a Concept — The Smaller Picture pg236–237
Colorful companion to my memoir The Incompetent Psychic
2003
That summer I painted my last three stage sets at Woodminster Amphitheater and vowed if I had to work that hard it would need to be a lot more fun or much more lucrative. I was billing $75 an hour for murals and figured out at the end of that last theatrical debacle I had netted about $14 an hour for painting aerobically on a dangerous scaffold in the blazing sun.
Simple answer was, get more mural jobs. Thing is, the pool of clients is teeny — like maybe one in 10,000 people of means will commission an expensive mural project once in their life. How the hell do you find those few hidden rich people at the exact time they’re looking for an artist? So far luck, magic and word-of-mouth was how I had managed to trip over those gold nuggets on the beach my life is.
Then another idea dropped out of a silver cloud. If I built my own festival booth I could do enough decorative painting on it to advertise my mural business, too. —From Chapter 13
A concept I finally discovered after decades of experimentation is to be discerning about which idea is worth running with. Any freelance creative type person is visited with at least one…