Last weekend I had a booth at the Garland Art Made Here art festival. I have been doing a ton of markets and events lately, and I really like interacting and talking with everyone who stops by my booth! When I was looking up this event to determine whether or not I should participate, I didn’t find a lot of information on the vendor experience, so I want to share my experience so that it can hopefully help someone in the future.

One of the big questions I get when I do events is how to do events as an artist, so I’ll share more about each type of event I do to help you go from starving artist to thriving artist. Scroll down for my artist market checklist so you don’t forget anything for your first market!

Garland Art Made Here 2025 Vendor Experience

This was my first time with a vendor booth at this particular event. Here are some things I loved about it:

• The booth fee is relatively inexpensive compared to other art markets ($100 in 2025)
• The fee INCLUDES a tent, table, and 2 chairs! What a dream! Usually I’m huffing my tent and tables from the car, so it was really nice to not have to drag my tent out, put it together, etc. I did still bring one of my tables out, but it was still a time and energy saver to have those things provided.
• This was an art/creative-focused event, so the attendees had an eye and a mind for art – this is great for sales!
• There was good communication from the event coordinator leading up to the event.

Here are some things to keep in mind:

• This event is geared toward families, with many opportunities for kids to participate in arts and crafts. I had several people coming up to my booth asking for free things since there were other opportunities for freebies and group participation at other booths. I had a community canvas where people could draw on it to add their flair, but I didn’t have something people could create and take away for free, except my business card, ha.
• Because this event was geared toward families, these are not necessarily “art collectors” like you may find at an art show or gallery. If your art is priced high, I believe you would be less likely to sell those pieces. I mostly sold prints at this event. Usually I sell at least a few originals, but not this time.
• The load-in experience could be coordinated better. I wound up having to move the roadblock barrier myself to drive up to my booth to unload even though I arrived well within the load-in time. Not a complaint, just a little bit of a lack of communication and coordination the day of the event. I did know where to go because they sent a map of the booth spaces the week prior to the event, so that was good.
• The vendor parking was kind of far. Nothing really to be done about this, but it really underscores the need for a wagon or an easy way to transport your stuff when the event ends.

Overall, this was a great event! I did well sales-wise, and I would recommend it for local artists, especially those who are new to doing events. It’s nice because they provide a lot for you, and it’s a good atmosphere with live music too.

Doing a Community Canvas

Becuase I knew Art Made Here was a family-oriented event, I wanted to have some kind of element of participation. I considered doing a live painting of the event or painting a portable mural people could take a picure with, but what I ultimately decided to do was loosly draw some flowers on a canvas and have people paint them in with paint pens.

I went with paint pens, because I thought paint and brushes would be too messy, and I didn’t want to have to babysit it the whole time since I was there by myself. I also worried about wind potentially carrying away a wet paint palette. In the photo above, my canvas is actually taped to the easel so it didn’t fly away.

Here are the two types of paint pens I used and why I like one of them more for this:

• Grabie Dual Tip Dot Acrylic Marker – these were perfect. The thick side of the marker made it very easy to color in bigger sections, and the smaller tip was good for lines and details. I think these were also very forgiving with the kids’ small hands too. They are already inky, so you don’t have to push the tip a bunch of times for the ink to come out, know what I mean?
• Grabie Extra Fine Tip Paint Pens – these paint pens are great in general, but for a larger canvas like this, the other ones worked better. The extra fine tip just didn’t work well for coloring in the larger petal areas. I will say that these paint pens are awesome for the price and I have given these as a gift to more than one of my artsy friends. You do have to push the tip to get the paint to flow, but it’s literally like 1-2 pushes and the paint is there unlike other brands that take longer.

And that’s it! Like I said, overall it was a great event, and I would participate again. Let me know what questions you have about doing events in the comments. Good luck to you!