I'd rather not spend $5000 on your painting, thanks.

I've been spending time on Etsy, lately. The website where people sell all sorts of handmade stuff. Great website, lots of things I've put in my "favorites" file, but only a few things I've ever bought. Anyway, this site is HUGE. Full of all sorts of great (and horrible) stuff. And pretty hard for me to navigate some things.

Like jewelry. How do you manage to do a web search on this site for "not ugly, tacky jewelry, and not stuff I won't like" ? There is a lot of chaff to get through for a few bits of wheat. I recently bought a great necklace from this seller.
But her crochet stuff is listed smack dab in the middle of a lot of boring crocheted jewelry. I can't even remember how I found her. I certainly didn't go in there with "crochet" and "necklace" in my list of search terms.

There are so many little gems of shops on Etsy, but it takes a lot of time to find them. Like this one with animal silhouette pictures and handmade stuffed animals. How cute is that?

And then there is the artwork. Original artwork. Thousands of pieces of oil paintings alone. Just for fun I ordered them from most to least expensive. Let's just say the $100,000 pieces are not encouraging. And that at almost every price, the naked woman's body art is....meh. And then at the $200 range, where I could seriously consider a purchase, again, some horrible stuff, and some cute things. One woman does a still life painting every day - I read about her in some magazine and accidentally stumbled on her page on Etsy.

I've moved from general oil paintings to still lifes, in the $100-$200 region. Not sure why, but I think I like the black and dark colors in many of them, with the surprise of orange for a piece of fruit, or sky blue on a bowl. I guess you need to go into Etsy with some pretty specific items in mind, and then it isn't so overwhelming.

(20 minutes later)

Ok, I went back to my still lifes on Etsy, and realized what I need to do. I searched on one type of fruit, I chose the lemon, and there they were. The super realistic, the too dark, the ones I thought were boring, the ugly, the intriguing. It was easy to find ones I liked and see what else the artists did. And it turns out many different artists do this "one painting a day" thing, and there are actually a lot of $35-50 still lifes I like. A lot. How cool.