This is just the beginning.. art shows start approaching, and my work room starts expanding into the rest of the house and every table becomes a work surface, every free space along the wall is temporary storage, my couch is now my print matting station..
I can’t get these round shapes and details out of my head – sort of symbolic of the sun. There will probably be many to come over the next couple months…
Started off today with a back-road drive back to my home-base from my hometown before sunrise — my favorite time of the day.
Lots of printing & cutting & mailing to do today. Thanks ya’ll for your orders over the weekend. Sending off a wholesale order to Finland, a couple packages to Denmark, one to the UK, and stateside to Michigan, South Carolina, Texas & New York. It’s kind of cool seeing where my art goes geographically.
Also working on some paper cuttings for the upcoming Mid-Winter Art Fair. But first, enjoying a quiet hour on my couch with a cup of coffee and my laptop making weird colorful animated images… Til next time.
Many thanks to Cynthia of http://wordsandimagesbycynthia.com for awarding me with a Kreative Blogger award as part of her acceptance of her award! An award presented to bloggers by bloggers, the rules of acceptance are: (1) Thank the blogger who presented me with the award. (2) Post a photo of the award. (3) Share ten things about me that readers don’t know. (4) Choose six people to present this award to. (5) Let the six know that they have been awarded!
I’m not really blog-savvy enough to be able to fulfill all the rules of this acceptance, but it seems like fun, so I’ll do it halfway, and bend the rules by linking to some artist friends I’ve met at various shows that I’ve meant to link to and haven’t yet..
So… Ten (possibly weird, random, and useless) Things You May Not Know About Me:
1. I’m a cancer (astrologically speaking).
2. I took 10 years of piano lessons interspersed with violin, flute, and bass guitar, and rarely practiced. Totally regret not practicing now..
3. I like to keep my tube of toothpaste very clean and always squeezed from the bottom.
4. When I was young I couldn’t stand the way my toes felt pressed together inside shoes.
5. I spent half my day today catching up on emails that I needed to respond to while sitting underneath a down comforter set up like an igloo on my couch (I totally fell asleep and am now doing this instead of finishing my emails).
6. I love to cook for people.
7. My photograph (at age 14) is in a college physics textbook demonstrating some law of sound waves or something. I’ll dig it up one of these days.
8. I’ve had the same winter boots since 1997. I just bought a new pair, but I’ll probably still wear the old ones anyway.
9. I had to hit the ground once during a drive-by shooting (wrong place, wrong time). Ahh, Brooklyn..
10. I don’t really watch TV, but I totally love The Golden Girls. I’ve seen every episode.
6 awesome artists I’ve befriended at shows (there’s more that I’ll surely link to down the road):
Michael Hamlin-Smith – ceramist
Dolan Geiman – contemporary art with a southern accent
Lisa Mistiuk – oil painting
Kent Ambler – print maker
Thomas Spake – glass artist
Yvonne Miller – mixed media
Since I don’t have anything that I’m working on at the moment completely finished and scanned, I’ll post another progress photo. This one was sort of for fun.. and I think I really like the way it came out. Still need to add some finishing touches. (Try to ignore the coffee stains on the temporary white copy paper background…)
I just finished cutting the top layer of this paper cutting.. Next step is to add color & background. It’s Sunday night. This coming Friday I’ll be in Kansas City setting up for the 1st day of the Plaza Art Fair. Stress central… I have a bunch of stuff in the works, and I’m racing to finish it up after a busy weekend away from my workspace with family (including a new niece!). Coffee pot set to brew at 3:30am… I work best during the dark hours anyway…
..Out of my new workroom which was clean.. for a minute.. (This is actually still relatively clean to what it can be). I’m in full-on production mode. I’ve got a bunch of new buttons, cards, and prints in the works. Plus, a couple commissions still in the pipeline (on their way out soon!) And of course, lots of new originals coming that hopefully I’ll be able to extract out of my head and put onto paper (into paper?). Having a new workspace has been challenging — I seem to most easily “create” in a space that I’ve comfortably broken in, and I guess it’s going to take a bit of time to get used to these new walls, windows, outside sounds, etc.. I feel it coming on, and it has no choice because I’ve got the Spinach Festival AND the Lawrence Fall Arts & Crafts Festival coming up on the 10th and 11th of September, respectively. Plaza Art Fair follows two weeks after that. Oktoberfest, Maple Leaf Fest, and Artclectic soon thereafter. This pretty much equates to major stress and lack of attention to my website. Things ain’t always easy, but I wouldn’t trade this for the world. Looking forward to winter when I’ll be able to work on some other things that I’ve got grinding in my brain.
I’m not leaving my desk for the next six days as I prepare for my trip to Des Moines, Denver, Colorado City, and Boulder… Being this busy and booked for so many out of town shows in a row is new for me, and I’m figuring out that I did not prepare myself nearly enough during the slower months at the beginning of the year. So now, my fingers are burning rubber as I cut and cut and cut…
5 x 7 inch paper cutting.
I’m spending today trying to get some card printing done, shipping out Etsy orders, cutting out baby birds, and tracking storms on the weather channel. Luckily, I’m only getting rain and thunder, but midday, I was glued to the TV as tornadoes were being tracked on the ground in the Kansas City area which is only an hour away. When you live in the midwest, the weather demands your attention.