Tag Archives: art

my week in art

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i haven’t had much to report artwise for a while, but this past week had some activity that i want to share.

this week i did two things i want to celebrate myself for: the first was that i entered a few pieces into the art2life international online juried art exhibition. yes, at the very last minute, literally, but i did it. an online art show might not sound like a big deal but actually following through and entering anything in any show is a big deal for me. i’ve had several shows this year i’ve wanted to submit to that have come and gone, mostly cuz i didn’t feel like i had anything that was “finished” that i felt good enough about. well this time i just said fuck it and i entered some pieces anyways. i’ve been part of the art2life world for more than a year now and i just missed out on entering it last year so i figured, why not? it was $40 to enter up to 3 pieces; sadly i couldn’t settle on a third and get it photographed in time so i only sent in 2. (serves me right for waiting til the last minute.) but dammit i did it. (pat on my own back.) i certainly don’t expect to win anything (there are cash prizes and it is juried by a gallerist from NYC) but who knows what might come from it. maybe nothing but it was a baby step and i took it. so yay.

these are the two pieces i chose to enter. i’ve posted both on my instagram before but haven’t put either up for sale. at the time i made them, i wasn’t really sure i liked either and wasn’t sure they were done. but they’ve been sitting in my studio for several months now and when i scanned the room for recent work, they just jumped out at me.

untitled blue – acrylic on canvas board (10×10″)
releasing guilt – mixed media on bristol board (14×17″)

the second thing is that i did yet another free taster online course from another online art guru that has a longer expensive class. this one was called 5 days to jaw dropping art. jessica serran who is based in prague is the artist/coach and she takes you through a lot of self-examination of your fears around why you aren’t making the art you know you want to/can. it’s kind of more art therapy than art instruction – there’s a lot of journaling involved – but the prompts were interesting and thought-provoking. i tuned in live all 5 days but have only managed to complete the first 2 days of exercises; thankfully i have more time with the replays and a partially completed piece so i guess we’ll see what happens. but when i signed up for it i wasn’t even sure i had the time to tune in every day cuz this has been a busy work week. so i’m patting myself on the back for watching the lives and trying to engage and wanting to follow through. hopefully i can get through the rest of the week’s exercises this weekend when i have more time.

where my jaw dropping art piece stands now – acrylic on bristol board that’s been torn up and glued back together onto a piece of cardboard (14×18”)

i like taking these free teaser courses because, well, they are free. but also because each artist-teacher has a different approach and conveys some different – and many of the same – nuggets about making art, having an art practice, overcoming your inner critic, developing a style, and creating an art business. i guess i keep hoping that if i hear these things enough they will sink in and i will make some progress. today was the last day of this one and as they all are, the day’s live was mostly focused on selling the paid program. hers is a 4 month deep dive with a step by step plan and regular coaching calls and some bonuses for those who sign up early. it’s around $2k for those 4 months and she has a bunch of payment plans. (i’ll add that none of them are as good as paying the full amount up front using paypal credit which gives you 6 months interest free to pay it off, which is how i did the art2life spark program last fall.)

i also keep hoping that one of these teachers will resonate enough with me to want to really invest the money that i don’t have to try one of these longer programs, to see if it would help me break through whatever my blocks are to build my art business back up. i liked nick wilton (art2life) enough to do the short (and cheaper, around $500) 3 week spark class, and i did feel at the time like it helped and gave me some momentum. i learned a few things but mostly it kept me in the studio every day with exercises that helped loosen me up and get the creative juices flowing. you’ll probably remember i applied for a scholarship to his CVP program, the longer 3 month course that cost around $2400, but i was not selected. and i just couldn’t justify that amount of money at the time when my pet biz was really slow and i was barely making ends meet.

i’m in a little different place right now financially – despite my dogwalking schedule thinning, my petsitting schedule has been in overdrive for the past many months so i’ve banked some savings – but $2k for jessica’s 4 month keep your ass in the studio program still feels hard to commit to – especially when the pet biz is so busy. and until i go back and watch the replays of the last few days’ lives and finish the exercises, i won’t know if i feel like i really resonate with her style. so i guess we’ll see after this weekend. but i’m still really glad i managed to do what i’ve done with the free 5-day class.

ok, so i guess that means it was “good” week in the studio? i dunno. it was definitely better than it has been recently. i’ll take that as a win. hope y’all had a good week and happy weekend!

it’s been a minute

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yeah, april and may whizzed by and i have no art to show for it. i’ve been struggling to have any creative motivation and there have been way too many distractions: weekend getaways, jazzfest, an unholy alliance with amazon (more on that later), and work work work. i should be glad that work has picked back up because it means i’m struggling less to pay my bills, but summer has arrived and it’s heating up and my dogwalking schedule is really stupid right now. (doesn’t geographically flow so i find myself criss crossing town back and forth multiple times a day, spending more time in my car than i am walking dogs.) so it feels, shall we say, not fun right now. petsitting has really picked up too which always complicates my schedule even further. i am grateful for the abundance of work and money but, whew, i am tired.

all of this is to say there’s been less time and energy to even think about art. but i have 3 dogwalking clients leaving me this month (one is going on summer vacation for a few months but will be back in august, and the other two are moving out of state/out of my service area at the end of june), so my daytime schedule is about to get a little slower and i’m hoping i can refocus and get back into the studio with some of that spare time.

in anticipation of hopefully having more time soon, and to try to jumpstart my creativity and get myself excited about making something, i just treated myself to my first ever gel plate for printing. gelli printing has been kind of a craft/scrapbook/collage fad for the past few years and honestly i pretty much resisted even paying any attention to it cuz i’m averse to fads and not into scrapbooking at all, but dammit if it’s not impossible to avoid all the gelli plate printing reels on instagram! and once i started watching a few of them, they of course multiplied and i started finding artists who use gel prints in different ways, as part of their painting or mixed media practice, or who actually seem to do well selling their collages that they make using their gelli prints. sometimes even on canvas. i guess it opened my eyes to the possibilities of using this tool in different ways, some of which might intersect with my recent foray into abstract art.

a couple different companies make gelatin printing plates. (which interestingly enough, are not actually gelatin.) gelli arts is the OG but gel press is a bit more economical, and speedball also makes them in different sizes as well as the other tools used with the technique. i opted to try out the gel press 5″x7″ size first, just to play with and see if i like it. i figure i can use it to make cards and postcards and small prints and if i’m really digging it, i can invest in some larger sizes. i already have multiple brayers on hand and tons of acrylic paint as well as silkscreen ink for paper. and i have oodles of paper to print on. so it’s a relatively lost cost investment in case it doesn’t catch on with me or i get bored with it after a week.

as soon as i’m done with my current dog sit, i’ll have a chunk of time to start playing with it. i look forward to sharing my experiments with it with you!

new artist paint tip!

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i wanted to write a quick post to share a pretty cool deal for artists but i think it’s only good til the end of march, so you need to act fast. and no, i don’t work for them and am not getting anything in return for talking about their product. i’m just someone who is always interested in new art supplies and especially eco-friendly paints and processes, so when i saw a sponsored ad for this company and their paint scroll across my IG feed, i looked into it and ordered some samples.

the company is called tomorrow’s artist and they make premium quality, highly pigmented acrylic paint using leftover paint that was destined for the landfill. “they” are a group of artists, art enthusiasts, makers and marketers who created a proprietary process to turn leftover paint of all kinds into high quality artist paint. you can read more about them on their website or that of their parent company, encore.

the deal they are offering right now is for the month of march, which they are calling artist appreciation month. they are offering buy one get one free on their 4-ounce jars of either standard body or heavy body paint in all colors, and free shipping for all orders regardless of amount. ever curious, i ordered 4 4-ounce jars of standard body, which ended up costing me $15.98 – a pretty great deal considering the prices of other brands. (their normal pricing for a 16-ounce jar of standard body is $19.25.)

i just got the jars of paint an hour ago and opened them right up. the colors are really vivid. i brushed some onto a page in my sketchbook so you could see what they looked like. the standard body is fairly fluid though not quite as much as fluid-body paints, more like basic latex. it brushes on really smooth but has good coverage, at least in the colors i chose. i ordered “bluebird blue,” “oak orange,” “thalia blonde,” and “victoria sunset.” i got the first three but the last one must have been out of stock or something, because instead i received “gaviota gold.” oh well. no explanation was provided, which is a little disappointing but since i’m just sampling their product, i guess it doesn’t matter much.

the only other minor grievance i will note is that the various jars were all filled to different levels, as you can see in the picture above. the “thalia blonde” and “gaviota gold” were not as full as the other two colors, noticeably different. but again, these are meant as testers and i got a good deal so i can’t complain too much. hopefully they don’t do that with the larger jars.

i have to run to work right now but i look forward to playing with these paints and seeing how they interact with the other brands of paint i have, how they layer and mix and dry on various surfaces. but i would say so far i’m pleased with the purchase and am considering getting another order in before the end of the month, maybe to try out some of their heavy body colors. but if you are someone who is invested in trying to be more eco-friendly with your painting life, this might be a good option to investigate and if you order in the next few days before the end of the month, you can take advantage of a pretty good deal to try them out.

ETA: after i posted this and an IG post pointing to this blog post, i got a response from the company apologizing for sending me the wrong color and offering to send me the one i actually ordered. it was just a mistake and they didn’t even realize it had happened. and then they explained to me that the jars they bought to use for the 4 ounce testers turned out to be actually 6-8 ounce jars, so that’s why the fill lines are all different. they didn’t want to waste the jars, so they are using them; and they didn’t want to just put 4 ounces in them cuz they’d look half empty! so they are in fact being extremely generous by filling them up closer to the top!

this is great customer service, to address the issues i brought up right away and to offer to correct their mistake. i just put in another small order for a few of the heavy body paints to compare them to the standard body, so i’ll report back when i get them.

on disappointment

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well, after not really sleeping all weekend and having serious anticipation anxiety, waiting to hear if i got one of the scholarships for the CVP class i mentioned in the previous post… i just got the email that told me i did NOT get in. “overwhelming amount of scholarship applications” blah blah blah. i find it so hard to believe considering how hard it is to even find out that there IS a scholarship for this program. it’s not listed anywhere on their website and they never mention it. i only found out because someone said something about it in the chat during a live call – and even then the official response was just “email us.” but at the same time, it’s no wonder they have a kajillion scholarship applicants because the course is really quite expensive, putting it out of the reach of most working class and/or low income folks. i guess it is geared to those who do have the money for it, as they are a business with a lot of staff and expenses to pay in order to keep the whole a2l empire going. i get it. nick and the whole team are great and deserve to make a good living doing what they do, inspiring artists to overcome their fears and create. i’m just sad to not be joining in the 2023 cohort. it sucks being poor.

i hope the other artists i’ve made facebook friends with who applied got in. many of them are on disability or are retired and living on a fixed income. i’m not, so i get it. but the timing is definitely not right for me to go $2.5K in debt right now so oh well. maybe i’ll try again next year.

it does however i guess free me up from what i was already thinking was going to be an insanely busy spring. not that i’m going to stop painting – i won’t, in fact i’m thinking i’ll go back over the spark videos again and see if i learn anything new. but i do have some busy work weekends of petsitting coming up and i’m trying to scheme my way for a weekend trip in april and festival season is almost upon us. spring in new orleans is a very busy time of year. so i guess i won’t have to forego all of that, as i’d previously thought if i were to be in CVP.

maybe the universe has other plans for me.

i know it’s ok to be disappointed. this too shall pass. back to the proverbial drawing board… or sketchbook.

post mardi gras update

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now that mardi gras has passed, it’s back to business as usual, which for me has been all about my art. (you can see more pics of my mardi gras adventures on my personal instagram, or if you follow me on facebook.) the chaos and whirlwind that is carnival sort of caused me to pause on my actual painting, save for some sketchbook playtime, in favor of costume prep. but i was able to continue to follow along with the live calls on the free art2life workshop in the lead up to the beginning of CVP. (if you don’t know what i’m talking about please go back and read the last post.)

so, i made a decision about CVP. as much as i really want to take it, i could not put myself that much in debt given my current financial status. it just wouldn’t be prudent and would stretch me really thin on a month to month basis in terms of covering my actual expenses, even on a 12 month payment plan. but i discovered a few days ago that they do have a scholarship program for those in financial need, so i applied. i don’t know if they will consider me to be in enough need to give me a scholarship or not, but i really do hope so. i get that there are probably plenty of others with greater financial need than me who are more deserving (folks on disability, or seniors on a fixed income, etc.) but i’ve pretty much been low income my whole life and right now i’m lower than i have been in a long time. i have no way of knowing how many folks they give scholarships to each session, or how many apply, so i don’t know my odds. but i had to go for it.

so it’s in the hands of the universe now. i turned in my application on sunday. (yes, in the midst of total carnival chaos!) the deadline was today at noon. CVP starts with a welcome call tomorrow but they don’t let you know if you got the scholarship until monday, so even if i do get in i will be playing a bit of catch-up. but that’s ok. i will be so elated if they do allow me in. (i didn’t ask for a full scholarship; i offered to pay 25% which is about all i think i can reasonable pay off over the next year. though if my finances change, i’m happy to kick in more.)

so wish me luck or if you are so inclined, visualize me getting in so i can continue this deep dive i’ve started into my creative expression and all the things that have blocked me over the years from truly succeeding as the artist i’ve always known i am. as i’ve mentioned before, last year started this new phase for me, with the (wo)manifesting of the extra rooms in my house which afforded me a studio space in my home. (this is something i never thought would ever happen and i willed it into existence last year!)

and then i took the art2life breadcrumbs challenge in the late summer, which was a free workshop that introduced me to how nick wilton and art2life approach teaching art. i immediately resonated with what he was saying, how he taught, and was convinced to take the paid Spark class in the fall. i feel like Spark really gave me some a-ha moments and started breaking down all the nonsense i’ve been telling myself my whole life about art and my abilities. i feel like i discovered some threads… that i really want to keep going with, pull harder on, dive deeper on. which is why i did the most recent free workshop and want to continue with CVP. i feel like i have momentum. and that now is the time. i fear if i don’t i’m going to have a hard time on my own keeping it going. like, i’ve been introduced to the principles that art2life teaches but now i need to really integrate them into how i paint. the structure of the classes, the recordings, the lessons, really help me.

anyways. i am accepting all woo and good wishes for best outcomes. and thank you. especially to all of you who have supported me over the years in my art journey, by listening to me talk endlessly about this stuff, or who’ve read my blogs about it, who’ve bought my art and craft, supported my patreon when i had it, or who’ve just generally encouraged me when i haven’t felt confident about what i was doing. i feel like i’m finally on the verge of figuring it out, of gaining that confidence i’ve lacked, so i can finally have a self-sustaining art practice that is meaningful to me and hopefully others.

for now, it’s back to the dogs and cats and to clean up this MESS of a house and studio post mardi gras costume making and general carnival life for the past few weeks. i’ll post again when i’m notified about the scholarship.

new year, new adventures

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new years are for trying new things. and this old dog – ok, middle-aged dog – has spent the past year or so trying to learn some new tricks… and i’m finally ready to talk about it. i’ve been expanding my mind, suspending disbelief/my intense skepticism about things i don’t understand, and following my intuition about falling down a rabbit hole because i think there’s something there for me — even if i wasn’t sure what that was. i haven’t talked about it publicly for a bunch of different reasons, but among them is that i wanted to make sure i at least sort of knew what i was talking about before i did… and i guess part of me was hoping i could already be successful at it before i did. that hasn’t quite happened yet but i’m tired of keeping it to myself, so i’m just saying fuck it. time to let the cat out of the bag.

what the fuck am i talking about? i’m talking about crypto. but really i’m talking about NFTs.

what does that even mean? and have i lost my mind? well the second question remains to be seen but as for the first question, i will probably write some more detailed posts getting into the nitty-gritty of all this for those who care to read about it. but for now let me just say that NFTs, if you haven’t heard about them, are changing the art market and many artists’ lives. and i felt like i owed it to myself to explore the space to see if i could be one of them. or if i could even just turn it into a secondary income stream, now that i’ve cut back on my petsitting and set the intention of spending more time on my art.

so maybe you have heard that NFTs are “non-fungible tokens” and have struggled to understand what that means. all that means is that they are unique digital assets (like jpegs or audio or video files) that are authenticated, stored, sold and traded on public blockchains. this technology answers a lot of questions around authenticity in specifically digital art, where it’s really easy to just right-click save whenever you see a cool photo or piece of artwork online. you can still do that, but now there’s a way to actually support the artist who made it and collect the originals of those pieces in digital form.

why would you want to do that? well, that is harder to answer if you’re not someone who spends a lot of time living on the internet. for some it’s about supporting the artists. for others it’s a status flex on social media, owning cool art or whatever is the hype of the moment. some folks take their NFT collecting very seriously, especially those treating them as investments to be flipped for profit on the secondary market. and for others it’s just a fun thing to do – it’s entertainment. it’s like a new (digital) version of trading cards. but it is something that is quickly being adopted by artists, musicians and celebrities, corporations/brands, sports teams/leagues and athletes, the gaming industry and even things like event ticketing. all of these are using NFT technology now and soon it will be the norm, or at least that is what web3 enthusiasts believe.

so yeah, I have been lurking in this world for the past year or so, having first stumbled into it because of folks i follow on twitter talking about the meme-based cryptocurrency dogecoin. but it led me down a rabbit hole trying to understand crypto and eventually NFTs, and has in fact given me enormous amounts of inspiration and exposed me to all kinds of art both physical and digital that i would’ve never been exposed to before. it’s been a steep learning curve but has definitely expanded my mind. and i am energized and excited for how this technology is helping artists create as well as make money on the internet.

i am obviously not a natively-digital artist but i am learning some of the tools and as someone who has dabbled in graphic design i do have some rudimentary knowledge of programs like adobe photoshop and illustrator, as i’ve used them to design my stickers and t-shirts for years. i’ve been spending a lot more time with my ipad and the drawing program procreate. i’m not there yet, in terms of making my own digitally-created art. but in the meantime one way physical artists are participating in the NFT world is by selling digital photos of their physical work, or sometimes digitally altered versions of their physical work.

a process shot of 2 layers of an abstract painting that eventually got many more layers, available now as an nft

(i’ve been experimenting with running photos of my paintings through adobe illustrator to vector them, and then editing them, sometimes changing colors or words or other aspects, therefore making them new and different from their original physical pieces. i’ve also been taking a lot of detail and process photos and videos of my work, with the hopes of turning those into abstract NFTs, like the one above. that physical painting ended up with many more layers of color on top, so what that image depicts does not exist in physical form any longer – except as an NFT.)

some of my paintings available on opensea

i have some of my work up on the NFT marketplace opensea on the polygon/ethereum blockchain, some of my recent paintings and also some photographs that i’ve taken over the past few years. i also have a random assortment of things up on another marketplace called rarible on the tezos blockchain. there are different marketplaces and different blockchains to mint NFTs on and i can get into all that in another post. but they each have their own audience, vibe, and types of artwork that sell better; pricing can vary widely between them, often correlating to the price of the underlying cryptocurrency of the blockchain being used. i’ve been experimenting with several marketplaces but so far I’ve only sold one out of an edition of 100 photos of my cat sticker on rarible that many of you saw me post on instagram. it was thrilling to sell my first NFT but also it was only worth $4.30 at the time of sale so i guess i shouldn’t get too excited. (my hope is to sell all of them to help pay down my vet bills.)

ok, that’s probably enough detail and enough links for you to click through for now.

but there. i’ve come out. i’ve been anxious about talking about this publicly because i think some of you will really think i’ve gone off the deep end or abandoned my moral compass. NFTs are often deemed a cash grab, but honestly, i think the entire art market could be considered such – i mean, we live in a capitalist culture and we all have to make a living, and i’d be lying if i said money wasn’t a big motivator. but please know i have approached all this with and still harbor a healthy amount of skepticism and i have spent a ridiculous amount of time researching and observing and investigating everything in the space. it is frankly not as shady as you think it is. it’s not all maga hats and libertarians in the space. there are a lot of women, queers/trans/non-binary folk and people of color who are doing really cool things, and i have found overwhelmingly progressive political views across-the-board, which frankly surprised me. (when you look at the data about who is participating in the crypto world, the demographics skew younger and towards people of color, although those with incomes much higher than mine.)

i have found it a very exciting and forward-thinking space and particularly when it comes to the 1/1 art NFT realm it is really empowering and inspiring. it’s democratizing art in a peer to peer fashion even faster than what etsy and other online marketplaces did in the 2000s. there’s a lot of potential and just a lot of experimentation, collaboration and open-minded thinking about it all.

the bottom line is that i quickly came to the conclusion that it would be stupid for me as an artist NOT to get involved in this. because if i can figure this out, find my place in it, especially now before it has really hit the mainstream, then maybe i can finally make some decent money from my creativity that can pay some bills. but even if it never amounts to that, if it keeps inspiring me to make more art, keeps opening my mind to new ways of thinking and being creative, and keeps helping me meet other artists around the country and the world, then it is all entirely worth it.

so. if you’re already into crypto and NFTs, holla! if you aren’t but you are interested to learn more, let me know that too, because i’m happy to write some more posts with how-to’s and more basic level info for folks who want to dive in. it would be good to hear from anyone interested.

and if you hate NFTs/crypto or you’re just really not into this and think i’m crazy, that’s fine too. we don’t have to all be into the same things! you can just ignore all my blathering about it all. i’m not gonna stop making physical art. if anything this might get me to make more art – try different styles, mediums, subject matters – some of which i will sell as physical, and some of which i will sell as digital. i’m just excited about all this. and i just really wanted y’all to understand what the appeal was for me.

thanks for reading and stay tuned!