Razzle Dazzle!

It has been a while since I posted here. I have posted more recently here. Also here. (for those of you wondering, the first link is for fiction I write, and the second is for political cartoons and the like.While this blog is for autobiographical "essays" primarily about my life as an artist and more primarily as a greeting card designer.) Be that as it may, I have been pretty busy in the greeting card business. (using terms like that always reminds me of Chandler asking Joey how long he's been in the "out-of-work-actor" business.) I primarily post on Etsy now. I am also beginning to post on Zazzle, and more on Cafepress in addition to the tee shirts you could always get here.
When last we met, I was just going into the brick & mortar card business. That is an awesome experience, but alas, my dreams of selling directly to a store being my saving grace have proved fraught with obstacles. I thought that I would have a bigger chunk of the profits, which I do. But ink is very expensive and I think I'm actually losing money. I tried raising the price (I tried to be tricky about it by delivering an invoice with the price increase already on it. This didn't work. It was noticed and not appreciated by the proprietor, who was nice enough to commission me to make the cards in the first place. The initial negotiations at the beginning of the venture were informal, so I mistakenly thought it wouldn't be a big deal. Plus corporations always have that clause; "prices subject to change without notice"... well I'm not a corporation.) Anyway, it was suggested that I reduce ink costs by making the cards slightly smaller. I will also design them to have more white space or something. form follows function, I guess. Smaller cards means more work because now I will have to trim the cards because the card stock isn't sold at the size the owner wants them. Ah well, that's life in the big city.
Meanwhile, as soon as I joined Etsy, I made a HUGE sale! Really! I got an email from a client that said she wanted to buy a painting, and she would send me a certified check and after I received the check, I could courier her the painting. Oh, you've heard this one. Yeah. So the check arrives, and it's like for $1,000 more than the cost of the painting. (like I could cash a check like that.) Well, that was a tip off. (that and the fact that my girlfriend and my mom both knew it was a scam before I did). Anyway, suffice to say, now I only accept sales actually through Etsy. (don't worry, I never sent the painting, so the only damage was to my ego)
Since Joining Etsy, I've taken to making linocuts because most things on Etsy are handmade and I feel like computer prints are outside the norm. Most of my sales have been computer printed cards, though. I'm in several circles and treasuries, which means when someone is looking to see what other people like my stuff will pop up here and there. I'm on a few teams which means like minded people selling like minded stuff (like Friends of Bill on Etsy)

I've decided that if my focus was on in store merchandise, I'd want to be in as many stores as possible; so likewise as an online seller, I want to have my products on as many sites as possible. this is why I've joined. Zazzle and expanded on cafe press. Both stores offter better terms than GreetingcardUniverse, which requires approval of designs and only offers $.50 a card. (I have yet to get a check from them as the minimum amount they will send out is $25, which is 50 cards. On Etsy, I get paid every time someone buys something.) Cafe press and Zazzle also only pay over $25 worth of earnings, but it is much easier to reach these numbers as you control how much you make per sale. Plus, your designs don't have to be approved like some grade schooler.

UNION THUGS



Aunt Christie: Teacher, Union Thug



My aunt Christie is a teacher. She is a very good teacher, she wins awards, her students love her, they even started a fan page of her on facebook. If you are reading this, it's thanks to a teacher. If you can do basic math, it's thanks to a teacher.

If your house got robbed, and then caught on fire, would it be alright with you if you were asked to forgo the services of the police and the fire department, because after all, we are in a recession and everyone has to tighten their belts. We just can't afford to send the police and fire department out to just anyone.

All this talk of union busting in Wisconsin has really got my goat. The idea that further sacrifices need to be made by the most important people in the community; teachers, fire fighters, police, sanitation workers... people who don't make a great deal of money to begin with, is insane. That's not hyperbole. it's a statement of fact. It is utterly ridiculous to look to public employees, people who have chosen as their careers often dangerous, sometimes thankless jobs because they recognise the good these jobs can do for the community, as a place where austerity can be further demanded to pay for tax cuts for the rich, and to dig us out of deficits caused by greedy bankers, which they were able to do due to deregulation. It is beyond delusional: it is crazy. Actual "you need your head examined, stay away from me," crazy.
On top of this add the clearly disingenuous notion that taking away their collective bargaining rights will help balance the budget. They exposed the deceit of this logic when they removed it from a budgetary bill so that they could pass it without a quorum.
Since these are public employees, the bargaining rights were taken away as a bill passed by the state's legislator, and signed by the Governor. I'm no expert, but I believe that collective bargaining is freedom of speech & striking is peaceful assembly. These are constitutional rights that the government can't take away.
I'm telling you, if I were a public employee in Wisconsin, I would go on strike immediately.

Happy New Year!

Well, now that the holidays are over, I guess I can use them as an excuse for not having blogged in a while. While I was gone I made new cards, but also sent away a book proposal, and samples to a children's magazine publisher. I have done a lot of painting this last year, and I hope to do more this year.

Clearly, greeting cards are not going to make enough money for me, so I have to concentrate on something else. I would like to write & illustrate children's books or just plain books. Since I'm having trouble getting someone to pay me for greeting cards, I might as well struggle at what I really want to do most, right? My idea that I sent to Harcourt Brace is Dinosaurs are Terrible Lizards! The idea is that dinosaurs' names all have meanings in Latin or Greek ("dinosaur" literally means "terrible lizard"), and I thought playful illustrations depicting the meaning would be fun. This evolved from an earlier idea to do a book about dinosaurs with swords; all I could come up with was a tyrannosaurus with a sword & a crown, sitting on a throne. "Tyrannosaurus Rex is a Tyrant King!" (again, the literal translation of the word). Once I made that connection, and gave up the sword stipulation for the other pictures, I began thinking of other illustrations, like "Triceratops rides a Tricycle: Tri means Three!" I sent it as a proposal to get feedback, and work with the publisher. I read that picture books are rarely a one man job. Also, I wanted to send something out, and it could be quite some time before I come up with 32 finished paintings illustration dinosaur names.

It could take a while to hear back from Harcourt, so I continued to make paintings. I looked at my favorites over the last year, and realized that I had a lot of female heroes, saints, & goddesses. One of my areas of focus is I want to give young girls role models to look up to. There are a lot of role models for boys, but not as many for girls. I thought next in that series could be Sacajawea. She has a big story and I'm still trying to figure out how best to handle it. I found some great photos of Native American women to work from. As I work on this big project, I have grouped together some of these historical paintings and sent them to a magazine publisher that produces historical magazines for kids: Cobblestone.

They're Giving me the Business

Did you ever go for a walk with a bunch of your friends? You're all talking and laughing, and you notice your shoe is untied? So you kneel down to tie your shoe and when you get up they've all gone on and you catch up and the conversation has shifted to something else, and even though it was only a second, you feel you've been left behind in more than one way? This is my life.

While I'm concentrating on one area, diligently creating Christmas cards for my online business, I find there's things going on in the real world! I have one really good friend who keeps advising me to take my cards to local stores. I don't want to do this because it's scary. My ex-girlfriend used to do exactly that. She went up and down the coast trying to sell cards & prints of name artists back before I knew her. She said it was miserable. She was turned down constantly & spent all her time going from town to town schlepping tubes of posters into stores that have no desire to expand their inventory.

My friend calls, and I'm trying to tell him I don't want to do what he wants me to do while he's trying to tell me I'll be good at it. He says people like me, and they will buy my cards based on this alone. I'm trying to be polite, because this guy is a good friend and he's only trying to help, but if I can just explain to him that I want to do this my way... Well, as soon as I tell him this, he says the reason he's pressing is because he knows a place that needs exactly the cards I'm selling. In fact I know the place. I've been there. I know the people. They know me. Well, that's different. That's not so scary. Besides the guy that was providing them with cards disappeared and they actually need someone to buy cards from.

So I go down there as soon as I hang up. I have to get to church in an hour and a half but I think I can make it. I get there and the guy behind the counter does know me. He knows my cards from facebook. I spend the next two days printing cards just to have something for the guy to hold in his hands and show his boss. I leave the samples, and some business cards. I spend the next two days creating new cards & going to new age gift stores to scout the competition. The guy calls and says they want my cards. I'm in business! So, while I was concentrating on one aspect of possibilities, I nearly miss out on what was going on around me. More will be revealed. wow.

THE TROUBLE WITH FAERIES

Man! It has been a rough couple of weeks! After submitting my Saint Hildegard for approval with GCU, I began looking at Halloween categories I might have missed, and decided to make some Halloween party invitations. Then I began researching what kind of Christmas theme I wanted to pursue. I wanted to have a theme so I could make a bunch of cards on one subject, kind of like illustrating a story. I decided that since I neglected the faeries for Halloween, it would be neat to have a faerie theme for Christmas.
I noticed it was taking a while for my Hildegard card to get approved, but I had read on the forum that a lady had over two hundred cards pending approval and I figured that this was the hang up. It didn't occur to why she would have so many pending. Then someone else complained on the forum how long it was taking for their cards to be approved. I should point out at this point that it is rare for someone from GCU proper to respond on the forum unless they are addressed by name; so when someone asks a question, it is usually answered by other artists who have more experience (hopefully) than the questioner. This time the response was that cards were taking a long time for approval because of the holiday season. What?! I thought starting on Christmas cards in August was being ahead of the game! Well, if you consider Halloween, and Thanksgiving part of the holiday season, I guess I am still ahead of the game; however, I realize that the vast majority of total cards sold are Christmas cards so naturally I began to panic. I went from being ahead to being behind without even noticing it! Crap!
Well, what can I do but proceed? I actually already have a few Christmas Cards posted. My great idea was to have faeries lighting a Christmas tree with their little halos. I know, right? Great idea! Well, I am now on my second attempt. My first attempt was too complicated and too small. I tried to draw each faerie and make their glow different colors on 7"x10" watercolor block. I used a device of having a closer faerie heading toward the tree to make it more obvious that the tree was lit by faeries. This way I could detail one faerie, and the tree. It was just too messy.
My second attempt is on a 8.5"x14" (10"x15" cropped). This time the faeries on the tree are shining orbs with a faint faerie silhouette. Also, the glow is uniformly golden. I still have the device of a faerie closer to the viewer to convey that faeries are lighting the tree. Also, in the new version, she looks over her shoulder at the viewer and beckons us in. In each case, I also have faeries topping the tree and they are a little bigger.
I also wanted the trees to be covered with snow. To make the lights seem bright, I had to set the scene at night, right? So, I decided to make the snow a light blue. Trying to make snow look like snow and still have the lights be the lightest part of the painting turned out to be challenging. (when I was a kid, "challenging" meant "motivated one to try harder" now it is applied to every situation that is difficult; some kind of political correctness cross wire.) The trees just looked blue. Luckily, you can add yellow to blue and get green; the color most people expect fir trees to be.
The biggest challenge of the new painting turned out to be the glow of the main faerie. In the first painting, I left the paper white for the faerie glow. This is the recommended way to achieve light in watercolor: use the white of the paper. Using white paint is frowned upon. In the first painting; however, all the halos were too sharp edged, particularly the lead faerie as she appears against the night sky. On the new painting I thought I would try leaving the sky light around the lead faerie but not white. The whole sky came out funky though. Kind of patchy as the paper dried before it could paint the whole sky. On a second pass, I wet the area to be painted first but this created puddly splotches.
When it came time to paint the glow around her; let's call her Noel so I don't have to keep calling her the lead faerie, putting yellow on top of purple didn't work so well. So in with the white paint!
OK, this might be a good point to talk about Christmas music. I thought it might be a good idea to listen to Christmas music while I was working on this project, to help create the proper mood. I listen to Pandora which is usually great. I'm kind of picky about my Christmas music though, and the thing about Pandora if you aren't familiar with it, is: you set parameters, and they pick music according to those parameters. This way, they get to try to sell you some music you weren't expecting. First I picked "Christmas music" rather than a genre like "blues Christmas", "Jazz Christmas," etc... I wanted some Jewel, some Anonymous4, some Mormon Tabernacle choir, and I put this into the parameters, but Christmas is a stronger parameter, and I got Bing Crosby, Dean Martin... like that. That's fine, but it is August remember? I used to work at a craft store and the manager would put Christmas music on in September (to go through January) and it drove me crazy. Well I switched my station to "Classical Christmas" and put in my parameters. after three straight days of listening like 8 hours a day they have yet to play one specific artist or song I put in, and I doubt they are going to. I like the classical Christmas, but I have a resentment now that they are not playing what I asked them too. They can't get Sufi music down either, but that's another story (they keep playing dance music: whirling dervish? I don't know. there. that's the story)
Any reader of this blog will quickly come to the conclusion that I have a lot of ideas that I voice and then seem to abandon. Sometimes, it gets put on hold for pursuit of a new idea, and I return to it later. Sometimes I do abandon it because while it might have sounded good in my head, it doesn't work out in reality. We'll see what happens to the "Faerie Christmas." Even if I start doing line drawings of Santa Clause and Nativity scenes (both of which are in the works) I still want to do more faerie Christmas.

Saints Above!

OK, I think I've figured out a routine. I paint, I post, I blog. I bet that sounds cool in Latin. This week's blog is going to be about saints. I have made several paintings of saints and my newest one is of Saint Hildegard. More on her later; right now I want to talk about paintings of saints and saints in general. As I have stated in previous posts; I like painting saints because I consider it like a meditation on a holy subject. I study the saint, I spend time and energy concentrating on the saint and his or her actions even as I paint the picture. I also feel like the resulting painting might bring someone some kind of solace to see it or to have a copy for themselves.
There is certainly no shortage of paintings of saints in the history of art. The Church has been a major sponsor of artists throughout its existence. In fact in pre-renaissance times, art music and writing had to dedicated to the church or the reining monarch of the land. Of course there was art created that was not and we call that folk art. folk art is usually considered less refined and less valuable than fine art.
With the rise of the merchant class and education among the laity, the demand for secular art rose. Then further, with the advent of Protestantism, even representation of religious subjects evolved. Landscapes became metaphors for creation and holy things. Religious wars caused a reliance on coded paintings; ie, lilies represented the Resurrection, and roses were a symbol of the Virgin Mary. These symbols existed previous to these times but became more prevalent due to religious persecution and the evolution of art in general.
As art continued to evolve throughout the ages, religious art changed accordingly; the baroque through modern times have their own symbols and styles specific to themselves. In today's post modern world, I open art magazines and visit galleries and museums and it seems that artists are free to follow their preferences. I see no overarching movement that artists have to conform to or be part of to ride the popular wave of the times.
My paintings are generally in watercolor, though I often then run them through photoshop, their style is simply marked by habits I have formed through years of painting. As I said I research the subject and try to put it in the proper time; ie, costumes and the like. There is a long tradition of clothing biblical characters in contemporary clothing and local scenery and ethnicity. Sometimes I might employ these techniques for the purposes of making a point to the viewer, but in general it seems like you're doing your homework if you take pains to use proper context, and you're not if you don't.
As for my new painting of Saint Hildegard, I decided to do another saint painting as a friend of mine has expressed interest in having a collection of them. St Hildegard was a lady who lived in the early 12th century. She had seen visions since she was 5yrs old. as the 10th child and perhaps because she was sickly (her visions were accompanied by migraine headaches) her parents tithed her to the church (they get a 10th of everything you own, you know). She became a Benedictine nun when she was 14, and became abbess when she was 39. When she was 42, her visions commanded her to write them down. She also was an herbalist, and a composer of sacred music. This was all very prolific for a woman of her times. I first heard about her through a recording of her music made by Anonymous4, a favorite group of mine. At a sacred book shop, I stumbled upon a book of her work; Scivias, just as I was looking for a new project. I was blown away by the poetry and beauty of the imagery.
I set the painting in a forest near the first abbey she was stationed at and depicted her as a young woman. She is usually depicted as older because that is when she began to chronicle her visions, but she had been a nun since she was a teenager, and a visionary since she was five, and I felt like this period of her life is often glossed over. She is shown in the midst of an ecstatic vision, and the forest represents one of her major themes; green nature. my reference material is actually of the forest her abbey Disibodenberg was situated in.

There are also many saints of India and many other cultures around the world. If I can, in some small way through my art and through my actions, I would like to put them all under one roof and demonstrate to the world that all the paths lead to the same source.

Halloween!

O.K.! I am officially excited about Halloween! I have created a bunch of cards in plenty of time for my favorite holiday! I could just keep going... We will see. I even created a Halloween themed station on Pandora to inspire me, but Pandora hasn't got the hang of it yet. Anyway, so far, I have a wiccan ceremony in which a chalice is displayed in worship of the mother goddess (this was meant to illustrate the fact that the use of a chalice (the holy grail) predates Christianity. Although in fairness, the Zoroastrians also used it as did the Roman spin off Mithraism, early Hindus (also evolving from the same culture as the Persian Zoroastrians aka the wise men visiting the baby Jesus) as well as the Greeks and basically everyone with a cup and a Deity to worship. But I digress. This is the first painting that I utilised my favorite celestial object the cone nebula; which lends itself nicely to being raiment for the Goddess. The Priestess embodies and becomes the Goddess. That painting is from my student days in days gone by.
Next, I painted specifically for this Halloween, another rendition utilizing the cone nebula, this time as the Goddess herself manifesting over a field where thirteen fires represent a coven of wiccans summoning her. In this piece, I made use of watercolor pencils that I received as an anniversary gift from my girlfriend. I suspect I may have freaked her out a little with my near obsession with witches and witchcraft (in July no less! It's only Halloween to me!). If I did, she had too much grace to let me see it.

At this point, I decided to paint a picture of a black cat. I searched the web, the library and the used book stores looking for the right cat. I think I found one that was relaxed, yet stared back at the viewer in a challenging way that may confront the viewer.
Then, continuing my focus on witches (Halloween may mean dress up and Frankenstein, but it was originally a Wiccan holiday; one of several sabots or witches' Sabbaths - Black Sabbaths. It's the most important holiday on their calendar, so this has been my focus. I may lighten up a little after this. However, before I lighten up, I painted a picture of a girl in Puritan dress circa 1692 Salem Mass. She is at her hearth where a cauldron hangs. she sits with a black cat at her lap and a giant pumpkin by her. For fun I gave her a corn cob pipe. In one of the cards I created, I included a quote from one of the women executed for witchcraft: Mary Easty. She was later exonerated. "I know not the least thing of witchcraft, therefore cannot, I dare not belie my own soul."

Then, finally relenting to the urge to have a laugh, I made a cartoon of Monster proportions. As I'm going to display it with the others, I won't describe it as explanations of cartoons tend to diminish any humor they may possess.