A new print site and some Valentiney goodness

One of the things I forgot to mention during my late-pregnancy scramble last year: I joined another print site!  It's Boom Boom Prints, and here is my store on there.  It's more geared towards families and kids, so in addition to t-shirts, shower curtains, tote bags, etc. like on Society6, they also have onesies, maternity t-shirts, lunch bags...they even have dog clothing.

You can get a purple cow onesie!  Isn't that kind of the thing that's always been missing from your life?

You could even, theoretically, get a portrait of your dog ON a dog shirt, and they can wear their own likeness, if you were so inclined!

DOGCEPTION!

I've been trying out a new style, which I'll be rolling out onto Boom Boom Prints first, since it seems to fit there better...

Color of the Year excitement!

So, you may have heard...this is Pantone's new "Color of the Year" for 2015:

Image courtesy of Pantone

It's called Marsala...I would call it "brick red, but snazzier," or a "warm dusty wine red" maybe.  And you know what?  I'm actually really psyched about it.

Greetings from the land of post-show fatigue!

This past weekend I was attacked by a wild art festival.  Or at least, that's what it felt like.  So in lieu of an Inspired Monday post (although I hope people find this inspiring if you're in or thinking of getting into the craft selling business!), it's time for a show recap!

It's my booth!

We were a little busy this weekend.  Just a bit. ;) As mentioned, I went to set up early at the festival on Friday afternoon, then went directly to my opening reception for my show at the Watercolor Guild, and was at the festival from 9 in the morning to 4:30 in the afternoon both days. (Plus, last night almost immediately after the festival I went to a party.  On the opposite side of town.  I.e. about 24 miles away.  I might be kind of a masochist.)

And then there was the setup and tear-down of my booth.  So artists, if people try to make you feel lazy or like your profession isn't hard, tell them you'd like to see THEM set up an art festival booth and man it for two or three days.  Yeah, it's not a stroll in the park.

Show prep, show prep, show prep...

I'm about two and a half weeks out from the Hilton Indoor Summer Art Festival (i.e. my first JURIED art/craft fair, with the most traffic of any craft fair I've done so far), and a little less than two weeks out from exhibiting at the Southern Arizona Watercolor Guild. So...cue the panicking?

"Hurricane Panic," painted in 2006 when I lived in Florida.  Appropriate to many life situations other than hurricanes, however.

Surprisingly, I'm not panicked about it, though!  I've just been doing a couple little show-prep things every day, here and there, in addition to my everyday chores.  It's been fun, and in getting things together I unearthed some hidden gems.  Like...

Insert pun about stones here (I've run out of puns!)

Well, I said they were coming...and now they're here!

Painted stones...that you can wear.  Booyah.  And now they're on Etsy too!

Nothing to wine about.

People like wine, right?  Most people, although I know not all people...but even if you don't, you know someone who LOVES wine.  So here's a promo for you: buy one of my art prints, and get a $100 gift certificate for wine as a free bonus.

Seriously!

Took me a while to find a piece of art I've done with wine in it!  This one is super old, but I do like the colors...

There's some more details here, including information about the wine company that's giving the gift certificates, the terms and conditions, and blah blah...but the main point is, BUY ART AND GET FREE WINE!  

Heck, I might even buy a print from some other artist in order to take advantage of this deal myself...and it's only during the month of July, from what I can see, so go get it!

Art show recapination

In lieu of Inspired Monday this week, I wanted to post about how my art & craft show this weekend went.  Maybe this will be inspiring to somebody, though...it was inspiring for me at the time, and a big learning experience too.

It's my booth!  You can tell it's windy 'cause the Sowing and Tree Woman paintings are blowing away from the grid.

Honestly, there's not a lot I would do differently...although this was my first craft show selling my own work, I've done several helping someone else sell their work, so I kind of knew how things should go.

And this is how they went...

Show prep madness!

As I may have mentioned, I'll be selling my work at Monterey Court here in Tucson this Saturday night...actually, I'm pretty sure I only mentioned it that one time, because ever since it's been finalized I've been in major preparation mode.

A Pile O'Prints!  Plus on the left you can see a package I just shipped - a cat portrait off to Florida.

 I ended up making 17 large prints (like the ones above), 20 smaller prints, and six sets of greeting cards.  So Tuesday was Packaging-fest 2014!

Hey, you! You need t-shirts!

It's just a big week for this little ol' art business all around...preparing for the show next week, and now, Society6 has informed me that my t-shirts are on sale!

I bought this one.  Is it not perfect to wear to yoga?  Or just on any day when you anticipate you'll need a little extra bless-and-releasing?

It goes through Monday, and it's $5 off any t-shirts (this style shown above, plus v-necks or tank tops).  So that lovely shirt shown above is only $19.  Plus shipping is FREE.  You don't see that every day, folks.

Check out these possibilities...

Words, words, words.

This past weekend, our house was overrun by teenage boys.  My stepson has some friends in the neighborhood, and they come over some weekends to play video games and watch TV shows and anime where apparently a lot of the plot involves people yelling "WAAAAAAAAUUGHGGHHG!" every ten seconds. (I think it's Dragonball.  Can't be too sure though.)

After a couple hours of this, I needed a break.  So I retreated out to my studio and spent much of the weekend playing around with...word art!

New prints!

It's that time again...time for new things to go up in my print shop!

"The Ceremony", watercolor and ink

 Some of these date back to December of last year...the only camera we have that takes high-resolution photos had its battery completely die.  As in, would not take a charge for mysterious reasons known only to the battery.  So when my husband got a replacement battery I was immediately like, "yay, prints!"  I get really excited about these...

I also want to ramble about a couple of these new pieces...brace yourself for art-geeky talk about colors and stuff...

Phone clothing

So I was at an arts festival a few weeks ago (manning a booth for the company I work for, not for myself...although some day maybe I'll pull enough of my art and prints together to have my own booth!).  I was having a customer sign off on a purchase she had made with my iPhone's credit card reader.

And I noticed that my phone was, actually, quite unsightly.  I've had an Otter case on it for a year and a half, and after dropping it repeatedly, getting beach sand and desert grit in it, and popping the case off a couple times to clean it out, it got sort of...frayed.  The rubber bit was fitting loosely and pieces of it had come off, it was not a nice-looking case anymore like when I first got it.  I felt weird about handing this gnarly phone to a customer who had just dropped $200 at our booth.  I imagine it was not confidence-inspiring to her.

Point being, I really need a new phone case.

Fortunately, the print service I use, Pixels.com, will make prints out of my artwork!  And for less than my Otter case cost, too!  Of course, I'll still have to get a screen protector for it, but still: pretty phone case!  Yes!

I predict that seahorses are the new birds.  You'll be seeing them "put a seahorse on it" on Portlandia soon, just watch.

Much better.

I think this one would make a good case too.  How about this one?  This one would just be weird, though.

Oh no, she's back!

Hi!  Miss me? (sound of crickets chirping)

So, seeing as I've had a lot of art-related things going on over the past year (two exhibitions, launching a print shop and making several sales, and starting to inch my way into the pet portrait industry), I thought it might be prudent to restart my art blog.  Well, that, and I kinda just missed having a place to ramble on about art and related things.

Here's something I've been doing lately: playing with this app called Brushes on my iPhone!

It's a pink corgi.  Why?  Why not?  There never has to be a reason to draw pink corgis.

It's really gratifying, not only to be able to create tiny phone paintings, but the Brushes app also shows you a little video of your progress on the painting.  I'm trying to figure out how to import those, because they're really fascinating...and I like seeing videos of other artists' painting process, like the ones Jorge Columbo does for the New Yorker's Finger Painting blog (which is where I found out about Brushes).  It's been a fun way to get the daily sketching in, even without carrying a sketchbook...ahh, iPhone, what can't you do?