Some whining and some artmaking
So, last week I was bitching about needing to get my taxes together.
I suck at math so I obviously got an accountant to do it (but sure as Hell not the one who had the data breach that led to me having to chase down identity theft stuff like credit cards and cell phones bought in my name… and who waited 2 months to tell me after they found that data beach…).
Anyway, I hate tax season but all’s well that ends in me not having to pay any money.
Speaking of the fraud, a lot of it has been sorted now, but I’m still dealing with the cell phone company… and from what I see on Reddit and elsewhere, they’re known for being non-responsive to this sort of thing. Bastards.
But at least progress is being made to wrap that bullshit up, though I’ll have to be vigilant basically forever.
What else is annoying me this week, lol…
Well, one of the squirrel vermin in the neighborhood has been digging up my newly planted violas – three times this week I’ve spotted one of the dozen baby violas I planted by my front path and sidewalk dragged out onto the concrete.
If it was a dog digging there would have been more than just one little viola disrupted. There is a crazy old lady who walks in the neighborhood and loudly complains about my garden but she seems a bit too frail to be able to bend over to yank out flowers and get back up.
But the squirrels dig up all over the place and it’s the right amount of dirt kicked around for it to be a squirrel doing the damage.
Anyway, I got them replanted each time and hopefully now they can start to really root in to thwart the little shits.
We’ll wrap up with a few garden pics at the end, but let’s move on to work/art.
I finished that painting I mentioned last week. It’s a mixed media piece with drawings on paper, beads, textile appliqué, acrylic “gems” and texture gel.
I finished it in a few long days of painting and then stitching on beads, the papers, and all the textile layers… which made me realize the hard way that I really need to improve my ergonomics for this sorta thing.
Because hunching over a canvas on the dining room table for 5 hours at a time makes for a very sore neck and headaches… well, clearly this month I need to figure out how to improve my ergonomics.
I won’t post a full shot yet because it’ll be in a local show in May, but here’s a couple detail shots in the meantime:
Speaking of the rat…
So I was thinking about the twerp’s name. And while I didn’t call him “Mickey B” in reference to Mickey Mouse, it’s probably still best to change his name, just in case.
But I like the sound of “Mickey” so… next best thing: I decided to call him Ricky B.
And hey, he does look a wee bit like Richard Hell (amongst other NYC punks).
But also it retains the “-icky” sound, useful for fun little rhymes… y’know, like “Quicky Ricky.”
Anyway, so now it’s Ricky B the rock n roll rat.
And I still have to make time to work on a couple projects for Ricky, but at least the name is finalized. I should go through the last few posts and correct his name so it’s more consistent.
And when talking about Ricky, of course I’ve said before that he’s evolved from my sketchbook project of daily drawings of Bono as a cheese-obsessed mouse-man. Here’s my favorite of those from this week:
Still a silly project, but that’s what makes it fun to do.
I really do need to make time for other drawing daily, of course. My current excuse has to do with the fraud stuff but, hey, I usually work on Noah when I’m on hold for an hour trying to talk to someone at one of these companies.
There is now a second life drawing session available in Victoria, I noticed, but it’s on a day when I’m not usually down in Vic. I noticed that the local arts council where I live seems like it had been going to offer a life drawing but then it was cancelled, so I’ll have to look into that if it’s offered again in the summer.
Or maybe it’s time I tried to figure out how to organize something like that myself… in which case I likely wouldn’t get around to it til later in the year at the earliest.
Anyway, in other art news, it dawned on me that I should probably have business cards on hand.
Now, I do have business cards, but they’re from when I was doing stand-up and comedy/rant videos on YouTube years ago, so not the sort of thing that would be appropriate to have on hand if I’m going to some gallery even or to a workshop etc.
When I lived in Vancouver I always just used ClubCard and would pick up my cards/fliers/posters so as to not pay shipping. I know there’s print companies over here who would do just as good a job, but I haven’t had time to research that and I don’t have any word of mouth info or recommendations.
And I kinda should have cards by mid-month, though I don’t expect I’ll need many til later in the year.
And I was trying to think of how to approach them where they give a sense of my work without being too tied to a specific painting or drawing (ie, the way so many artists’ business cards seem to have a teeny photo of one of their paintings on the back and then their info)… and a few things popped into my mind:
- 15 years ago when I was at BCIT for the New Media Design program and we were tasked with designing our own cards, I was interested in hand-made elements so I designed one where the logo was from a lino cut I did of an orange flame which I then scanned and incorporated into the cards, which I printed on my computer on a tan card stock… and if memory serves, I may have also stamped the backs of them with that same lino cut. I really liked the feel that gave them, and got a lot of positive feedback about those cards.
- Anyone else remember artist trading cards? I do, and I used to just cut up watercolors that didn’t turn out the way I wanted so each card was a fragment of a bigger work. Again, I liked that approach, and I got a lot of positive feedback from it at the ATC meet-ups I attended.
- I dig the gelli printing workflow and the randomness, as learned in a workshop the other week. For me, gelli prints are more about backgrounds and I want to cartoon overtop of the dried ones I have from the workshop (and I think I mentioned I have ideas for such involving Ricky B).
Put them all together and I grabbed a pad of 9×12 watercolor paper and spent the afternoon with my gelli plate, making a bunch of random backgrounds:
I figure I can get 12 if not 15 cards out of each sheet of paper, then will have to hand-print my info on the back of each, which will be tedious but it’s something I can do while watching YouTube.
And it’ll be plenty of cards, probably more than I’ll need all year and then some.
Anyway, so that was what I was up to this week aside from the usual Noah cartoons… and I’m still a month behind on posting those to the actual website, but Facebook is up to date always.
On to the garden pics to wrap up. Much is the same as last week, but still:
