In CO

Just arrived in CO and am preparing myself for the Vail Arts Festival this weekend. The drive was ridiculously long and boring, which is what I have been told numerous times from other people. Not much time to decompress! I leave tomorrow morning to set up, then the art fair is Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Wish me luck!

-- Post From My iPhone

Testing out mobile

So, I bought the Blogpress app to give mobile blogging a shot. I'm at the Stone Arch Festival of the Arts today. It's a gorgeous day and there are lots of folks here. Sales could pick up a bit, but all in all not too bad. I've been MIA from blogging due to my increased pressure to get ready for the Vail Arts Festival next weekend. With this app I hope to be able to keep up with things better!!


-- Post From My iPhone

New adventures

"I'd love to sell out completely. It's just that no one has been willing to buy." —John Waters

I love what I do. I very much would love to rely on nothing else but selling my art. When I started 7 years ago, I would have never have expected such a warm receipt of what I do by others. At the Edina Art Fair this weekend, I got so many comments like "This is so cool!" and "I really like what you do!". It warms my heart and solidifies my decision to try to carve a life for myself out of what I do. 

However, it concerns me that I have carved myself a nice little niche that I can't expand upon. Again, I love doing the location collages. It's fun to capture a whole place in one piece of artwork and doubly fun to see people's reaction to it. But when I start getting requests for every little small town, suburb and very small college, it takes a little of the fun away. When I tell people "no" when they ask if I have a certain location, I sometimes get stern looks like I hurt their feelings or I get a quick "Well are you GOING to do it?". There are only so many hours in a day and a lot of time goes in to photographing for those collages. If I'm not sure that location will be well received, that time is better spent doing other things.

I've put a lot of effort into creating new collages to display at the Vail Arts Festival. It'll be the first art fair that I won't have any location collages at. It'll be the first art fair where I am judged solely by my other artwork. And I'm terrified. Because here in MN, that artwork may as well be invisible. It hangs in my booth and gets almost completely ignored. It used to take up half of my booth. Half location, half fine art. I got so many comments about how it was "interesting" or "unusual" (some actually came right out and called it weird) that I finally just stopped bringing it. It never sold and I didn't want it to get damaged by hauling it around.

My Facebook and Twitter friends mostly see my new artwork and have given me a lot of positive feedback. This is REALLY encouraging and I'm thankful for it. I feel like I've been divided in two and it's really odd. I'm starting on a new journey of exploring the half of me that really loves getting my hands into my artwork and expressing the things I love, yet the photographer in me still wants to get out and document all of those cities and states in a way that only a local can see it.

I'll probably never merge those two sides, but I'd like them both to come along with me equally rather than having one move forward and the other stay in one place.

Four Five Six

In preparation for the Vail Arts Festival at the end of June, in order to have a more complete collection in my booth I thought I would expand my number collages to include four, five and six!

Don't forget about the Edina Art Fair on 50th and France this Friday, Saturday and Sunday! Hours are Friday 10-7, Saturday 10-7 and Sunday 10-5. My booth number is 169, just about a block south of 50th Street near Salut restaurant. To see a PDF map of the Edina Art Fair booth locations, click here.

Number art complete

I finally made a decision about how I wanted to treat the number collages from my last post and I couldn't be more pleased with the outcome (except the part about it taking FOREVER to dry).

I chose canvas versus the wood blocks because I liked the treatment I gave the bird spinner collages. I had initially thought that I was going to use wood blocks with vintage fabric or wallpaper adhered to the side, but thought that the grunginess of the collages deserved a more rough treatment.

The canvas is coated in 3 colors of walnut ink, spattered with black paint and then stamped. The stamps are actually stencils that I stamped with ink and then pressed into the canvas. The print is adhered to the canvas with Mod Podge. I'm considering spraying the print with a gloss acrylic to give it a glass-like appearance but it's not something I want to play with and then not like. I like it so far and don't want to ruin what I've done. I may spray it with a UV protectant to protect the print, however.

When I finish the set I will have them available for sale up on Etsy. They will be a limited edition of 50 and will sell for $85.

New art!!

Since I won't be bringing my location artwork to the Vail Arts Festival at the end of June, I'm really pushing myself to make new artwork so I have a fairly full booth. I don't think I've ever created this much new artwork in a year and it's really exciting. I've created a lot of retro inspired pieces, which I love, but I also am finally getting around to creating collages that I've had rolling around in my head for awhile, like the collage I posted a few days ago: "Room to Breathe".

The titles are fairly simple for these collages: "One for the Money", "Two for the Show" and "Three to Get Ready". They're 12 x 12 and I'm undecided if I will mount them to canvas like I did the bird spinners or mount them to museum blocks and edge them with vintage wallpaper. I'll post photos of the final product, whatever I decide!

After the scan: Getting started on (and finishing) a collage

After I finish the scanning process, it's time to get started! As I scan the photos I make note of all of them and try to figure out placement and size of the images. If it's a wedding collage and I have individual photos of the bride and groom, I try to put those in the corners as anchors. If it's an anniversary, I try to find photos of the couple together throughout the years and use those as corner photos. Unlike a puzzle, I start from the edges and work in rather than from the center and work out. There really isn't a formula to how I work, but there are things that I find I do repeatedly, like using certain photos as corner anchors. Again, it really all depends on what I'm given by the client.

Above you can see how I began the 70th birthday collage. There were several images that I liked of her alone, but decided on the portrait type image to anchor the lower left corner. It had nice cool colors and blended well in with the background. Most of the photos of her were in black and white, so I thought a color photo would balance out the background nicely. I then kind of worked around, placing other images of her by herself in somewhat of a timeline, then decided to use the family image to anchor the upper right corner. 

I had initially started to fill in small photos of her extended family, then found this photo of all of the family together and decided to place that one and remove the smaller pictures so it wouldn't be too crowded. The more photos I'm given, the more I have to shrink things to get them all to fit and more times than not it ends up looking more messy than a unified whole. The elimination process is a difficult one if I'm not given a whole lot of direction about the importance of the pictures by the client.

This was the first draft that I submitted to the client for approval. (Actually I added one more photo after I took this screen shot, but this is pretty close to the first draft.) It turned out that my decision to try to consolidate by eliminating family wasn't the best choice and that she would've rather have had less photos of her mom and dad together and more photos of the family because the family was very important to her mom. So I shrunk some of the photos and removed two to make room for the individual photos. She also requested that I add the word "Candy" to the collage because that is her mom's nickname. Words are always easy to add after the fact because they can be blended so as not to interfere with the photos. Adding more photos (or taking away photos that I've used in key places) is more difficult because I have to shift things around so as not to leave holes.

So...after making the changes, this was the final collage: 

Not too drastically different from the first proof that I showed the client, but tweaked enough that she was extremely pleased with the result. I told her to let me know what her mother's reaction is to it because I always like to hear feedback. On several occasions I've heard that the gift has moved people to tears, and that's probably the highest compliment I could ever receive. I enjoy what I do immensely and that I can bring joy to others makes it very worthwhile. I think it's so great to be able to take photos that otherwise would rarely see the light of day and give them life again.

If you're interested in having a custom collage done, please visit my website for more information!

Thanks to Kat Christopherson for allowing me the pleasure of working with her on this collage for her mother's birthday.