Blogging for Saturn: Baby's First Budget!

Parchment Cyanotype, Framed

Heya, Spiders! I know, I'm still late. I'm just really bad at writing during the days and now that I have a social life, I keep doing things on Thursday and Friday nights. It's a real issue... except for the part where I'm out, having fun with friends. So. Not a huge issue, really. Thor might be getting a bit miffed, though.

Today I'm blogging for Saturn, because he's the Roman God of (among other things) wealth and fortune. Why? Well, Spiders, I'm happy to tell you that I've gotten my first grant. The Art & Science Council of Mecklenburg County offered a grant for artists to participate in a Community Supported Arts program. I was selected as one of nine artists to be featured this year. I'll be making 50 small pieces of handmade art, to be distributed to the people who buy shares of the program.

For me, that means making 50 of my cyanotypes on parchment, wood and bone. In all honesty, I'm extremely unlikely to include any bones in the grant program. I'm only getting a budget of about $40 per piece; the bones are just worth too much to me. They're hard to make and the materials are a bit scarce. I'd rather use them myself. So, instead, I'll be making prints on wood and parchment for the grant program. My offerings will be a combination of the wearable art that I've been experimenting with, and the normal parchment prints that I've been doing for some time.

My biggest challenge is going to be the framing and packaging. I've got to keep my costs low, and my time fairly limited on each object individually. The type of display I used for my show in Asheville, seen above, is too labor intensive and costly as far as materials go. I'll need a simpler way to present the parchment prints. The wearable art will probably stick fairly close to the early test models, like the ones featured in the last two weeks. The material and time cost on that is pretty low.

Obviously there's going to be some research into how best to package everything, where to get the best value frames, how to assemble everything, what adhesives to use... but that's actually kinda fun for me. I'm excited, because if I can get this all down, then future work will be that much easier to make!

All of this is pretty amazing. It means I'm getting paid to continue with my experiments. I have a budget! I'm actually being paid to make art. Honestly, that doesn't happen very often for me. I'm very, very excited. You can rest assured that as I move forward with the grant, I'll be posting updates on the work made for it and what I learn during the process.