Thursday, January 22, 2015

Blogging for Thor: Sickness and Ideas.

Hi there, Spiders. I'm very tired. I've been coughing pretty much non-stop for a month, and it's rather annoying. The doctor hasn't been a lot of help. I don't appear to have tuberculosis, bronchitis or anything else particularly nasty. So, just coughing. Maybe I'll cough my way to a fitter belly? Who knows. My diaphragm muscles sure are getting sore. Hopefully today's blog, posting on Thursday, will maybe make up for skipping last week entirely?

Artistically? I'm actually struggling with budgets and brainstorming. My grant came in, so I've got a decent amount of money to make fifty (50!) pieces of art. Well, it's a decent amount when you take it as a lump, but it becomes far smaller split 50 ways. The real issue for me is how best to present these items for shipping and handling while keeping them aesthetically pleasing, environmentally friendly and cost-effective.

The cost-effective issue is a big deal, mostly because I value my own time. It took me a lot of work to assemble the pieces for my show in Asheville. I don't want to go through that mess again. So I need to find a fairly simple way to present these prints. 

I'm splitting the 50 pieces into 20 wearable objects (necklaces, rings, scarves, earrings) and 30 traditional prints. Oddly enough, the prints are actually going to be the ones that require the most work. Assembling the ready-made jewelry with parchment prints is pretty easy. It's even easier using wood prints. Scarves, at least the small kind that I discovered for Christmas, are fast, too. For the prints? Those I have to make (easy, fairly cheap, takes time, though) and frame. The framing is the sticking point. I don't want to do traditional frames, glass and all, I want something simpler.

At the moment, I'm considering mounting the parchment prints on wooden blocks or artist panels. We'll see how that goes. While tooootally not cost-effective for this grant, I might use some of the left over money (ya know, the amount that goes to me for my time) to buy some interesting products. I discovered a company that makes exotic hardwood artist panels, and realized that you can use Etsy to purchase all kinds of stuff. I'm thinking some live-wood (bark and all) slices of osage orange wood would make a great background for some round prints. Wouldn't that be cool?

Any of you spiders know where to get logs of exotic hardwood... and a belt sander? I need those. 

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