Stencil Art - Illustration Friday: Bouquet

I've never really done stencil art before, so this portrait of a woman in a flower hat is new for me.

I was inspired by the wonderful flowered hats that Ashley Nell Tipton from this season's Project Runway featured in her runway show. They seemed to be the right inspiration for this week's word, "bouquet."

Stencils are kind of like block printing, and there are a number of ways to approach stenciling. It can get quite complicated, especially when you start getting into multiple stencil layers.

It's going to take a while to get the hang of it. However, it was a great day to play with stenciling because I was actually off work, and because I warned everyone that if I didn't get in some art therapy, I would be way too stressed to make it through another week.

They wisely chose to give me that time.

This piece is done with 2 stencils, then colored with acrylics and watercolors, and printed on heavy vintage paper with printing.

Like a lot of my current drawings, you can purchase this piece at ottoblotto on Etsy.

Illustration Friday: Villain

People often ask me if I know the people I draw. The answer is no. I mostly draw from mug shots.

Mug shots are in the public domain, so there is no worry that someone will come after you for use of the image. Still, one never knows how people will feel about these things.

The word for Illustration Friday this week is Villain. While a few of the people I draw could definitely be classified as villains, most are just your garden variety public drunk-and-disorderly types. Would you know a villain if you saw one?

I kind of doubt I could spot a villain in a lineup. Sometimes the tattooed stranger is really an OK guy, while the little grandmother type turns out to be the villain.

Life is funny that way.

The Work of Drawing

Drawing is my comfort food. My hips might have a different opinion, so I will call drawing comfort food for my brain, and maybe my soul. And while I work at it, it doesn't feel like work.

One of the best things about drawing is that it requires very little equipment, is generally not messy, and you can always walk away from it and come back later, and things will be exactly the same as when you left. No worries about things drying and not being easy to rework the way you have with painting, and no monumental cleanup the way you have with printmaking.

Being able to walk away so you attend to the less enjoyable things in life, like work that actually pays you money, is important too. And so it is with my life.

Because my life is so filled with work these days, I have decided to let drawing off the hook, so to speak, by not taking any more commissions. I have decided to draw what I want, when I want, and leave the rest of life to be the work part.

This has been one of the best decisions I have made in a long time. I have quit worrying about trying to make something that has the potential to sell, and just started making things that speak to me in whatever whispered tones they have at the moment.

Of course, I do still like to make a little extra money with art, so I have revisited Etsy, and started putting some of my drawings into products on Zazzle. You can share my joy if you like, but please don't ask me to work for you.

ottoblotto on Etsy
Incomplete Thoughts on Zazzle

I Wear My Grandad's Clothes

My grandmother died recently; she was 96. She was my last remaining grandparent, my father's stepmother. Arrangements were made to have us all meet at her home on the morning of the funeral to read the will and divide up a few things. It sounded like the tedious sort of thing you would normally equate with preparing one's taxes or having a colonoscopy. But it's all part of the life cycle.

My daughter was away at college, but I got my son and husband, and pep-talked them into getting on board with this activity. We found a pair of pants my husband could get on over all the bandage/drainage stuff that wasn't a pair of sweats, and my son coaxed his dad into a red bow tie from TJ Maxx as compensation for having to endure a day of funerary festivities.

We made it to the house with seconds to spare. We all exchanged the normal niceties and enjoyed coffee, Danishes, and grapes, courtesy of the assisted living folks who really just wanted us to get everything out so they could rent her house to someone else.

Now, I had never actually been to a "reading of the will" event, and had no idea what to expect. And really, I wasn't expecting anything beyond a free lunch and the opportunity to visit with a couple of cousins I had not seen in decades. The will was read. Some paintings and photographs were divided up with the key players getting to make a choice according to the numbers they had drawn. Then, we were introduced to "the bags." Take a bag, fill it with whatever was left. Put it in your car. Get another bag. Do the same. Basically, it all had to go.

The will calls this stuff "residue." If I were to die now, the amount of residue would be insane, but my grandparents had a very manageable amount. So everyone started to go through their stuff. And that's where the fun began.

I went to my grandmother's closet, and we pulled out hats and scarves and handbags galore. At the amusing suggestion of my aunt, all the women picked a hat, and we wore her hats to the funeral. I think she would have been amused. But it was not until we dug into my grandfather's closet that I found this gem: a circa 1976 textured polyester coat in a patriotic red, white, and blue pattern. How cool is that? I think it was the find of the day, personally.

The real find of the day, however, was the laughter we were able to enjoy. It turned out to not be weepy, or tense, or morbid. It was fun, and perhaps even a bit healing. My grandfather and I had not had any relationship for the last decade of so of his life because of his refusal to accept my decision to adopt a child of color. So I wonder how he feels, looking from beyond the grave at my son, lounging in the satin pajamas of a grandfather he never knew. Or at me, strutting about in my grandad's clothes like a hip hop star?

I guess we'll have to wait and see.

Fun With Anthropomorphics

I actually engaged in a little art therapy a couple of weeks ago, which resulted in this indifferent little harpy. She started with a digital collage, then a drawing with a sharpie that was scanned and reworked in Photoshop. I liked her so much I used her for some fun products that will never sell on Zazzle.

Zazzle is great to work with, and I have over 60,000 products there. Sadly, it doesn't come close to making me a living, which is why I also work at the Christian place and the Big Box. It is like a giant vortex, sucking the life out of me. Meh.

The Quiet Face of Cancer

I did a drawing of my husband recently, which is not really unusual. I've been drawing pictures of him for the last 20 years we've been married. He is one of those rare people that, seriously, never changes. Until this time.

It was only going to be a little sketch, drawn on the inside of a discarded library book. A face I had seen for so long. Something, somehow, had changed this time. It was almost imperceptible. His lips were not as full. His look was a little harder. Very quiet differences.

I would probably never have noticed the changes had I not studied his face so many times before. I remarked to him, almost quizzically, that he had suddenly become old. Now, I am thinking it wasn't the old that I was seeing. Now I think it was the cancer.

I think it would be interesting to have a morning selfie every day for 10, 20, even 50 years, to see the differences. Would you pick up on the changes? Would it be possible to see cancer coming, like an early warning system?

I dunno.

And I Think It's Gonna Be a Long Long Time...

Yes, it's been a long time since I blogged. I'm sorry about that. The past year has not been overly kind to me, and this year is not shaping up all that well so far, but I am determined to get back on track at least a little.

I was asked back in the fall to do a show of drawings for a gallery at a small local college, which actually got me to drawing again, only to have the show abruptly cancelled because they "didn't have time to do the publicity right," and could I maybe do the show next year.

Huh?

As it was, I had been drawing all these people I work with down at the Big Box Store, and had promised them their portraits once the show was over with. So I just gave the drawings away and moved on. Here's my favorite from the group, Veretta, a cashier at the Pro Services desk. I think she looks like a modern day Mona Lisa.

You can see a selected collection of the drawings from the show that wasn't here online at Crooked Smile. I am still working on them, especially since I no longer have a deadline, and also since my life has gotten a little bit sidetracked by my husband's cancer diagnosis and because I work 2 jobs now trying to make ends meet. Art has sort of by necessity had to take a back seat as it is not really a great way to make a living. I wish it were different. And if wishes were rocket ships, we could all visit the stars.

Too Much Tequila

I did some collages for the Christmas show at the Center for Visual Arts in Greensboro, NC. They had some funny little sayings on them. I had scanned them before I added the sayings, so I could go into a program like Zazzle and add or change the sayings and type. This is one I did called Too Much Tequila. It seemed right for this darling debutante.

Fun With New Art Dolls

I made some new art dolls; a Maid Marian doll, a Hoochie Mama doll, and a Flower Child doll. They are made from shoe stretchers, collage, and a variety of hardware and kitchen items I picked up from yard sales and the local Habitat ReStore.

Repurposing Salvaged TV Antennas

In the attic of my house there were two TV antennas thoughtfully left behind by the previous owners. I was reacquainted with them this week while working on some insulation issues in the attic. I decided it was time they got repurposed.

I mounted the more complete one on top of a 4x4, and used parts from the other one around the base. All around the poles I planted some pole beans. I'll post some pictures once the beans have climbed on it. Hopefully the birds will like it as well as a place to watch for bugs on the pond, too.

Illustration Friday: Ahead

I've done these Library People drawings for years, and I've always sold them on eBay, but I've decided not to auction them anymore. Since everyone is suffering through the Great Recession, I think it is unlikely I'll get decent bids, so I am going to move ahead and just sell them on my website. Sure, my website gets a hit once in awhile at best, but I remain hopeful that things will pick up. This is Library People 126, and she is for sale at the aforementioned website, ottoblotto.com.

I also sell my work now in my Zazzle store, Incomplete Thoughts. Yes, it's reproductions. I have to make a living somehow.

New Uses for Old Golf Clubs

I don't golf. I don't even follow the sordid details of Tiger Woods' life apart from what I read in line at the grocery store. So it comes as no real surprise that I have no real need for a set of golf clubs. However, I have managed to collect a slew of them from various places. Habitat for Humanity stores are a great place to go if you have need of such things. I really needed a way to put them to work in the garden, and trellising looked like just the right spot. I used old golf clubs and mason's line in some raised beds next to a chain link fence to make this excellent support for my sugar snap peas to grow on. Their weight makes them very stable with the addition of some rock anchors. I'm going to look for some other ways to make use of the remainder of my club collection. If you have pictures of some other uses for old golf clubs, post the links in the comments.

Repurposing Vintage Postcards

Vintage Save the Date Postage by VintageGreetings See more Vintage Postage

I've won a number of awards on Zazzle, which is nice. Really nice. Yesterday I got two awards; a TBA [Today's Best Award] for the stamp you see here, and a Zazzle Artist Award [my first] for this postcard design I Photoshopped together from an old postcard.

Good Luck Vintage Horseshoe by VintageGreetings Browse Vintage cards Postcards

The Zazzle Artist Award gets me a feature on the front page of vintage - postcards. I'm not sure how much attention it will attract. I do like taking old postcards and repurposing them with the magic of Photoshop. That's what I did with the Save the Date postage stamp. I don't think Save the Date cards were even around back when I got married, so surely they weren't around at the time of these designs. There is, of course, a matching card to go with the postage. Check out my Vintage Greetings Store for other repurposed vintage cards, thank you's, and invitations. Great stuff from vintage wallpapers, too.

Cafepress vs Zazzle Revisited

It's been a long time since I wrote a review of my Cafepress and Zazzle experiences, as an anonymous blogger pointed out just yesterday. Since I achieved ProSeller status on Zazzle yesterday as well, I thought maybe they were right, so let me share my more recent experiences.

I have done very little work on Cafepress over the last year, having concentrated primarily on Zazzle. The reason for this is pretty simple: Zazzle stores are free. Bottom line: FREE. [Cafepress, are you listening?] Furthermore, I can set my price at anything I please on Zazzle, and that's the price it is everywhere on Zazzle. Not so on Cafepress, which no longer links back to your store that you spent so much time building, and where you control the prices. Unless you spend a lot of time getting people directly to your store, you will end up with all your sales coming from the price controlled Cafepress marketplace. It's pretty good business, but not great since I am still paying for the privilege of having the store, which also has limits on how many sections you can build. No limits with Zazzle.

Zazzle allows you to build as many stores as you like, so you can have small, very focused shops. I find that putting up a big shop full of every design idea that spills from my head is a little like walking into WalMart. When a do a focused shop like Social Butterflies, which only sells butterfly designs, I get fewer visitors, but I have a higher purchase per visitor result. The bottom line being, if they come to look at butterfly designs, then they are more likely to stay and ultimately buy something since that is all the shop carries.

I now have 17 shops on Zazzle, with no shop fees eating into my profits. Because I can gang them all together for volume bonuses and such, that makes Zazzle a good deal. At this time, I make a little more on Zazzle per month than I do on Cafepress, but because I pay no shop fees, a lot more of it ends up in my pocket. Also, since I can decide what my markup can be, I can control how much I make.

The good news overall is that the economy is picking up ever so slowly, so sales are slowly improving on both sites. And I will probably keep doing business with both sites since I do make a profit on both, but my loyalty has definitely shifted somewhat to Zazzle, because free is still a very good thing.

Adam and Eve and the Children of Eden

My kids were recently in a production of Children of Eden, a musical of questionable theology set roughly in the book of Genesis. Aside from the names of the characters, there is little that refers accurately to anything Biblical, but if you like theatrical interpretation, you may really enjoy it. Or not.

I am of the impression that pretty much all plays and concerts are about 3 songs too long. Even with the relief of an intermission, they always seem to surpass my attention span by the aforementioned 3 songs, and Children of Eden is no exception.

Children of Eden starts in the first act with the creation story, and somewhere along the way we end up at Stonehenge. [Hello? How did we get from naming animals to a ring of giant stones?] In case you are not up on your Old Testament, Stonehenge does not appear in the Bible.

By midway through the second act, which is the story of Noah and the flood, I was ready to start pitching all the characters off the ark and begging God to please let the musical end. I make a lousy thespian, especially in light of the two theatre degrees I have collecting dust in a bookshelf somewhere. Let me be clear, though; the people who put on the play did an admirable job; it is the musical itself I find tedious.

My most recent trip to the Habitat Restore, however, yielded some very inspirational bits of hardware, so I decided that an Adam and Eve sculpture would be an amusing task. Since I had been a slave to my children's rehearsal schedule for the last few months, I must have a bad case of Genesis on the brain.

I hope you like my doll sculpture. It, like the play, is suggestive of the apple eating contest between Adam and Eve that resulted in their both catching cold from the sudden draftiness one frequently experiences when camping out. Or something like that. You can look it up.

This is Dolls; We're Not Making Construction

I watched a bit of that new show on HGTV called Tough as Nails. You've likely seen the ads where Cindy Stumpo snidely declares, "This is construction; we're not making dolls." Why would I want to spend my time watching someone revel in their ability to be rude and abrasive to everyone they meet? It's an easy show to turn off.

I, on the other hand, am making dolls. My supply of shoe stretchers is holding up, so I took out another heap of them yesterday and got to work on some much needed art therapy. I had been meaning to make a bovine inspired doll for my friend, John, whose stickam site is much more engaging than an evening with Cindy Stumpo. John lives off the grid in a desolate area of Texas, and has longhorn cows that wander in and out of the premises all day. Evidently, they aren't his cows, but he doesn't seem to mind, and has become pretty good friends with one named Benita, who now has her own Facebook page.

This pair of bovine beauties is made from two shoe stretchers. The legs are spindles from a local textile mill, the facial collage is from some women's magazines from the 50's and 60's, and the various other parts are scavenged from the Habitat ReStore here in Greensboro, NC. They include various cabinet hardwares, hooks, nails, brads, leather strips, and wooden spoons.

The people over at Habitat were beginning to get curious over my frequent purchases of piles of apparently unmatched hardware jetsom and flotsam. So I shared this blog address with them. I hope they will be pleased, but there is no telling what people will really think.

Recycled Materials Birdhouses 4

This birdhouse is one I call The Meter House. This house uses side cuts and regular 1X lumber. I used old tin roofing for the roof. There is a large gas meter kind of randomly screwed to the side, because I really liked how it looked.

The opposite side has some ventilation holes covered with screening and a ceramic outlet cover. The perch is ceramic as well, with a silver toned beauty ring and a piece of rusted metal roofing.

The house is asymmetrical in design, but I figure the birds won't mind too much. Maybe they'll have creative offspring.

Recycled Materials Birdhouses 3

This is another of my recycled materials birdhouses. I'm pretty fond of this one. It uses 1X lumber along with side cuts from some old logs.

There are some key ornaments, along with drawer hardware and a door stop that is doing duty as a perch. The side hole has screening in it to protect against anything getting in through the side, but it still offers some ventilation.

The roof is made from a piece of old tin roofing from a dismantled barn. I can't wait to get it up on a tree where I can watch for future tenants.

Recycled Materials Birdhouses 2

I call this birdhouse the Arizona house, as it uses my no longer needed Arizona license plate, among other things.

We found an awesome metal scrapyard the other day. They had all these bins of old brass junk, much of which I have used on this house. It includes three different styles of drawer pulls, along with escutcheon plates, beauty rings, a key, a dog tag, and a plastic outlet cover.

My favorite part is the unusual top ornament. I just hope it doesn't act as a lightning rod.

Recycled Materials Birdhouses

For the last few days I have been doing some birdhouses. We have had an unusually cold winter, and I have been trying hard to keep all the neighborhood birds fed. Since spring is on the way, I figured birdhouses would be a good idea for my little feathered friends.

My husband and I spent the better part of a day collecting some birdhouse inspirations. We got some very cool items at the local Habitat Home Re-Store, a metal salvage yard, and the junk heap where a barn had been not so recently re-roofed.

It was just uncommon fortune that Illustration Friday chose "Propogation" for it's word of the week. I figured I would be contributing to the propogation of baby birds, so I decided to post some pictures.

This particular house uses the side cuts from some logs, some regular 1X lumber, a portion of a license plate, a metal house number, a valve stem, an electrical plate of some sort, and a sculptural head that had taken a bad fall. I still have a little caulking and weatherproofing to do, but I am pleased with my results.