What makes me tick

In my last blog, I asked myself what art is to me. In relations to the statement of " art is patience", I have come to acknowledge that creating art is patience. I also started dissecting my work habits and it feels like I've opened up a door into my creativity.

Walks - going for walks makes me look and see. They help me think.

Sleep - besides the obvious rejuvanation affects it has on my body, I create and process in my dreams.

Go or Stop - creativity, like life is constantly flowing, even when an artist feels that they are stuck in an artist block. I think blocks are a combination of stress and burn out. Also processing in between times of physically creativing counts too.

Art is...

An illustrator
I really admire recently posted "art is patience". That got me thinking what art is to me. I always thought of art as being exciting and have an impact. I never thought of it as being patience. Perhaps I should give it more thought and think about what art is to me.

Sometimes, I am not a patient person but I understand that patience is necessary with all things. When I am impatient, I distract myself with other tasks, mainly research. As a good multi-tasker, I am also aware of the danger of unfinished tasks or projects. The older I get, the more I realize how important it is to find out how I work instead of just labeling myself for having problems. It is crucial to identify my short comings and turn them into positive asset. Sometimes, I like to trick myself into doing something I don't like to. Luckily, I am on a bit of a productive high right now. I am reviewing online presence and deciding whether I need to have several portfolio site to display my work.

Buy Me

As I play around with my online presence, I am looking at different portfolio websites out there. I am now set up to sale prints here http://fineartamerica.com/profiles/astrid-fox.html It's a pretty neat print on demand set up where I don't necessary have to part with my original piece of work if I am selling the prints. I am excited to upload more of my work for sale as prints and some originals.

Creative, Inc.

I borrowed a book from the library called " Creative, Inc " and it has sparked me to rethink my online presence. I have more than a handful of sites, including artists community type portfolios like myartplot.com, a few blogs and tumblrs. I think it's time to merge or streamline them, especially for my home site www.astridfox.com. Other than my home site, the rest of my sites are linked together well, just that my home site seems to be a bit disconnected and holds more of my older work.

 I started looking around online at artist portfolio sites and am excited to report that there are some nice stuff out there. I found a skin that will make my redesigning a lot easier. It's called simpleviewer.net,  it has a free verison that has a limit to 50 images per gallery and some other limittions and more extensive pro version for a paid fee. My existing home site uses a similar way of displaying my work but it was labour intensively coded. Another artist community I found is called carbonmade.com. They offers a smaller free trial that can display 5 projects and 35 images. I like their nice clean designs and of course they have a more extensive paid version. I am happy to be able to sign up with astridfox.carbonmade.com.

I would like to think that I am the only Astrid Fox in the world but sadly I am not.

Lilies

This is my new Lily inspired flower motif

Linocut

I am dusting off my speedball linocutters, got some linocut blocks from the art store and started some block printing. Oh I am glad people have invented easier to cut blocks comparing to the old school hard linoleum. I remember how hard the old lino was to cut, there was always fear of cutting too much or cutting my hand.

I am trying to make a stamp with these rough trials. The stamps will be used on shopping bags. I find the white super soft block very easy to cut but it was a bit challenging to get a clean crisp line. The grey one is a perfect softness to cut and also gives clean lines but it was hard to transfer the image on it as the material didn't take the good old graphite in the back technique. I also tried a white neo-colour on the back, but no luck, I ended up freehanding it. I may try chalk next time.

I have always loved printmaking.

Who knows, maybe I will crack open my skillscreen kit too.