This Past Weekend...

...was my birthday weekend! It was one of those landmark b-days too. *Gulp!*

*Not my actual birthday cake.

I took Friday off of work to relax, but wound up running a crazy amount of errands instead. This included taking my hedgehog to the vet, picking up packages at FedEx, and paying a visit to the post office (to name a few).

To all my Mail Artists out there - I sent out letters to everyone interested in participating and included the addresses of everyone in our group. You should be getting them over the course of this week. If you don't get anything by next week, just send me an e-mail at honeydewstudio@gmail.com

I also sold 2 items from my Etsy shop on my birthday! Woo-hoo! Goodbye Cabbee and Tap Dancing Squirrel. Enjoy your new homes!

I had to hit the post office to mail those out. Does anyone else have weird postal workers in their area? Nice. The guy who was shipping out my packages caught sight of my Honeydew Studio logo on the label and started chanting "Honeydew honeydew honeydew!" ...for the entire time I was standing there. I was like, "Er...that's right." and he kept going so I said, "If you keep that up, I'll turn back into a pumpkin." As I turned my back to walk out, I heard, "Honeydew honeydew honeydew!" Honestly, where does the post office find these people? At least he was cheery, I suppose.

I really want to make more items for the Christmas season. With school, I don't know if I'll have time to actually create anything or not but it's a hope. What should I start with? More bee ornaments for the holidays? More original illustrations? I don't know. What do you want to see?

I spoke too soon!

Wow. Just. Wow.

I posted that previous blog WAY too soon! I guess the folks who are on the Etsy forums in the evening are way more enthusiastic than the daytime forum people. My Etsy convo mail box as well as my gmail account has been bombarded. They are now full of e-mails from people wanting to participate in mail art! We gave quite the list of participants now!

I am so excited. I expect to be sending out a list of addresses to everyone who e-mailed me no later than Friday. So if you want to be a part of this, make sure you send me an e-mail or a convo before September 26!!! Then the fun part can begin. (o:

If there are any stragglers out there who are still interested in sending/receiving mail art, and would like to be added to my address list, please feel free to e-mail me at: honeydewstudio@gmail.com

Still going...

I'm back from NY and exhausted. I've got a pile of homework that I clearly haven't been working on all weekend and it was back to work today after arriving home last night. Ugh. (But I had fun!)

I'm still collecting addresses from people who want to participate in mail art. Ideally, I'd like at least a dozen names on the list before I send it out to everyone. LOTS of people seem interested, but only about half of those people have contacted me to participate.

Why?

Lord knows this is the antithesis to junk mail. It's a total artist-to-artist correspondance. It only costs 42 cents to mail an envelope. Don't you want tiny fun art to arrive in your mailbox? Or is it more that you're worried you won't have any time to make some yourself and send it out?

I totally understand that. Though I was able to mail one piece out rather quickly, I've been SWAMPED with school work and have been struggling to finish up another piece. Maybe if I get into doing them regularly, it will become second nature.

Or maybe I've tapped out my resources. I've been posting on Etsy about it, but my thread gets buried in 4 seconds. I've posted on here about it, but I'm pretty sure I only have about 20 readers (oh but how I love you guys who actually visit me!) I even posted on MySpace. But that can be such a black hole.

Any suggestions where else to turn for people who might be interested? Should I resort to a "Tell your friends! Tell your grandma!" type of outreach? Haha!

TGIF!

I'm heading out of state for the weekend to see friends who I haven't seen in ages. I'm hoping that when I come back, I'll find that a bunch of people are really interested in exchanging mail art and have subsequently e-mailed me with their addresses. (Please? Pretty please? It's fun, I promise!)
I'm aiming for at least a dozen people on this list to start off with. I'm almost halfway there! Help me out by participating!!!

In other news, Etsy was on CNN today. Woohoo! Click on the link below th read:
http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science/09/18/craft.revival/index.html

Snail mail, anyone?

I'm thinking about creating a mail art list for artists and craftspeople to connect and have a fun correspondence with each other. After getting feedback from my other blog posts, and having discussions with fellow artists and Etsians, there seems to be some genuine interest in participating in something like that. Everyone loves mail, right? Especially when it's not a bill!

However, with me being in school, commuting, plus working full time -- I certainly don't have the time required to run or coordinate anything, let alone a group!

Instead, I was thinking that what I could do was collect addresses from interested parties, compile them in a big list, and send them out to everyone. That way people could choose random names off the list of people, and start mailing little fun postcards, collages, doodles, tiny paintings (or whatever) to fellow artists all over.

If you aren't sure what mail art is, please click on this link. The options for what you send are wide open since the definition of art is pretty broad. The only rule that I absolutely want to stick to is that if you receive something, you should definitely send a little piece of art back to that person in return. Participate! Really, it's only fair. You can't just sit back and get cool art in the mail without sending any in return.

What do you think? Does anyone want to participate? Maybe I should put a deadline on submitting your address so the group doesn't get out-of-control huge. What do you think? Does that sound good? I'm completely open to any suggestions. I've never tried to put together anything like this before.

If you're interested (or have any suggestions) please e-mail me at honeydewstudio@gmail.com or you can just write me with your snail-mail address. Let's see where this goes!

A blog about not blogging

My brain is mush right now, which is why I'm posting so much later in the day than usual. I try really hard to avoid complaining and negativity on this blog, but since this rant is sort of art and design related....

I have my evening classes tonight and tomorrow, and am not feeling so confident in the homework projects I'm about to present. Worse yet, I don't feel like I've been getting any helpful feedback or direction so far in my classes. I'm pretty disappointed. Which might have led to the aforementioned lack of confidence.

Maybe the upcoming weeks will prove me wrong - maybe it'll be great,...maybe I'll get a lot out of it. But I'm feeling like this is going to be a lOOoooOoong semester.

Last night, I had to wrestle with giant printing fiasco (why does 11x17 seem like a reasonable presentation size to teachers??? I do not live anywhere near my school, so I can't "pop into" the computer lab.) I've tried copy stores, and that is a hot mess and a waste of money. The only other people I know who can print that large are my parents. My dad is a self-taught photographer and has a great big printer for his photos. So, last night I was up with my poor mother at my parents' house until 12:30-12:45 trying to figure out why red on the computer screen was printing up as brown on the printer. Sigh.

Eventually, my mother figured it out. Everything is all set now...except my mood. Wish me luck tonight. I'll need it (that, and a bucket of coffee!).

You Know You're an Icon When...

For one of my homework assignments this week, I decided to make the point that the Mona Lisa long ago surpassed being a mere portrait. I did this, in part, by stenciling the word "recycle" over the image. It has passed into history as an artistic icon. I'd also say it is officially in the realm of symbol and metaphor...that people all over the world use time and time again. You know how to tell if your work has reached this level?

You know your painting is more than a painting when....

Lego's has built a representation of it,

Miss Piggy...

Lisa Simpson ...

The Far Side cartoons ...

Kim Possible ...

and Madame Tussuad's have all imitated it. And that's not even the tip of the iceberg! I used probably about 100 images of interpretations, parodies, recreations, and reinventions of the Mona Lisa for my project. And there's so many more out there. It's infinite.

I have my BFA in illustration and have quite a few years of art history under my belt. I know all the Mona Lisa history and even some of her "secrets", and I'm still not really sure why it is so popular.

I studied for a winter in France. I went to the Louvre. There were other paintings by Da Vinci that I found much more interesting hanging right outside the door to the gallery that the Mona Lisa was in. Yet, the crowd was so thick around this small portrait that you could barely get through. I might get some backlash for this, but....though it was nice to see it in person, I wasn't super impressed. I wanted to go look at Da Vinci's ginormous painting of Saint Anne, Mary, and Jesus outside in the long gallery:

Gorgeous, right? And no one was standing in front of it except me with my sketchbook. Sigh. Don't get me wrong, I don't hate the Mona Lisa. It's just that people miss out on a lot of fabulous work when they narrow their view on art history down to a couple paintings. What are your favorite (non-iconic) paintings?