Things are GREAT

Still busy busy, but the list of things I have in front of me are now down to the "oooh, that'll be FUN" stage.  It's a huge relief, I tell you what.

Yesterday was Business Work Day. I updated my website, added a process page, changed the way the book work is displayed--a long-overdue change--and changed it over to a better domain name that I've owned forever (www.monkeyropepress.com, but of course the squarespace one still works). I also designed & ordered some pretty sweet business cards (my old ones predated my website, and the etsy URL listed was wrong--oops). I'm proud of the VERY good deal I found: 200 deluxe/matte finish 2-sided custom business cards for $30, after finding a 40% off coupon code. I also ordered a custom embosser! I get teased plenty for not having my name on anything I make, so now I'll be able to blind-emboss old prints with my business name and I got some shiny silver seals to emboss the back page of my books. BAM. 2012: the year I professionalize my practice.

This afternoon I finish carving the cover blocks for my book, which I designed and started carving on Tuesday and which I'll print this weekend. The inside cover is also going to be printed, so registration ever so slightly more tricky since there's only a 1/4" bleed.

I still have a page left to finish in the illustrations, but I've scheduled a time with my contact dude at the offset press on Thursday or Friday to drop off the covers & finished files (scanned & built). By the end of next week, Book 2 will be out of my hands!

That has made me think more critically about my presentation at the coming small press events. I built that model ship with three motivations: first, to have experience building a ship, since it's important in my book; second, to have a ship in front of me to help with drawing future chapters; and finally, to serve as the primary sign/display for my books. The ship is 4/5 built--the structure is done, but none of the detailing bits have been glued together and it needs to be painted. The plan is to paint it a solid bold color (dark blue?) with the same or similar colored sails and I will hand-embroider the name of the book on the main sail and my press name on the jib (maybe in metallic-silver embroidery floss?). This morning I've been daydreaming over color combinations, for the ship & sails & embroidered text & the table cloth covering my little table. I want something fun and interesting, something that if an attendee with a camera were walking through the event they couldn't help but take a picture of the girl with the books and the boat. I'm really bad with colors...I'll figure something out. (I also bought cheapo little book stands on amazon to hold the books open to an Interesting Spread, and a cute pencil holder from etsy to hold cash...got to be able to make change for folks wanting to buy ze books.)

I also got final thumbs-up approval from the two couples whose wedding invitations I'm printing, so soon I'll start carving that as well!

I still have to research & apply for this balls-to-the-walls wildest-dreams probably-not-going-to-get-it grant which is due at the end of the month, and make a new 2-3 page stand-alone comic for an anthology that's due at the end of next week. If that one slips through the cracks I won't be heartbroken, but I think I can do it. Do I have an idea for what to draw? No. Do they want color and I'm really bad at color? Yes. We'll see!

Bottom line: one way or the other, I'll be DONE by March 1 (*save printing the wedding invitations, but that's just two days printing in the studio for fun). I looked back through my Formal Blog posts; my first drawing was done on November 18. This book has taken 4 months; the last one took 6, and was several pages shorter. Not bad...not bad at all. :)

Aye yai yai.

Things I have said to my husband in the last 20 minutes that have stressed me out:

"You need to rethink and scrap or at least undersell that clown joke in your lecture."

"No, you can't pack your suit in your backpack."

"If you're going to draw a graph on the board, try to base it on fact in stead of made-up statistics...or, yeah, sure, I guess you could just draw a cake."

more stuff

Tom flies to SC on Wednesday for a Thursday marathon interview day (as in: 8am to 4pm, interviews with a new person every 20 minutes). He's the last of the 3 finalists to fly out, so the notification of if he gets the (tenure-track) job should come pretty shortly after he returns. Assuming all candidates are equal, which they likely aren't, it's still only a 1 in 3 chance so we're trying really hard not to get hopes up. He could do a great job and present himself perfectly well, and a different candidate could be a better fit for that particular department's vibe. Still, the fly-out is a pretty big thing.

I'm working on 2 earnestly fun wedding invitations. It's really nice, both pairs of clients have the attitude of "we like your stuff, this is the direction we want to go, but you're the artist so go crazy." It's pretty great, getting to exercise a different part of my design-brain. Also, I'm getting paid for these, so that's a plus.

I'm one full spread away from the end of my illustrations for Book 2, plus touch-ups on some old spreads. The last 2 pages are a dense spread and could take a few days (more birds and fish and so on), and the touch-ups could be an extra day of work, but it's thrilling to be so close. Today after work I buy a big linoleum block to carve a new cover. Again: thrilling.

Still have to finish the model boat; going to embroider the title of the book on the sail, so it'll be my sign for my books at the various comic events I'm tabling this spring.

Also applying to a 2nd grant this month, which I don't think I have as realistic a chance of getting as the one I applied for last month, but what the hell. Need to also begin/finish/submit a new comic for an anthology by the end of the month, and apply to a residency (not live-in, just free studio access for the summer).

And I'm teaching a linocut class in 2 weeks. I'm pretty excited about that too.

Even though everything feels totally within my grasp, and I know I can get it all done (which I wasn't confident of last month), I'm still a bit of a mess. I'm not sleeping, which I think is as much about not going to the gym for a month as about having lots of little details to juggle in my mind. My vibe is increasingly inconsistent, confident and happy and proud switching REALLY quickly to stressed and overwhelmed and a little panicked. Office-work is in a crunch period too, so that doesn't help.

Soon soon it'll be done! Soon soon I'll be back in the land of the living!

Cats out of bags

As of Wednesday night, my dear husband is flying out to give a job talk in Aiken, SC the 2nd week of February.

Still no word back about 2nd round interviews from either Pocatello ID or Athens WV...

...and I have barely slept at all this week. For context: I'm a world-class sleeper. I can sleep on a plane, I can sleep upright, and I regularly fall asleep at action-movie climaxes if I happen to be watching them at bedtime. I'm also a person who takes comfort from planning, and have only in the last few years really learned to be OK with, say, plans changing last minute without having mini-panic attacks. I've lightened up! Really! Or so I thought. Having so much up in the air is, mentally, exciting and encouraging and validating for Tom, but my nervous system won't listen to reason.

Also, in spite of good advice from people I trust and respect, I'm going to go look at an etching press this weekend. Not a Gigantic Proof Press that is 1,500lbs and motorized and hard to fix if it breaks, just a 2' x 3' little etching press that was posted on craigslist. If all goes well, I might have a Press Of My Own soon? I'd still print mostly at the community shops here in town while I can, but just *having* it would be a huge security blanket for me. I admit, it's an emotionally driven potential-purchase...the idea of having to move away from a city I love and a huge network of friends and art-community AND being totally unable to keep making work REALLY keeps me up at night. We'll see.

Holding breaths

I try not to tell other people's news here. This is my little rant-forum; other people's business is their business to talk about. It gets muddy, though, when dealing with Tom-news; Tom-news is my news too, but I want to respect his requests for secrecy. I'm not supposed to talk about a few things on the horizon, because one Mr. My Husband is very superstitious and doesn't want to even announce the presence of eggs lest they don't hatch. (Metaphors!) The superstitious thing is no joke; when we moved him out of his last apartment that was just him, I found several dollars worth of pennies that were tails-side up. For such a tidy and spendthrift dude, fear of bad luck won the day: he wouldn't even touch the tails-side pennies.

But I'll say this, and let folks draw their own conclusions:

Tom has applied to 50ish jobs, in almost every state. We thought we had a "No Dakota" policy, but when a job came up in Spearfish SD I got oddly excited about getting to be friends with rustic weirdos and developing sophisticated snow shoe skills; instead, a "No Florida" policy emerged. Every job posting in FL was MEGA depressing. "St Olaf's School for Troubled Evangelical Children," surrounded on 3 sides by a vast swamp? T'anks but no t'anks. West Virginia seems more appealing than that: at least there you get beautiful vistas and cheap cost of living. Lots of jobs posted in Indiana and Georgia, literally none he was qualified for in Texas, but there were some interesting posts in Alaska and Hawai'i. There are still new jobs being posted for fall 2012, but not many. The season is moving to the next stage: phone interviews with the long-list of finalists, before moving on to the short-list for fly-out job talks.

And so I won't say anything else. I won't say anything about the three things I'm not supposed to talk about.

* * *

I've been spending all of my time this month working. Like, since coming home from Michigan for new years, I've just worked. I had one night out with my pal who just had a baby (as much for her mental health as mine, two new hermits meeting up), and there's a potluck this weekend that I RSVP'd to in December, but everything else is getting a "thanks pals, maybe next time" response. I go to the office, bike home, draw, draw, draw, cook dinner, then draw until it's time to sleep, and that's not even an exaggeration. I haven't been going to the gym, Tom has been picking up more than his share of house work, and I haven't been super great at remembering to do basic grooming things. But it's paying off! I'm at the half-way point for my book, which is ahead of schedule. Ahead of schedule is really good, since I picked up another wedding invitation to print this spring. Office-time has been busy too, so I've fallen behind on correspondence...again.

The bit of fuck-around time I'm giving myself is trying to figure out how to continue my practice if we do have to move this summer. I'm really starting to build a solid (if small) little business with my print work, especially if I can use these invitations-for-friends as promotion for soliciting custom work from other folks. If I had my own press, I really think I could grow this work to be more than just the current level of self-sustaining: I think I could push it to be profitable/household-expense-contributing. If I had just 1 Custom Thing a month + etsy sales, plus seasonal craft/art fair stuff, I'd make as much as I could at a day-job (at least, the kind of day job I would qualify for in Rural McCollege Town). That would still give me time to keep up with my never-going-to-make-money comic work. And since Tom would be making a lot more $ and we'd live in a much lower cost-of-living area, we could easily get by any dry months while I work to build it up more. The only hitch is not having a press. Those flat-bed press fuckers that I work best on sell for $15,000, and they're rarely up for sale (not manufactured since the 1960s) and in high demand. I could get an etching press for a third the cost, and still do multicolor linocut and woodcut work, but since those presses aren't self-inking, it's a lot more laborious to do large runs of anything. I'm still trying to figure it out.

News!

Overbooked

I keep doing this to myself: instead of getting to emerge refreshed and renewed in the new year, I'm staying in hunker-down work-mode through April.

• February I'm teaching a linocut workshop (which is super exciting and only a day, but I'll need to prep handouts)
• February I'm designing/printing an invitation for acquaintances of Tom's (for which I'm getting paid a reasonable price!)
• Beginning of March is a deadline for a local print residency I'm applying for, and 2 comic anthologies (for which I'm making new 3+-page-spread little comics each)
• Mid-March is a big zine festival, where I'll sit and sell Book 1 and talk with other small press folks; need to have my boat finished by then.
• Mid-March I have to print the cover of Book 2 (hand-carve a block + 4 hours on the press)
• Mid-March Tom defends his dissertation: celebration ensues!
• End of March I have to send the next chapter of my book to the press, to have it back in time for the April convention, so through all this I have to have finished drawing and scanning and digitally cleaning and file-building (have currently finished 5 spreads out of 18)
• Beginning of April is a deadline for another local print residency I'm applying for.
• Beginning of April is Tom's sister's graduation in STL
• 3rd weekend of April is the small press comic convention in Ohio, where we visit with Tom's nephew and I debut the next book.
• The 4th weekend of April Tom is going to STL for his friend's bachelor party
• Mid-May is Tom's graduation: Dr Tom!
• End of May is Tom's friend's wedding in STL, where Tom is officiant/I am reading something

And in all of that is Life--20 hours/week in an office, cooking and going to the gym, occasionally remembering to clean myself and my apartment. Tom's mom is in ill health, Tom's job stuff could change EVERYTHING (though we're both just staying in "we'll stay in Chicago for another year while he adjuncts and works on pubs and re-applies" mental-mode to keep from over-worrying about maybe-moving), my closest pal in the city just had a baby so I want to be good support for her, etc etc. It's all really thrilling, being this active toward the work I really care about, but I *did* have a mini-panic-attack last night.

So yeah. #1 on the list is finishing the drawings for the next book. Last night I cut down all the paper I'll need for the rest of the book and measured out the dimensions for the drawings on each page, so that traveling and in Texas during low-key times I can work on composition pencil-drawings for the rest of the book. I can't have another 2 week lull while I re-work the same page. Forward marching!

Keeping busy

Tom left the house to catch the train for St Louis at 7 yesterday morning and doesn't come home until late Sunday night. I didn't go with because my I-need-to-be-done-with-book-2-by-April deadline is super super tight, given the average number of hours it takes to finish a page and inevitable seasonal interruptions (travel for Christmas and New Year, illnesses or low-energy periods, editing Tom's dissertation, etc).

Yesterday I got up with Tom and got started drawing a little late in the morning, near 10am, but didn't stop until 11pm. I finished a page that had taken a few days to get ink-worthy and started inking a second page. It was great, I was working at a really good pace and everything, but by the end of the day I was donezo. I was scraping the awful bottom of Netflix watch instant (meaning I have now seen The Santa Clause 2 to my desperate shame), my hips ached from immobility, and I decided that for the next two days I needed to give myself some Task Outside The Apartment to do.

So! I woke up a little later than I intended this morning; my alarm was set for my normal 6:30am, but for "Mon-Fri" so of course it didn't go off. I had my eggs and clementine and carrots and coffee, got dressed, grabbed my granny-grocery-cart and headed out in the rain to Gethsemane, a huge garden center about a mile and a half from my home.  I GOT MY FIRST CHRISTMAS TREE, Y'ALL. I rolled it home (yes, rolling the tree a mile and a half in the rain in my granny cart), set it up, put lights around the window (will get lights from the basement for the tree later) and hung up a new print from Jen. It's so festive!

I've been uncharacteristically excited for the holidays this year. Usually we put up lights around the window in the living room (as much to give us more light with a 4pm sunset as to decorate for Christmas), paint our Christmas gourd and call it a done deal. Well, Halloween weekend when I was doing mega-printing, lots of forces came together: I found myself thinking Christmas decorations at Target were cute--unironically--for the first time; I was printing holiday decoration prints in the studio for a few hours; and while I was doing that, the podcast I was listening to marathon-style had their Christmas episodes. Add to that the thinking-about-Christmas we've been doing in negotiating our holiday travel plans for a few months (who is coming? where are we going? oh, no one is coming? are we hosting? nope, going to Texas!) and I'm primed and ready like I've never been.

Anyway. It's fun. The cats are napping on their pillows by the radiator, the room smells like dirt and green, and I've gotten out of the house enough to feel like now I can hunker down and watch Poirot or something until it's time for bed.

Merriest of merries, y'all!

 My messy living room with a tree and napping cat and lights!

  My new print: "To those who have hunger, give bread, 

and to those who have bread give the hunger for justice."

(Paired with a sweet print "The Salt and the Hot Black Oil" and 

an "I love my bike" print. This is my slowly growing print collection corner.)

Nothing new here, just the messy dining room; just didn't want it to feel left out of the picture party.

Media Week

Time out likes my CTA Prints for holiday gifts

Tattoo Article in which I'm briefly quoted

bullshit mantra against procrastination

looking at design is bullshit. looking at fashion is bullshit. looking at aesthetically-manicured lives is bullshit.

there is only work. make work. make art. make design. make fashion. make an aesthetically-manicured life. fucking make it.

fuck the internet.

BLAH.

Time

I've got an awkward amount of time before meeting up with Tom for the gym...so I thought I'd write about how quickly time disappears.

Fakeness antidote

While i'm waiting for my kettle to boil for a cup of green tea, before I settle down to working, I thought I'd post some pictures as an antidote to my goddamn bottomless OPTIMISTIC AND SUCCESSFUL self-promotion work I've been doing on FB and on the formal work-blog. I feel like that optimism and success is a gee-dee lie. Here's truth:

 This is a crappy webcam photo of my new tattoo after Round 1 of shading.

That means there is a Round 2...which I wasn't anticipating, nor was it what I'd budgeted. 

I like it a whole bunch, but it hurt like a motherfucker and the artist & I 

had an awkward silent vibe for the whole 3 hour sitting. I was mostly

trying to remind myself of other times I'd been in pain, and that it ended and wasn't 

ultimately that bad. Shading is WAY worse than line work, y'all. 

 I'm going through another "trying to give a shit about the way I look" phase. 

They usually last about two weeks; it snowed today, so I bet this one will die off soon.

Mom sent me this beautiful scarf-shawl from her most recent trip abroad,

and I learned that hair-twist trick (not a braid!) from some bottomless well of 

online searching while bored at work. It worked out pretty well; this picture

was taken after round-trip bike commuting to work, putting my helmet on and off twice.

 Got some new boots. My old walking-around sketchers got holes

where my pinkie toes labored for liberation; it's too cold for my gym-shoes converse, 

and too warm for my only-comfortable-below-5-degrees mega-winter boots. So I got these.

They were on sale at anthropologie, which means they were $120 off and still about $50 more 

than what I should have spent. Still, cute and shoe-niche-need appropriate. 

 This is my entire business. Everything I sell on etsy is in this ikea flat-file,

next to my ratty-ass couch that the cats scratch on instead of that perfectly nice

cardboard lounge scratcher. Actually, Atley likes to stand ON the scratcher
to get a better position to scratch the couch. Jerks. Also, I don't like the etsy "favorite" system.

Folks mark "favorite" on my shop and on prints, which is cool and encouraging,

but that rarely translates into sales! Way to raise and bash my hopes. Jerks.

Someday I will have a studio. Or a room of my own. Or something.

Until then, I work in trade with my pal Jen (trading babysitting and open-house-booze-slinging)

or in cash-payment to the community studio a neighborhood away for print work. 

My book work is done here, drawing in the living room, with my back to the couches

and fighting cats and dissertating Tom, and in front of our 

Entertainment System/Work Station/mega-monitor computer, which crashes every few days.

If you can't tell, I'm grumpy. I'm sleep-deprived, I've spent outside my budget this month, I'm having little we're-both-tired fights with Tom (who is stressed about job stuff and dissertation stuff anyway), and all the work I've done this month on my print sales haven't translated to, you know, print sales. Hopefully the shout out in the magazine will boost that later this month. Fingers crossed. Until then, time for tea and drawings. Sounds and Seas doesn't draw itself.

poor dude.

tom dreamed that i got this huge arts grant and was accomplishing a lot, but the only way i could get the grant was if he lifted an atlas stone.

not that he's worried about his job prospects or anything.

poor dude.

Keeping it real

Skipped the gym today since I'm still bone-exhausted from my 48-hour print marathon last weekend.

Tom's at his weekly gaming night. Me?

Ate a whole tray of bacon for dinner, drinking some cheap Romanian wine, going to read some goddamn george rr martin after my shower.

BAM.

KILLA OUT.

absenteeism

lots of good news bubbling out of the ether in the last week or two. don't want to announce anything prematurely, but things are looking up!

i know a common theme recently has been infrequency of posting, to the point where i'm thinking of discontinuing this blog. it doesn't have much function for me anymore: as my professional considerations (small though they are) are getting more in the forefront of my mind, anything interesting or dramatic that does happen to me gets self-censored into vague references here (see good-news cloud of vagueness above). I'm posting more personal pictures on FB, and more work-stuff on my website, and everything else is just pleasant behind-the-scenes routine that feels increasingly self-indulgent to write about here.

Peace out. More later, maybe.

So this happened

 +

 +

 

 (Harold Washington Library)

 =

This is Pallas Athena, the patron of heroic endeavors. The symbol of wisdom in battle, of knowing when to fight the right fight and how fight it well. Not blind peace, not blind warfare, but justice. The symbol of inspiration (she did, after all, emerge from Zeus's head fully formed) and strength, as well as mechanical arts and crafts. She is closely associated with the owl; I tip my hat to Chicago with the owl image. Chicago, where I came to embrace my path as an artist. Chicago, where I became more confident in my skin, more comfortable with who I am and who I want to be, where I learned (again and again) when to fight the right fight and how to fight it well.

Athena, who prompted Zeus in an argument to say "Great Polypheme, of more than mortal might? Him young Thousa bore (the bright increase of Phorcys, dreaded in the sounds and seas)..."

My tattoo celebrates this chapter of my life. I love it.

A few thoughts on getting the tattoo:

1. Getting tattooed down by my elbow immediately sent my hand to sleep. Immediately.
2. Getting tattooed up by the front of my shoulder was immensely painful; felt like flesh being carved.
3. The rest of it was pretty easy, pain ranging from the pressure of writing on your skin with a bic pen to very short bursts of pinching, burning discomfort. The artist said I sat well. We did this in one two-hour session. 
4. It will look pretty different with shading; that will happen in early November. The background (for instance) behind Athena's face will be filled in darkly so she'll pop a lot more, etc etc.
5. I really really like it. It's more art nouveau-y than I'd imagined in my daydreams, and the feathery part of the helmet is less graphic-bold than I'd daydreamed, but I'm not even able to look at it with anything but pure giddiness. Seeing the sketch complete, and seeing it on my arm, is so much more exciting than I'd imagined. FUCK YES!

 (Before the tattoo I was planning on taking "untattooed" arm pictures

but they turned into beefcake pictures. BAM MUSCLES.)