Great Initiative to Get to a Residency

Local charmer, Angela, has taken an initiative and I admire her methodology and determination. She is making market-ready commercially smart art, true to  her passion, and undertaking a campaign on the crowd funding site, Indegogo. Here is how she describes her current purpose to raise funds to attend a residency in France (I love residencies):

My name is Angela Gooliaff and I’m an emerging visual artist living in Vancouver, BC, Canada. I have a passion for telling stories, especially stories about tiny but fascinating creatures among us – bugs!

My favourite subject to draw is ants. And I hope these ants will take me all the way to France. Why ants? Because they are admirable and multi-dimensional little beings. No one works harder than an ant. In my greeting cards, I have also expanded to other interesting and beautiful bugs such as British Columbia’s Rugose stag beetle, a Blue Morpho butterfly, ladybugs, dragonflies and others. 

My goal is to raise $5,000.00 to attend DRAWinternational, an artist residency program in Caylus, France.  DRAWinternational provides illustrators a one-month opportunity to focus entirely on their artwork, expanding their ideas and creativity, and collaborate with other like-minded artists. I am honoured to have received acceptance to this program.

Link to her Indegogo site.

Clients from Hell

Thankfully, I never had any clients like those whose obnoxious conversations with creators are inventoried on the website Clients From Hell, but I have commiserated with many who have. I did graphic design commercially as well as writing, and the design clients were always more challenging to converse with than my writing clients.

As a technical writer, this happened to me many times:  An employer would contact me and work out a contract and then he'd walk me down the hall to meet "the people I'd be working with." They would warmly welcome me then the boss would leave and the "people I'd be working with" would say, "What the hell ... we're not ready for you!"

Here is a sample of what you'll find on Clients from Hell:

          CLIENT: “I don’t like the type.”



          ME: “What don’t you like.”



          CLIENT: “I don’t like how it goes all to one side.”



          ME: “You mean arranged left.”



          CLIENT: “Yes, yes, arranged left.”



          ME: “How do you want it?”



          CLIENT: “To be the same on both sides.”



          ME: “Justified?”



          CLIENT: “I don’t have to justify anything for you. I own the fucking company.”

Digital Art Gets Monotized

This (from Forbes) is the first I have ever heard of a digital art auction described thus:

"Earlier this month, Phillips, a prestigious art auction house, partnered with Tumblr, one of the largest repositories of freely-shared GIFs, to showcase GIFs, webcam selfies, video game screenshots and other experiments in screen-based pieces and physical objects derived from digital tools."

The article continues...

"Though digital art is shared, liked, retweeted and embedded free-of-charge all over the web, the 20 pieces Lindsay Howard selected for this exhibition demonstrate a new level of comfort with bringing digital art offline and traditional media online. And, unlike the digital art shared and spread online, these pieces pulled in prices of $800 to $16,000 each."

I also found some interesting commentary on the show here:

Steven Sacks, the owner of bitforms gallery in Chelsea, said that while he thought the auction was a wild success for artists that weren’t well-known, “financially, it’s more difficult to say.” Nine of the 20 lots sold for less than their estimated bids, and four of those were bought-in by the auction house. “Obviously, the numbers weren’t through the roof,” Sacks said. But Phillips was extraordinarily happy with the auction, its head of sale, Megan Newcome, told me. And by its metrics, that’s not just PR. “We were very clear-eyed about this: no matter what the results are, if we’re able to bring these artists to a mainstream audience, then the auction is a success,” she said. About this there is near unanimous agreement. “This auction was great for opening up people to digital art,” art consultant and collector Myriam Vanneschi told me. (Full disclosure: Vanneschi once bought a digital portfolio from AFC.) “For the collectors that I work with... it takes me a lot to even get them to consider digital art. Because the auction took place at Phillips, a big name and brand in the art world, it gives them some sense of assurance.”

 

Inkodye Printing System

Lumi is a new DIY alternative to screen printing. The process works on cotton, linen, silk, rayon, canvas, and any other natural & absorbent fiber. Once finished, your print is permanent and can be machine washed without fading. Link.