Friday, March 20, 2009

In honor of the first day of spring...


Here's the new DC print, DC Love III! I'm doing 2 versions of this, because I thought it would be fun to make some of the prints with pink blossoms, but pink kinda clashes with red, so half will have pink blossoms and half will have the red umbrellas. I really like how they came out, and I've already done a custom save the date based on the design, but with a different couple and no umbrellas. There's also a matching moleskine for this design!


Soon, I will probably be offering custom services on my etsy shop. Here's the image for the custom save the date I just finished today (I took out the type though)!

I'm thinking of adding an option to customize an existing design, and another option for a completely custom print. Custom prints will be giclee, not gocco or screen printed since there is a finite supply of gocco materials to be had at this point, and because I really don't have the screen printing thing down just yet. I thought I would by now, but I'm really not used to having to screen print in a home environment which is where my studio is now, and I don't feel comfortable selling screenprints until I can effectively complete the project! I'm really only used to printing with equipment like a vacuum exposure table and a powerwashing booth, and neither of those things really fit into the bedroom I've been allocated as my studio space, at least until we have more than 2 kids and then I'll have to move into the room behind the garage. At least at this point that scenario includes about 2 more kids than we currently have (which is none), so I'm not too concerned. Honestly, Devin was such a sweet, calm and well mannered kid (from what his family has told me), I'm not sure he would want more than one kid if that one kid turns out like me as a child (my mother says this to sum me up as a child: "people thought you were darling until you opened your mouth"); I'm not sure he could handle it.

Anyway, I bought a new pigment printer today, and I'm very excited about it! It's an HP Photosmart Pro B8850. It has a sister printer, if you will, but it was a bit more money for some features I don't really need. I did almost buy it because it takes thicker sheets of art paper, but what really sold me on the 8850 was that it has a sleep mode which helps keep the printerheads from drying up between uses for people who won't be using it very frequently. And since each print is pretty costly to make, I probably won't be using it terribly often. I was looking at an Epson for a while, but kept hearing they have a lot of issues with ink cartridges not reading correctly, and one guy who said he didnt figure out that his printer was defective in reading the new cartridges until past the 30 day money back time, so all epson would do was send him a used refurbished model which he had to pay for shipping on. No thank you to that customer service. I already have a million headaches with customer service between my crap verizon fios and my adt security system (the cats keep setting off the "pet proof" settings. now there's a way to getting acquainted to a new neighborhood: be the people standing in their pjs in front of the house with the cops on a saturday morning. I don't think we'll ever live that one down, honestly. But the neighbors now at least seem to think we're interesting, and I always say, better to be crazy than boring- which is probably mildly ironic, given this long winded blog entry).

I'm also going to some shops this weekend in the hopes of one or 2 of them carrying my prints and notecards. I hope they like me! And, I reprinted San Francisco Love in grey, and I think they came out really well! They remind me of what it might look like if there was morning fog over the bridge.

2 comments:

Patricia said...

Your cherry blossom, Washington Monument and couple with the umbrella design looks like the Japanese woodcut used by the Smithsonian's Sackler-Freer Galleries when they were advertising the Cherry Blossom events held there a few weeks ago.

Art Shark Designs said...

Yes, I suppose it does bear some resemblance...really I just wanted a vertical view of the Washington Monument, and this was from a picture I took. But that is a great piece (although I didn't think they used that one for advertising this year..I think it was one slightly different).