Considering my Art Prints

So, I'm considering changing the paper my art prints come on. Currently I use Hahnemuhle brand paper, it's really top of the range "watercolour" feel matt paper. But honestly, it's a massive pain in the rear. It doesn't co-operate with my printers, doesn't feed into the printers on it's own, I have to stand there with the printers to feed the sheets in. It catches and splodges easily, and after all that, there is just so much waste. I hate waste. Waste also makes things very expensive to produce, and the paper isn't cheap to start with anyway.
Yes, the prints come out really beautifully, and being a matt paper, they are very true to the original artworks look. But they are also very delicate, easily scratched.
I'm considering switching back to the paper I used previously. It was good stuff. A high quality "silk", semi-gloss surface. Not super glossy slick, just a slight sheen to it at the right angle. It was also really tough stuff... you could run your prints under a tap and they wouldn't be worse for wear (seriously, I did this). They also printed through my printer with near no faults or wastage, and I could stack the sheets in and leave my printer to it's work without babysitting all day and night.

Many, many benefits there. Also, if I switch back, I could maybe even offer a slightly reduced price for my prints. It's all very tempting, except for that ONE problem... the surface type. I simply love the slightly textured matt look of the Hanhemuhle... but everything else about it is wrong. And yes, I have extensively tested and tried many other brands and styles of matt and textured papers, and they pretty much all have the same issues as the Hanhemuhle for me.

I'd love some feedback from other artists or print collectors on this. Does the surface type (semigloss VS matt) matter to you? And does it matter more than the toughness of the print (and thus it's longjevity and flawlessness)?

My other option, which I could fairly easily acheive, is simply offer a few paper options for the prints. I did already do this at one stage. But part of me cringes just knowing when people order the Hanhemuhle, I'm going to have headaches...

Getting back to work

The move to my new home and new studio has definately been good for me. I'm really starting to feel motivated again, about my art and my business. I will eventually get around to taking photos, at the moment things are still a little too chaotic! I really need to sort out some proper shelving for my studio, all my product stock is just piled up in random boxes at the moment, not very pretty!

The house is coming along well, some great improvements already made and it's really feeling like a home now. I'm enjoying gardening very much, and have some nifty raised garden bed edging coming in this week for a couple of little vege patches, and I went a little crazy at an online vege seed store, so it's going to be exciting to grow things (I bought the PURPLE variety of everything! Purple carrots, purple capsicum, purple corn, purple colliflower, etc! Woo!)

I have finished a painting since moving, of the seeress Fidelma, calling down a vision for a celtic queen, and I'm half way done working on a painting of Cerridwen, both are for the next oracle deck I'm illustrating.

For the first time for a long time, I'm having fun developing some new products. I've got a bunch of really neat items I'm hoping to release soon. One of the first will be a new style of earrings, which will replace the current style. So if you have your heart set on one of the current earrings style, better grab them now, because they will be off sale soon replaced by the new type! Or take advantage of the current sale, to buy an Art Pendant necklace and get a pair of earrings for free!

That's all for now. I need to get back to work. Still many, many things on the to-do lists!

Winterfest, how I love thee...

Despite battling a disgusting cold last week, I made the effort to get to the medeival fair this weekend that I regularly vend at, Winterfest, and I'm so glad I did. I couldn't miss Winterfest, it's just such a wonderful event, and the folk I see there each year are becoming like an extended family, and this year particularly I had an absolutely amazing time. While I was still sniffling and coughing and a little woozy at times, the event itself was like a healing experience, just magical! The weather was more perfect than I could have hoped, clear sky and not a whisker of wind. I was suprised by many gifts from strangers, from random hugs to exclamations of me being beautiful to a breakfast of Fairy bread made just for me! I had my pixie ears on (having my wings out are just such a hassle, always getting caught on things! Ears are a nice neat, little, bit of magic to my outfit!) and just the look on kids faces and uncontrollable squeels of delight (and sometimes fear!) when they saw them was priceless. Hundreds of kids have gone home this weekend thinking they saw a real life pixie, or elf, and that makes me feel tingly inside :) Bitter sweet that I had to break the hearts of a ninja and a gorgeous panther man, and feeling triumphant for having run my stall all by myself (with a few appreciated helping hands here and there) and I'm already looking forward again to Winterfest next year.

New home, new studio, new energy.

I'm writing from my new home, in my new studio for the very first time! Still surrounded by boxes, but progress is going well. I'm hoping to be back in business by this afternoon! It's all so exciting, the studio is looking great! Actually, it kind of looked better empty, but I blame that on my magpies collection of furniture that I seem to appropriate from where-ever I can for free. I have ex-high school science lab tables, kitchen side boards, steel work shelves, bedside tables, and not a one thing matches another... but it works, and if it aint broke... no point spending money and sending usable furniture off to landfill just to have a consistent interior design ;)
But it's still nice in here. I've got all my printers almost set up now (missing some cables, where did I pack those?!), and just a bit of unpacking left to do of stock and tools. I actually have a room in the house I will use as my painting room, and keep all the order filling and manufacturing type work seperate from my creative space, which is very exciting for me. My painting room actually looks a lot nicer, I kept my favourite bits of furniture for in there :)
We're still finding more things around the house that just don't work, which is a bit disappointing (air conditioning unit, TV antenna, some light fittings), but it is still a beautiful house to wake up to in the mornings, birds calling outside, lovely light, trees all around. I will be getting photos online very soon :)
Anyway, I'm just getting my internet fix for the first time in a couple of days, and then back to unpacking and finding homes for everything!

End of TFS contracts

I just wanted to post a quick notice to say that as of April 18th my licensing contracts with The Fairy Society are now all legally terminated and I am no longer affiliated with The Fairy Society in any way.
That is all.

Redbubble quality let down, cheese and more

I'm just processing some photos off my camera for some one of a kind items and new things I'll hopefully be getting online for a website update today, and grabbed these photos that were on there as well.
First one, is a photo of the print quality of the Red Bubble t-shirt I just bought myself.
http://www.redbubble.com/ is one of those print on demand product services, and I thought it would be neat to make myself a kinda promo t-shirt with a bunch of my images on. I picked Redbubble over the others since I thought it had an Aussie branch, but turns out the shirts come from germany anyway, sooo....
But meh, I'm SO dissapointed with the quality of the print. I don't think I'll wear the shirt at all... For any artist out there that has designs up on Redbubble but hasn't ordered a sample themselves it'd be worth doing I think. I don't think I'm being fussy... it's all grainy and you can barely make out some of the images.


On a completely unrelated topic, me and David have been very busy lately, and going out a lot. Which means our milk, which the milkman brings each week, is not being used. So I've been making lots of homemade cheese lately. It's fun, and is really yummy, particularly for cooking (cannaloni, cheese pastries, etc). It's also super easy too. You just mix up some plain junket with the milk, let it set, then spoon it into some cheese baskets (getting the cheese baskets will be the hardest part!). Then the curds and whey seperate out, leaving nice, fresh cheese.
My cheese baskets are the Maltese style, so they have cute little patterns in them that make really pretty little cheeses-


And that's my random post for the day! Hopefully I'll have some website news later today!

Fun with Fonts

As much as they told me during my graphic design degree that I should only ever need 2-3 fonts on my computer (one serif, one sans-serif, and one script), I've always loved my fonts. I generally have anywhere between 500-1000 fonts installed on my computer at any given time. True I rarely use them all, but I like having them around just in case.
When you have that many fonts though, without a way to see what they are, you don't end up using them anyway. I used to have a font manager installed, but lost it moving to Vista, it just wasn't compatible! So for about a year or so now, I've been struggling with my font collection. Not happy.

Anyway, I've found a great new font manager, MainType. It works with Vista, and does everything and more that my old font manager did. It's really neat, functional, and intuitive, which is something that so many programs get wrong these days (do those designers even USE their own programs? Seriously!).

Basically what a font manager does is pulls up a visual list of all your fonts, so you can see what they look like. You can also install and uninstall fonts, a few other things. What I like to use them for is when working on logotype designs. The programs normally have a screen with the full alphabet showing, or a quick brown fox line, to preview the font (MainType has a few options there). But what you can do is type in whatever text you like, and it will preview the font in your own text. So, just say I'm working on a new Fairies and Fantasy logotype, I type that in and breeze down through my fonts list to find a font that suits the text. It makes things so much easier.

Anyway, MainType is a neat, simple program that does the job. The only thing I wanted to be able to do that I couldn't was flick a uppercaps/lowercaps switch for the preview text.

MainType is from http://www.high-logic.com/
They also do http://www.yourfonts.com/ which is awesome fun! You can create your own font from your handwriting! It's pretty cool stuff... of course my handwriting is too disgusting to consider doing it...