Category Archives: Art Habit

Plastic Laminate with the Provocrap Cricut

I
picked up a few laminated signs from old sales at the DayJob. Of
course, I grabbed them out of the trash, well, sort of, they were on top
and clean. These are 1ml thick hot lamination material over card stock.
They are thick.

The
cricut did REALLY REALLY well with them, cut the plastic like it was
butter. I was surprised. The only issue I ran into is that I need the
deepcut housing. Even on 6 and the highest pressure setting I could not
cut all the way through the bottom layer of plastic even though I cut it
on a blade setting of 6, high pressure 4 times. It did score the bottom
layer enough that I was able to sort of pop it out.

So
it’s off to Amazon I go to buy a deep cut housing. Though I’m tempted
to see if I can just sand off the bottom of my current housing…

I’m
going to see if I can snag a bunch of these old signs, I know some of
them are much larger, 14×17! That might be cool to play around with… They also have some in lighter weight plastic… Probably the stuff they call 5mil (actually 1/2 ml thick) would be easily cut on the crapcut.

I’ve got too many ideas and not enough time.

Tomorrow I'll show you what i'm doing with these super simple stencils.

Back to the Past and the usual corporate shenanigans

1 Reply

Instagram
dropped this little nugget of garbage on us earlier this week. The ToS
were insane. So people left in droves, quite literally overnight
Instagram lost thousands of users. Then in the afternoon they released
this nugget of double speak and whatnot.

Let
me translate that for you, Instagram and Facebook Legalese to real
English, “Dude we thought you wouldn’t notice that we’re taking your
pics and we’re going to turn a profit. How could YOU not know we were
planning on making money on this? Nothing in life is free forever.
Basically we thought we’d send out an update give you some good new
filters plus the ToS and you wouldn’t notice. We didn’t plan for Flickr
to release their app this week.”

I’ve
been expecting something like this since the day they were purchased by
Facebook. These ToS are not so different from the ToS on facebook. The
big difference- not being able to opt out.

The
reality is that things like Instagram need to turn a profit to stay
viable. How do they stay viable- think facebook’s ad system. How many
ads do you see on the sidebar of your facebook feed featuring your
friends? I see plenty of them. I opted out of them.

As
of right now, I can’t opt out of Instagram’s ToS, unless I delete all
my pics and leave. Which is kinda crazy. I don’t plan on deleting
everything yet, I’ll wait until the new ToS come out to see if I still
want to leave them entirely. frankly I’m already using the new updated
flickr app and I’m content with that, it’s a service I’ve used for
years, trust and will continue to use.

You can find me on flickr.

More Cutting Stuff

Recycled Stickers

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As a compulsive hoarder and trash picker I have many of my coworkers trained to bring me goodies- things they know I'll use in a creative recycled way. I had a coworker who used to send my way out of date and unused marketing stickers. I have rolls and rolls of them. I often use them to secure packages in lue of tape. I mean, after all, tape is expensive. They work well for that purpose.

Those stickers are all paper, meant to be torn and not last a long time. She also gave me 60 small 2×2 inch vinyl stickers, which are meant to last and last. I've been randomly sticking them all over the place- planners etc, as is. Randomly I thought to myself, "Supposedly the provocrap crapcut can cut vinyl with ease, I wonder if I can control it well enough to cut one of my shapes out of these little stickers?"

Lo and behold, hell's yeah, I figured it out, and I have 30 of these little sheep.

And then and untold amount of these. I'm telling you, making this work has made me unbelieveably happy.

So far I've only stuck these to my sketchbooks and my coworker's computer…

This led me to think, what could I do with those round paper stickers? Since I'm on a sheep kick lately, I cut some sheep out of them…

Not my most inspired thoguth. BUT! Now I'm thinking what IF I painted those round stickers? I know the crapcut will cut through paint as long as it's dry and a thin coat… So maybe I can paint and spray some stickers and get totally custom sheep. (heh< comment if you get the irony of that statement.) This may or maynot be a plot for me to go to Michael's and use my coupon to buy some liquatex spaypaint…

(Also if you haven't snagged the new flickr app for your phone, DO IT NOW, better than instagram!)

A Little More on Flack

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This article is a beautiful one about self censorship. I think that at some point we all lose our way toward our personal voice/vision for our own art. Call it authenticity or whatever, but we have to fight to get back to it. Fight for our unique and personal vision to come through.

In the past all you had to fight was yourself, the expectations of critics and your own inner critic. Now we have the machine of the "art" industry pumping out tools and toys for us to use, straight off the shelf.

For me part of the joy of art was learning to make do with what I had and adapting other tools toward my needs.A little gumption and an idea was all I needed to stoke the creative fire already buring inside.

Cutting Stencils

Flack

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I've gotten flack for being more of an arty art journaler than a writing or cute art journaler. I don't do pretty faces with cutesy quotes. Instead I write my heart out and cover it with paint. I let my writing become part of my finished pieces, even these faces that I've been painting, they have been born out of my art journaling process. Not all of these pieces have deep writing behind the paint, but I learned this process through my art journal.

My art journal is my greatest tool in my art making arsenal. Without it, I'm not sure where my art would be today.

In the images below you can see the words peaking through the layers of paint. Sometimes my journal contains simple lists- like the lists of things I ate during a road trip, a list of purchases made one weekend, beers I tried. Other times it's long paragraphs about influences, things I've read, people I've interacted with, gripes with life. I hang my paint on top of these words, not needing to add a quote or make it pretty. My art journal is a place of no fear. I don't always show it, sometimes it's too raw.

My art journal influences my art and is influenced by my art, it's a never ending circle.

Facebook

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Facebook changed how it's pages interact with the people who like a business page. We were all good doobies and made our business a page instead of conducting business on our personal profiles or just using a personal page for our art. So FB put the screws to the pages. If I want to reach all 402 people who have "liked" my page I need to pay $5 per post, then they guarantee all 400 people on my page will see it, if I don't pay $5 then only about 130 people see it. Additionally if I go ahead and schedule updates they meterout the number of people who see the posts across all the posts per day so the maximum number of people who see the posts totals 130. Pretty god damn sneaky if you ask me.

I won't be eliminating my use of the Comfortable Shoes Studio page but I won't be using it as much and I'll probably use my blog more. Hopefully I'll be writing more over this winter and spring.

Somethign I can't wait to share with everyone is that I have scored a wall at a local cafe to hang my art. It's not a big space, a spot for 10 or so paintings and the ability to have an opening night. So I'll update you all more on that. It's a long way off, August of 2013, but that's good, I'll be able to get a lot of ready for it.

More Details

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I'vebeen painting a few more faces. These are nearing completion. I need to add a few more details and some stencils to the background but for the most part these are done.