Wednesday, October 28, 2009

An ink smudge on both your houses!

I ordered a small hand held portfolio from Lulu.com today. I have no idea how it will turn out, but it was pretty cheap and could be something nice to give away to potential clients.
I could print myself, but after paper and ink costs alone I would be losing money...I am not even taking my time into account. What is hard to consider is that printing is never as easy as it seems. No matter how simple something is it always goes wrong. Its either your fault or the printers fault (in this case my Epson R2400). The classic things I forget are bleeds, spelling, image size, and type size ratio. The printer usually smudges, runs out of ink, the rollers are covered in paper dust and will not grab the paper, or there is a COMMUNICATION ERROR. One easy way to deal with human error issues is printing thumbs of your work before hand. My only issue with this is that is takes my printer 45 minutes of processing a job to accomplish this task even if I export it as a pdf. The printer issues are more complicated in usually involve a ritual dance where I bounce from foot to foot yelling obscenities at the computer while holding up the paper and yelling "see what you've done! How is this ok??" Basically, fixing the computer is on a computer-by-computer basis. For roller issues I suggest getting Epson Cleaner sheets. It does not matter if you have an Epson or not it works for any computer. The paper is sticky and acts as a lint roller to pick up paper dandruff off the rollers...much cheaper than bringing it in to get serviced.
Ok so you have overcome all these issue and now you have pages printed, yay! But wait there is more. Now you have to cut the pages down. I used to use the old exacto-ruler method...boy did I screw up a lot..which means back to the printer, yay! Now I have a very fancy paper cutter from the 70s; my beautiful Premier. It saves my fingers and poor judge of a straight line. But really the kicker is that once you have all these pages beautifully cut you have to bind them together. Perfect binding is the easiest, but it if the pages are held together tight enough then you can have glue seepage, which means the pages will stick together and your beautiful pages become gross.
Doesn't that make you want to run home and try to print a book!
Will let you all know how the Lulu experiment goes. The book was 19 dollars after tax and shipping. It is full color, saddle stitched, and 46 pages. There is also blurb, but Lulu had more layout size options.
All this work made me hungry, lunch anyone?

Monday, October 26, 2009

Pulling a fast one



Another IF doodle: Fast

Rub a Dub Dub Run Away Tub


Illustration Friday: Fast

Sunday, October 25, 2009

soul sucking latte

I love my job, but my soul is dripping out of my ear and into someones latte.
I sent an important email today to someone important who saw my work in the shop. It made me very nervous, so much so that I kept typing a sentence and erasing it because everything sounded dumb. Basically, now that my site is up and something I feel really good about I want to let folks know so I think there are more scary emails to come. The difference is is that in this case this person wanted to see more if my work. I think if its something that comes to anything I will post about it. Right now I can't really because its just one of those pipe dreams and anytime I talk about something that is just a hope it comes to nothing.
I have decided to make this blog a little more dedicated to my thoughts as well as art now that I can direct folks to my website that will have all the art and no talk.
I am going to send an email to the writer of a blog I really admire. I wrote an email to this blogger and have it saved as a draft because I did not want to send it out until the website was up...well now is the time.
In other news my children's book is coming along slowly but surely. I am trying to get it done before the December if I can. The problem is it limits my ability to take part in things like Illustration Friday. I am going to try and fit in a couple as long as I can hopefully more than one day before they switch topics.
Onward and upward

Saturday, October 24, 2009

Dawn of the Squirrel



Because now I am double posting. This is for a Halloween card cause why not?
So I do not know how this is going to work. I guess this will be the blog with lots of words and maybe stuff that does not make it onto the folioblog. I think I still need to blather so that what this will be, but it will still be art related.
Ok, so if you just want images go to charrow

Thursday, October 22, 2009

New Folioblog

Its up!!!!

charrow

new, improved, and really really nice. I am so love I just want to spend all day updating it.

Thank you Kevin!

Friday, October 16, 2009

Thursday, October 15, 2009

dry brain soggy ffeet

Its been a very busy two weeks and I have been having a heck of a time catching up with myself. I think the winter funk is setting in but Im trying to push through.
It is time for some new greeting cards so here is the first of hopefully at least 5 new ones before the holidays kick in and demand my full attention.

Thursday, October 8, 2009

Sneak peak

An image from my children's book. Get excited.

Sketches from Canada

Did a little doodling in CA on my new sketchbook which i love. I did not do as much as I thought I would, but its a start. I have been distracted lately by personal issues, but I am trying to refocus.



Monday, October 5, 2009

Back in the saddle

Being gone was great, but now I am back and somehow I am behind. I am unclear how this happened as all deadlines are my own. I am having a hard time feeling completely productive too. Website is on the way. I uploaded all the images I could find today and maybe I will be able to start cataloging them tomorrow. I have decided to make that website illustration work only and this one personal. I feel mixed about this as I really am attached to this blog, but the website is has really neat features. We will see how it works out.
There are plenty of personal things to write, but right now I am still processing.