Archive for the “Technology for Artists” Category

Set of wine cups/shot glasses with serving tray

I read a recent article about the dangers (or maybe it was folly) of making new work for an upcoming show without testing and revising the original idea first.  So, here I am less than one month away (24 days to be exact) from the Colorado Potters Guild Fall show in Nov. and I’m making new work.  A couple nights ago, I woke up around 2 am and suffered through a bout of insomnia - my grandparent’s clock that makes noise every 15 minutes and announces the hour with the appropriate loud gongs reminded me that I should have been sleeping at 3am and then again at 4am.  Normally, I don’t have problems sleeping through the night, but every once in awhile it happens.

fish lino-cut

All of a sudden, instead of counting sheep, I was thinking about pottery and clay.  New forms popped into my head and I briefly entertained the idea of getting up and marching into the studio.  I knew that if I turned on the light above my nightstand that my husband would be grumpy - so I allowed my mind to mentally visualize some of those forms in the dark of night.  Vases, tea pots, covered boxes, sets, tiles and more floated through my head.  After I heard the clock ring 4 am, I was feeling sleepy again and drifted off to clay filled dreams until the alarm buzzed 6am.  Luckily, I was able to remember and sketch those ideas out in the morning.

Relief printed fish cups and tray

This isn’t one of the forms that I imagined in the wee hours of Monday morning, but it might have influenced my clay filled dreams.  On Sunday afternoon, I was playing around with a lino-cut that my husband made this past summer of a fish bone skeleton and crafted this little set of 2 small cups and matching tray.  I’m not much of a shot drinker myself, but the cups are a good size for hard liquor.  I use similarly sized cups to drink red wine - and the tray could be part of the presentation, or maybe hold some light snacks.  All three pieces are hand built from slabs of clay that were printed using the lino cut and a sheet of embossed paper.

Butter dish top template

Back to sleepless in Denver….  When I made the set (above) on Sunday, I noted that the tray was the perfect size for a stick of butter.  True confession:  Other than the plastic butter dish that came with my fridge, my other butter dish is a functional but unexciting white ceramic butter dish that I found at a thrift store years ago.  My husband has been bugging me to make a covered butter dish for years.  Consequently, my earlier observation about the tray must have triggered something in my brain that caused me to wake up and start designing a covered butter dish that night.    First thing on my agenda yesterday, was to make a paper template for a slab built butter dish.  I pulled out a stick of butter, along with my thrift store butter dish to get a good look at dimensions - then started measuring and drawing a covered lid on paper.

Figuring out the corner cuts for top of butter dish

The trickiest part was trying to decide if the corners should have a slight curve or come straight down at 90° angles.  I was able to solve the issue by cutting on the diagonal at each corner intersection and then began the process of folding the corners to find a pleasing fit.

The possibility for a variety of other angles could make this a very versatile template

Lid and bottom - not a good fit

I didn’t account for the slight flare that I allowed in my lid template which increased the base perimeter, so I had to enlarge the bottom half of the butter dish template.

New larger bottom tray/butter dish template

Better fit between top and bottom

The alteration does make for a larger butter dish than what one would find in a store, but as a bonus, it will fit odd sizes of butter that one might find at a farmers market or specialty market.

Butter dish top and bottom mock up paper template

First butter dish prototype

I even added a decorative, yet functional handle to the lid.  The one I own does not have a handle which I think is a poor design choice.  The lid routinely slips out of my hands - it’s a wonder I haven’t broken it yet.

Butter dish side view

Once I roll out the clay slabs and print them with whatever texture or lino-cut I want, I place the paper template on the slab and use an X-acto knife to cut the shape out.  I use extremely soft slabs of clay which can be a challenge, but allows for a seamless design and minimal joints.

Meanwhile, there’s so much external noise right now because of the election and all the bleak economic news that makes it easy to become mired in negativity and dare I say hopelessness.  Surprisingly, I am oddly calm and more focused than ever before since I have ready experienced a pseudo personal crisis late summer/early fall before all of this really blew up in the news.  It’s not that I don’t care, because I do, it has more to do with my recent decisions and my resolution to forge ahead with a new sort of intentional life that is helping me weather the storm.    On a related note, I loved Whitney’s post on staying centered that she wrote a few days ago - perfect metaphor for clay people.

Back to the studio for me,

~Cynthia

Yesterday, I finally nailed down a schedule for my after school clay class that I have decided to teach again this year.  If you’ve read any of the past month’s posts, you’ll know I have been on the fence about it - so it’s a relief for me to finally make a decision.  Instead of teaching twice a week like I did last school year, I have decided to teach one day a week this fall partly to help with burn out and also because my daughter has a super busy schedule this year including soccer practice twice a week, my clay class and a music class.  It means less of an income, but it frees up more time for me to make my own work during school hours - which is a good compromise if you ask me.

I have also been working on my website the past few days and uploaded the current enrollment form for my after school clay class to my Teaching Schedule page, along with a gallery of children’s art work which is a sub page of the teaching page. I’d be glad to hear any feedback if you have any.  Next up on  my agenda is to flesh out the gallery page for my own work which still shows under construction. Also, I am not sold on the current header image and am continuing to work on the theme template I’ve settled on.  I would like to have the colors of the little graphic icons and the text (titles, links, etc.) be in the same color family. I will be working on my website a little bit at a time when I have a spare moment or two and definitely don’t feel the same urgency as I did a few weeks ago after breaking my site.

The bear is really called “I see what you mean” by Lawrence Argent

Meanwhile, on Tuesday, I pulled my daughter out of school (with her teacher’s blessing) and headed downtown to see some of the sights and sounds of the Democratic National Convention that has taken over Denver this week.  I figured it is educational and  who knows when we’ll ever be in a city again where either party will be holding their convention.  First we traveled by light rail and went to the non partisan “American Presidential Experience” at Invesco Field.  There is so much security in town right now that it was like planes, trains and automobiles just to get there.  We were on foot from the light rail and ran into swat teams, secret service and all kinds of blocked streets which added quite a bit of travel time to our journey.  The Presidential Experience was interesting, but it is a commercial enterprise which devalues it just a bit for me.  I’m not sure I’d do it again, but my daughter enjoyed the event (especially touring through Air Force One, seeing an exact replica of the Oval Office, and seeing some of Jackie O’s Clothing) so I guess that’s what counts.

A normal 20 minute walk from Invesco Field to downtown Denver took us an hour because of road closures and other obstacles.  We arrived at our chosen lunch destination, The Market, bedraggled, hot and hungry.  Luckily the food there is delish and after refueling and cooling off, we set off for Robischon Gallery to see a political exhibit as a part of “Dialog: City” during the DNC.  In between, we saw some celebrities and almost literally ran into Senator Tom Daschle, and got caught up in all kinds of protest and demonstrators,  which was interesting but just a little disconcerting for my daughter who sort of lives in a protective bubble (like most kids should).

After spending some time at the gallery, we headed towards the convention center where many of the caucuses are taking place.  Surprisingly, we were allowed to go in and watch the caucuses after going through a security check point.  We wandered around from meeting room to meeting room and eventually went to a “watch” party which sounds way more exciting than it actually is.  We had intended to head on over to Civic Center Park where many of the demonstrators where camped out, but when I finally looked at my watch, it was 5:00 pm, so we decided to skip the park and catch a train back home.

Things are returning to “normal”,

~Cynthia

Warning:  really long!

My old blog, http://cmguajardo.blogspot.com has been cached by Blogger even though I deleted it a few days ago.  Be careful what you post - it could be there forever even if you don’t want it there anymore!

Back in March, I decided to make the move from Blogger to a paid self hosted Wordpress blog after testing out several different platforms including, Vox, Live Journal, Typepad, Movable Type, Sitekreator, Weebly, Wordpress.com (which is hosted free and not to be confused with wordpress.org) and a few others.

Why?

When I first decided to really give being a studio artist a real shot after dropping out of the graduate landscape architecture program at UCD in 2005, I didn’t know what blogging even was until I joined a virtual multi-disciplinary art group called Wet Canvas (WC for short) in January 2006 and didn’t really know how to navigate my way around all the different available technologies.  WC has a ton of information for artists and I immediately started reading the “internet strategies” thread since, intuitively, I knew that this is a huge part of being a 21st C artist.

Not being completely confident of my longterm blogging or independent studio artist future, I looked for a FREE blogging platform.  Time would be my only investment.

I initially signed up with MSN Live Spaces (bundled with Qwest - my ISP) and then later opened a blogger account because that seemed like the most popular platform at the time.  When I first started blogging, I really was new to internet technology even though I had been browsing the ‘net and reading my email for years prior.  Slowly, I became more proficient and as I visited more and more blogs, I would find applications I wanted to implement on my own blog and started recognizing those that worked well in both design and function.  Later, I became dissatisfied with the canned templates, and went in search of “skins” so that I could customize my blog which ultimately led me to taking some free online HTML courses to understand how it all worked together.

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