New Project: My Process

I should have the thing colored by next week sometime. It depends on when I can get to Tree Towns...

This is it, I guess........im not very excited about it. It may end up in the trash to be honest...

Long Day.

Here's the painting i began. Now, mind you that i've never touched oil paints before. I'm just trying to figure out how the medium works. Plus, i want to learn a few cool techniques like this artist I found, Harriet.

Basia's Gift, For Real!

So i ended up re-doing the mosaic for Basia. This one is completely different in every way: color. design, stones. I think this piece is much more "together" and way cleaner than the first. It turned out better than I anticipated.
I ended up giving both pieces to her for the one price we agreed on in the beginning. It was only fair since it was my choice to redo it and not hers.

Abstract Art

I have always thought those who cannot paint realistically, paint abstracts. This I have found to be wrong. Abstract painting is equally as difficult. You have to know how to work with colors, textures, flow.....everything. AND you have to create it from within, not from a picture or a reference. I had made a small collection of a few abstracts I've done in the past year. It is a sad collection, I'll admit, but I tried. I want to go further with my red and blue grid, but I don't know any techniques to get the look I want. Perhaps I need to experiment more (which I'm sure is the only way to figure it out) but I don't have the patience. My mother hates abstract art and thinks all the pieces I create are garbage. This is discouraging, as one can probably assume. But I have seen worse!

My City

Once in a painting class, I was assigned a brief read, Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino. It was a beautiful book with descriptions of imaginary cities that Marco Polo supposedly visited. I then needed to choose a city I found most interesting and paint it.


As much as a loved painting Calvino’s city, I wanted to make my own city filled with things that interested me most. So, perhaps now is the time to begin writing.

The shore lines the vacant town with jagged rocks and shells, which crush the washed up bones of fish; none but crabs and seagulls walk this beach. Salty air hangs thickly around the decrepit buildings that once maintained commanding beauty, though now chip yellowed paint off their siding. A passer-by may dismiss this broken city, but beneath the gritty exterior is a story. A story of what this place used to be.
Every shattered window, every splintered door was once a guardian of its people. But where are these people now? No voices echo through the damp alleys or within the church’s walls. Everything is grey, for the exception of a small, red hat with, what was once a white satin bow, now a sick shade of green. It is the only evidence that life ever existed here.

I will be sure to add more if I can think of anything interesting to add. Perhaps I should develop a murder story centered around the town. I don't know.

ALL IS LOST!

So as few people know, I changed my domain name from arttalkit.blogspot.com to samanthadecarlo.blogspot.com. When I did this, I lost all my comments from friends and followers. I'm a bit bummed about it.

On a brighter note, I now have TWITTER AGAIN! whoo-hoo. You can ALL FOLLOW ME @SGDart My goal one day is to have 1,000 followers, which is a bit excessive, but in a few years I think I can achieve it. Oh! And I want to get followers WITHOUT "we follow" or "geo-follow." You know, those programs that generate followers for you? That's not real marketing. I want people to care about what I'm saying and drawing.

Speaking of which, I want to highlight a couple good friends: Anthony Kosar has a phenomenal website and blog that any artist or art-lover should follow. Also, Cindy Bernhard is a fine artist at school with me, and she has developed a great portfolio. As well as Dustin Yoder. Check them all out! I"ll be sure to add a few more friends next time.

Google Analytics

So i just set up google analytics for my blog. I didn't think I could do it, but I really surprised myself! It was a lot easier than I thought it would be.

Now I can track how many people look at my blog a day, what country they are from, what city they are from, and what pages they look at. I'm so pumped!

I already had it for my website (which visitor viewing is up a whole 29%) so i thought, why not my blog? Best decision ever.

For those who aren't familiar with what it looks like, it's super easy. It lists the sites you are tracking and how many visits you've had in a month period, and whether the numbers are up (green), or down (red).


When you click on "view report", it opens up to show you a much wider range of information, like visits and views per day, where the visitors are located, how many times one person has visited the site. CRAZY STUFF! it's awesome.


If you haven't set it up, and you have sites you wanna track, i recommend doing it asap.

go to:
 http://www.google.com/analytics/ and it will tell you how to do everything there. Good luck and have fun! But beware, it's very addicting...

business cards.

As an artist and a current freelancer, business cards are a very effective way for me to spread my name. SO WHY HAVEN'T I HAD THEM UNTIL NOW!? I guess I have been lazy considering I've been at AAArt now for two full years and most every upperclassman has a card or logo. Although they claim to be ahead of the majority of other artists, I believe there is no such thing as "being ahead," or "being behind." There is just getting out there.

My reasoning is this: you are never too young to start marketing yourself, just as you are never too old. My friends at school laugh at me for having a website and a blog, but I think it's silly not to start putting yourself out there. I would tell ANYONE who is in the business of "selling themselves" to start now and do everything! I'm embarrassed I only just ordered my cards this morning (1:30 am).

This is front of my card


This is the back


I wanted this to be simple and a good representation of my work. I love my monsters and underwater hybrids, so these two pieces are perfect. I love the color against the stark white, and the negative space around both figures. I thank Nick Eby for helping me with the text and figuring out what to add and how to align it.

New Octopus. (In progress)

This one is terrible. It looks like a rainbow, which is really lame.




I think I'm going to stick with this color scheme.

Colored Monster

Colored in the monster I recreated.


Colored Monster



Black and White against Colored Monster

Steppin' It Up

A new section has been added to my website: Before and After.

The premise of this addition is to take a drawing I've done years ago and redraw it. Then post both drawings together to show the improvement. Also posted will be my black and white drawings that I chose to color, for example the seahorse or my Two Birds. I plan on making a good amount of colored piece from the original black and whites. I'm not sure how many redrawn pieces I can do, or have time to fit in, but I think that is the most interesting transformation.

I hope you enjoy!


Before and After: Angler Fish




Before and After: Monster

I See a Seahorse!

I have had the "skeleton" (the black and white version) of the seahorse created now for about 5 months. I recently decided to color it just to separate the subject from the background better. I think it was really beneficial. Also, I've had a lot of great response from it.

If someone wished to buy the colored print, I would create a special color scheme for them that I would not reproduce. So my plan is to sell the black and white colored print for $50 and the colored prints for $100, since they are unique and original color.

Colored Print

This took roughly 2-3 hours to color, whereas the skeleton took around 25 hours to draw. I used micron pens for the black and white, then sharpie and prismacolor markers to fill in the color. Again, this is just one version of color. I would actually like to see it more blue rather than orange.

For my website, I posted the skeleton against the colored drawing.

Black and White against the Colored Print

Basia's Gift

A young girl walking uptown approached me while I was packing away the dog house in my car. She told me she liked the design and asked if I could reproduce it on a smaller scale for her sister. I agreed. So, here is my progress...



It is very different from what I am used to doing. Sure, I LOVE to do crafty stuff! I just don't think I'm very good at it. I tend to be sloppy, believe it or not, and I get frustrated very easily. I ran into a few problems already with this piece. I did not like how it originally looked without the glitter. And then once I glittered it, I hated it even more! The caulk I bought was sticky and everywhere. The glitter not only stuck to the glue I meticulously painted around the beads, but to the black canvas i had yet to paint. So...I had no choice but to just paint right over the rouge glitter.


STEP 1: attach beads




STEP 2: glitter



STEP 3: paint

Price Check!

When I walked into work this morning, I felt great. I had been busy all weekend with commissions, prints, and redesigning my website. So, I confronted my art director, Noel, about how much attention my site had been getting lately. This was quite rewarding considering he informed me how UNoriginal and boring he thought my site was just a week previously.

I also told him of a woman in Alaska who found my site and loved one of my prints.
He exclaimed, "Excellent! How much did you sell it for?"
I told him, "Well, $25. That's the price for a print."
He then burst into laughter.
"How could you sell a print for so little?" he asked.

I informed him how I felt about selling my work as a print. How I'd rather have my art work everywhere because people can afford it, than nowhere because it was too expensive. Though, he wouldn't listen to a word. He told me since I don't mass-produce, every print is like an original. I suppose I can see his point. Thus, I doubled my prices.

So, I ran to him and told him I did so. He laughed again. He thinks I should be selling my work for numbers in the hundreds. HUNDREDS! I couldn't believe it. My work? Well. I disagree that a print would be worth that much unless it's massive and difficult to reproduce. All my work is quite small, the most reaching 11 x 17 inches. So, I feel that the prices I've picked for each piece is reasonable and workable. If someone cannot afford an art work, I can lower the price accordingly. I think it's more important to give out art than hoard it.

So, I have raised my prices (most now are around $50 for a print), and I hope everyone can deal with it.

Randomly Found Work

I have been working on this fish for quite some time. A lot more time than it looks, to be honest. Perhaps 3 weeks? I began it the first week i was out of school, and then i abandoned it for a while. I really disliked the composition of the fish against the pipes. I should have planned it out better. I would not call it an absolute failure, but it's not my best.



This bird was also started three weeks ago. I worked on it one day and never touched it again. I will not be finishing it.

...

I am a little upset with myself. I have not done much since the week I finished school for the summer. Given I produced four pieces in four days, no new work has made its way onto my paper. This must change. For, if I am not creating, I am nothing.