Doodles to prints

I am fully engaged now in the creation of the next collaborative puzzle print, which as some of you know, I am launching as a Kickstarter.com project so that we get funded properly this time.
Once I launch I will update that project on my alter-blog http://puzzleprints.blogspot.com
but we're not there yet although so close I'm starting to shake a little.

While awaiting for the final approval process and the final touches on my part, I continued to work on the image which will be the awesome Fantastic Garden with the help of 80 printmaking friends. My creative assignment is to come up with something simple, puzzle-like, to be divided into as many pieces as there will be participants for them to give the image life.

The design has to be simple so I started by looking at my collection of royalty-free clip art and came up with some doodles. I felt like I had stepped into a toon-world of some sort with images of fat-funny bees and rounded flowers floating in my head.

But I couldn't stop there! No, once fully engaged I had to keep doodling. For that, I use Photoshop and my Bamboo tablet with a very responsive pen! I took the birds and flipped them, scaled the tree, added more pond, and some critters under the tree roots. I don't know about anyone else, but those "doodles" take a bit of your life away. I think artists live so long because we turn half an hour into seven, or more accurately, we shrink seven hours of doodling into what seems like 30 minutes, thus "living" 6 and a half free hours during which we don't age at all. It's a theory, no?!

Anyhow, one thing led to another and I came up with the final image, to be modified several more times of course. Here it is, the soon to be Fantastic Garden. Imagine it larger than life 60 x 44 inches in four panels! And all those empty spaces will be filled with my fellow artists' contributions! How awesome is this going to be?!

But of course I couldn't stop there! Not now with all the creative juices flowing like mad...so I thought wouldn't it be super-cool to make some woodcuts from the design with more detail and stuff?! Why not, I have to wait for the participants to cut their blocks anyway, might as well be making art.

So I took the next step and kept on drawing and coloring. I have to say that I don't usually work this way at all but this is a lot of fun. My usual modus operandis is to draw right on the block and take it from there. But this time I'm planning everything ahead.

So here we are after two days of working, the evolution of a little panel which is likely to become one of the rewards for the future backers of the project!

The creative process is kind of cool, I think, things just happen and we artists seem to step out of our mind and body while "something" takes over and doodles away.
This one is called "Tree and a Bee". Should make a cool woodcut.

I better keep working!

New Project in the Works: Fantastic Garden

Ready or not, here we go again! (Insert William Tell Overture here!)

I started doodling!

We are just ready to launch sign up for the Fantastic Garden starting the first week of April. This exciting new monumental collaboration will (hopefully) receive additional funding from the Kickstarter project by the same name, to go live in early April.

Participant artists, please read the new and improved agreement in the page on this blog called 2013 Fantastic Garden. The instructions will remain in place through sign up. This blog, along with the Kickstarter page will be the headquarters of the project.

For those of you not familiar with http://kickstarter.com go peruse some projects! The platform allows for creative project funding through rewards given to backers of each project. This allows us artists to play together in exchange for giving the gift of art, how cool is that!

More to come in a couple of days. I just shot a video for the project main page and should be receiving the results very soon.

More puzzle pages updated!

I am slowly but surely updating more projects, both previous puzzle prints are now all dressed up in new web dresses. Here is the main projects page, the first five links are now live:
http://1000woodcuts.com/projects/index.html

On a related note, the next monumental puzzle print is just around the corner, finalizing some details in Kickstarter. The Kickstarter.com platform is designed for funding creative projects and it should be perfect to make sure that we have enough money to complete the project without going broke. I personally am very excited about that.

Participation will be limited to the first 80 to sign up, this way the beast print remains manageable and I don't lose my sanity....er, allegedly.
Projected sign up will open in two weeks and will remain open for thirty days. Soon, now, very soon!

New (Old) Projects Published on Website

Website Update Alert

I have been working hard to update my "deprecated" website and now have new galleries and some projects updated! It is slow going but that just shows how long it has been since I polished up my web skills. Grumbling and growling, I'm learning as I go. Deprecated, I have learned, is a word that web design techies use to make us web-amateurs totally miserable. Deprecated sounds scary but really just means that some codes are no longer in use...which is a total lie fabricated in order to preserve the job security of aforementioned web design techies, because old websites still "look" fine on 98% of browsers. But anyhow, I am slowly seeing the beauty of efficient web design, sort of.

Quest 100

One of the first areas that I upgraded was my Quest for 1000 Woodcuts. In the process I seemed to have lost a few woodcuts, but who's counting? Oh wait, I am!
I found a nifty program that makes me efficiently designed galleries so, for now, that's the format I'm going with. I figured in about 20 years deprecation will catch up with me again. Deprecated...hmph...
Anyhow, my website: http://1000woodcuts.com and a direct link to The Quest Galleries: http://1000woodcuts.com/quest/index.html

Updating all those pages reminded me how much I worked in past years and makes me wonder if I will ever pick up the pace again. Sigh. So much to do, so little time.

Projects: The Cairn

And of course, my other "love" are the projects that keep me driving and driven all at once. Some of the projects that continue to tickle my fancy are the Puzzle Prints. I upgraded the second project: The Great Baren Cairn for no good reason except that the old pages seemed better organized and I felt like tackling them just now.

Direct link to the new home of the Cairn:
http://1000woodcuts.com/projects/cairn/index.html

Next puzzle project in the horizon, I have set a secret date to begin already. Meantime, enjoy the new dress on the webpages!