Speaking of Studios, Here's Sherri Haab

Oh! Oh! I'm editing this to include the link I meant to include when I first posted it...DUH!

A Room of One's Own (which lots of photos inside Sherri's Studio) at CrafterNews (by Crown Publishing).

There is this feeling of skepticism I get when I see pretty little pictures of pretty little studios and my inner cynic says "Yeah, right, how long did it take you to clean up for photo shoot?" (In my case, there may never BE a photoshoot.)

And were it not for her true confessions I might not have believed Sherri Haab either, with her clean white walls and simple trappings. But, I was convinced her studio is not a figment of my hopeful imagination or new set for a cable craft show when she talked about "studio creep" -- that thing that happens when your projects take over the rest of the house -- and being fueled by chocolate late at night.

In fact, I like it. I have learned to keep my workspace organized for over a year now, by decluttering daily and actually using my file cabinet. And having a good filing system. Maybe someday I too can have long blonde hair and a white walled studio? Surely, it's not too much to hope... sigh. Thank you, Sherri. :-)

Handy Mail Art Fonts

Dingbat fonts -- those wonderful typefaces made up of various themed symbols -- make my world go 'round. I love them as potent little terrariums of creativity. They take up so little space on the computer, but then WOW! you unlock them in Word or PowerPoint or your favorite image editing program, and out roll unlimited possibilities. They are scalable of course, either as you resize them in your type program, or subject them to whatever your image program can do, and colorable in so many ways.

I used to visit dafont.com in search of pretty black and white dingbat fonts whose characters I could transfer onto polymer clay, and then color with pencils before baking. Lately I've been using Mail Art and postage themed fonts, which I play with, and then print onto vellum paper and transparencies for use in collage.

The little graphic above represents only a smidgeon of what's available in MailArt Graphics by K-Type, which contains an unusually abundant number of characters.

He also produced this just-right alphanumeric font for mail art lovers called Mailart Rubberstamp:

There are other rubber stamp fonts around but I like this one because it's not obviously doctored to be grungy but still has a hint of poor spacing. Plus I love small caps.

I doctored the two characters below with PaintShop Pro filters, but you could also print them onto faux parchment stock or copy them on a laser printer and then do tape transfers layered onto a collage surface. These are from (you guessed it) Postage Stamps by Dixie's Delight:

Hmmmm. Not sure whether barcode fonts would confuse the postmaster, but hey, it's worth a try! This one is called CIA Code 39 and the designer is not identified at dafont:

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Howard McConeghey, Artful Master

On Satuday I interviewed artist and art therapist Howard McConeghey for a paper I'm writing. What a pleasure! I realized later it was almost 30 years ago that I took an Intro. to Art Therapy class with him. Oy! Howard will turn 90 years old in a couple of months, and he invited me to his birthday party!

Here's a photo from our interview spot, in a little window berth at Flying Star on Central Ave.

Studio Jealous All Over Again

Carol Strand-Siebers, the Sassy Art Goddess, has photos of her studio -- a converted bedroom looks like -- on her website, and on the one hand she gives me hope and on the other I want to swap bodies, or at least studios with her.

Sometimes I see people's studios in photos and I think to myself "Yeah, but you don't have the STUFF I've got." I can see that Carol's got the stuff and even probably a smaller room than me, and she's done it!

I like that one end of the table is against a mid-wall. I also like the wire baskets although here in dusty New Mexico that wouldn't work for long...

Check out her studio photos here: http://www.sassyartgoddess.com/my_studio.htm.

Olympic WT*&?@#???

Am I the only person who thought that techno show after the athletes walked in was the strangest thing they'd ever seen? Technologically adept, certainly, but odd, disjointed, and considering the amount of white people wore (yes, we know it was about snow), not very internationally appropriate (white is the color of death in many other places).

The people carrying the Olympic flag at the end reminded me of back-from-the-dead elders and Donald Sutherland's hair was just creepy -- they looked like pallbearers. And whose idea was it for KD Lang (awesome voice) to sing that particular Leonard Cohen song -- did anybody actually review the lyrics? (all I ever learned from love / was how to shoot at someone who outdrew me)

Sarah had to work last night so she Tivo'd the show -- she just texted me "Huh? Ice Totems?" Yeah. Which brings me to the other part. I loved watching (and hearing, when I could) the pow-wow dancers but some of that other indigenous stuff struck me as more than a tad exploitive. Maybe it's just me.

I guess if I want to see a tour de force of Western entertainment technology, I'll go see Avatar. The Olympics comes once in awhile and I thought the opening ceremonies were supposed to honor the possibility of coming together in the world. Watching the athletes come in was the best part. The rest of the show was just a very, very expensive mess.