Notes from The Steam Room

It’s been beastly hot in my home office. The humidity is at a 100% at 9:00am. Sweat pours from my face as I work. This has not been good. Luckily for me this sweat-lodge type of working atmosphere is a small blip on an otherwise incredible summer. So here’s a rundown of the last month or so, in no particular order and with dramatic breaks where I wipe the river of nastiness from my forehead. (That was a pretty mental picture, no?)

Artrageous!
There is a long back story to this, but basically every year I volunteer a week of my time to 10-25 junior high school kids at a place called Casowasco. It’s basically an art focused program that I help plan and run. I really enjoy helping kids know that they have talent and that they can become a professional creative. I try to get them to think, use their imaginations and be free of what the person next to them thinks of what their doing. One of the warm-up projects involves each camper placing an adjective and a noun in a hat, we pick one of each and have to draw whatever comes out. My favorites this year was “Stinky Prickly Octopus” and “Smelly Monkey Heat-lamp.” We laugh a lot at each others illustrations. Great fun.

I also get to do art that I wouldn’t normally do in my day to day at home. We carve foam blocks as a project and I’m always up for the challenge. I never really got into 3D stuff in college, so this is all learning. This year I made a robot. His name is “Lars 1.0” and he does things (not exactly well thought out). We spray they final product with special spray paint, so that it looks like it’s been carved from rock. They loved Lars 1.0. It was a great week.

New Business Cards
So I decided to update my business cards and am really happy with how they turned out. I updated my logo, went with a cream, brown and light green color palette and splurged on rounded corners. The font is DIN Schrift, 1451 Mittelschrift. I’m a big fan. It’s got a look that’s both modern and a tad retro. Like it’s been used in a sewing machine user manual from the sixties. So far the comments have been really positive. My sister said “These look waaaay better than your other cards.” Leave it to family to tell it like it is.

Of iMac’s and Creative Suites
Besides the heat, the second greatest problem has been the beautiful new iMac sitting on my desk. The machine is gorgeous. It is fast and the 20” screen makes my busted Dell laptop with declining screen brightness look like pure junk. The problem with the mac is that I don’t have Adobe’s Creative Suite yet. Oh, I have it for my little, slow PC. I’ve been working two machines for a month now, while funds for the new Creative Suite 3 have been coming in. Fear not, my friends! I know you are in shock and horror and would like to see me use the iMac for what it was bought for. The suite is on order and should be here in a day. I promise you I will jump the FedEx man at his truck to get my software.

The Scribble Guild
A while ago, Mrs. B (Andi Butler) an illustrator friend, e-mailed a few people to see if we wanted to start a group. We could critic each other’s work, offer support, talk through difficult client situations, and market together. It sounded perfect to me, as I was feeling the vacuum of being home working all day by my lonesome. We banded together and I offered to do the logo and the web site. I’m really pleased with how it turned out, but you’ll have to wait and see as we tidy the place up a bit before it’s big launch. In the mean time here’s the link - you can see the logo there as well. Look for good things from us!

There’s more news but I’ worried about the sweat blowing up my new keyboard. The next big purchase just might be an air conditioner.

This is where I ramble on and you tell me about it below. Ok, I actually hope to do more than ramble, but the jury is still out.