Halls of the Dark Muse

Though I have not been entirely absent from Litnet I have not been here and about as much as usual, and it certainly has been a good long while since my last blog post. I have been a bit busy with this and that, so here are some of the highlights of my life, of what I have been most recently up to.

Since my gallery experience, of which I have told you about it had helped to refocus my attention back on my artwork again. So I have been creating visually a lot more lately which had somewhat drawn my attention away from my writing, but I try to keep up with it as well.

Shortly after the gallery showing closed I began working on a new abstract painting the idea for which I have had for a long time, but had never got around to actually working on. I have to say I am quite happy with how it turned out.

I also have an idea for a watercolor which I hope to get to working on soon.

In addition I have recently discovered digital art, that is to say I have been aware of it for a long time, but never ventured into it myself, in part because I have not the money now to spend on something like photo shop, but I happened upon some pretty decent photo editing programs online which are free to use and offer a lot of different features. So I have been playing around with creating photo manipulations. It does get quite addictive.

I also happened upon this project hosted by Neil Gaiman. It is called The Calendar of Tales. Gaiman wrote a short story for each day of the month and then invited other artists to submit their works, in any medium to illustrate his stories, and you were allowed to submit as many works as you wanted. So I have been busy with that. It was quite fun and really got me doing some rather innovative things. The deadline was March 11th. It has not been announced yet which works were chosen, but I shall be sure to keep you updated.

And as part of all of this I decided to try and get more serious about selling my artwork. I found a site online for artists which allowed artists to establish their own web pages and sell through them. It is all free to use. The way it works is, when you post your work you have two options. Print on Demand, in which the site will handle the transition, they will make the prints, do the framing, and ship the item, etc.. and in return, whatever you chose to charge for your work they will add on to your price the different of what they will have to pay, then if you sell your work you will get the full amount you asked for and they will simply take their added fee.

For example, if you charge $15.00 for a print, the total cost will come out at like $27.00, if it sells, you get your $15.00 and they take the rest.

The other option is to handle it all on your own, so that it will be your responsibility to provide the prints, do the framing, shipping etc.. but if you choose this option than you have completely control of the pricing, the item will be listed by whatever amount you choose, and you get 100% of that profit.

It seems like a good community of artists, that offers different groups you can join to help promote your work, as well as various different contests you can enter.

If anyone is curious you can check it out here:

http://fineartamerica.com/profiles/amberly-mason.html

Right now I mostly just have some of my photographs up, but it is a work in progress, so I am continually adding to it, and hoping to get more of my traditional works available soon.

In other news I had a little outing a few weeks or so ago, it is the sort of thing that normally I would never actually do, which is one of the reasons why I decided to do it.

To give the background on how it all came about. I tend to keep late night hours, and I used to have this friend online who was always up late as well, and so we would pass the time entertaining each other, but I haven't seen him since this year started which left me with many long hours of boredom. So I posted a listing on craigslist just looking for someone else who kept late hours that I could just chat with either through emails or IM to help me pass the time until I feel like retiring to bed.

I began having an infrequent correspondence with one of the people who responded. I would usually have an email from him once every few weeks or so, he has a lot going on in his life, but he happened to mention that he likes to play games. As in old school, traditional games (board, table, dice, card etc..) and happened to mention that he liked to play backgammon, of which I myself have always wanted to learn but never knew anyone who could play, and online tutorials were just confusing, so he asked if I would like to meet up and he would teach me to play.

I agreed and we met up in this park that was downtown with a variety of different places to eat in the near vicinity so we ended up in this brewery that was not very crowded at the time, and we sat there eating lunch and playing backgammon, it was pretty fun, and he seemed pretty cool, very laid back.

I think that just about covers everything.