How it's Done

I’m going to post some pictures of this a little later, but I’m writing out my process for my moleskine paintings.

I start with a photo from the AP or another website. I print it off fairly small. I then take a pen and outline the major areas of dark and light. Anywhere I see a shape of different shade I hit it with the pen. I scan this in and open it up in photoshop. I edit some of the darks and lights and make sure my lines are all visible in black and white. I use a little find edge filtering and really highlight the lines I made on the print off. Then I save it as a black and white jpeg. In the photo wizard I open up the image and go to print. I pick 4x6 print, which enlarges and distorts the image a little more. After printing it off. I cover the backside with a even coating of soft graphite pencil- usually a 4 or 5B- SOFT is best.

I tape the image down to the page in the moleskine and trace my lines with a hard pencil 4H, or a ball point pen.

After transferring the image. I start with my blacks and lay those in. I work progressively through the shade until I get to white. I’ve been told I should work in reverse and maybe I will one day but I find that when I try and change up the painting style it screws me up and I end up making the painting messy.

After I finish the face I lay in the background. Depending on how much soak through I have from previous pages I decide on watercolor or gouache for the background. Lately it’s been all watercolor no matter what.

After all that I let it dry and close up the book.

jotter cover ideas

Ideas for recycled jotter covers:

Advertising fliers in the mail- cardstock mailers

Covers from magazines

Paper shopping bags

Laminated plastic shopping bags

Old calendar pages

Old spiral bound notebook covers

Cardstock from the craft store

Advertising signs

Paint chips

Old magazine covers

Beer and Moleskine'd thoughts and a future 'zine

One of the things I really love in the hot summer is a good cold beer. I don’t drink a lot but damn in the summer a nice cold beer is wonderful. Today it’s HOT here in the northeast and I’m sweating my a$$ off.

I’ve been editing an article I’m writing for both my blog and for a prospective ‘zine. Well, I thought about the couple of beers I have in my ‘fridge and I decided to crack into one. This is a St. Peter’s Golden Ale. It’s the color of apricots and honey. It’s smooth and easy drinking, light and refreshing, perfect for the summer. It also only comes in very expensive 17-ounce containers. It also seems to be quite heavy on the alcohol…

All that stated my article is going darn well. I’ve got 22 half sized (11 letter sized) single spaced pages of good solid starting out online advice as well as hints and tips for marketing art. I’ve been devoting about 2 hours a day to working on it. I spend my evening writing up notes and ideas I’ve jotted down during my various breaks in the day and random ideas I’ve had while waiting for things to load at work. I print the pages out after all that and when I get home from work, edit the pages and fix all the edits I’ve put into the draft. Repeat process. Tomorrow I’m taking a break from the process as I won’t have free time and I’m going out after work.

So Saturday I’ll be working on it again. I’m expecting a 30 or 40 page half sized ‘zine out of this effort, in 2 or 3 weeks. I’m very very excited.

marketing this

Holy moley it’s freaking HOT here in Mass. I’ve been printing lines on paper and the paper and printed are not liking the humidity.

The printer keeps jamming because the paper keeps curling. So instead of hitting print and walking away par usual, I have to listen for the printer not printing and then come back, fix the darn thing and then go back to what I’m doing.

It’s mildly frustrating. Especially as I have a lot of paper to print- I’ve got a l;arge order lined up and I need to print it now, I’d rather wait but I can’t.

I’ve also worked on my marketing plan over the last few weeks. I’ve got a good outline of what I need to do now I’m just in process of picking out actual actionable items to add to it. I need a good plan to follow otherwise I won’t do much of anything. Essentially the plan involved 4 to 8 hours a week of additional work- over an above work on the website, making books, ebay and etsy. The goal is to get more people reading my blog and interested in my books. The plan utilizes what I already do plus some use of google analytics.

Have I written about how much I’m in love with google analytics? It’s freaking awesome. If you’re an artist trying to learn more about the visitors to your website, blog or other site you can use analytics pretty easily. There are a lot of screens to look at and see: where your customers/readers are coming from, how long they stay, what they look at, where they are from, among a large number of other things. You can also set up specific pages and entries to track. It’s highly customizable and the reports are really useful.

I’ve analyzed (yes I’m a total geek and this is what I partially do for my job) some of the reports to see where I can improve my links, referrals, and length of time spent on my site.

Anyway, I was pretty happy with how much time I spent on the plan today so I congratulated myself with a bottle of Magic Hat Hocus Pocus. I rarely drink these days but occasionally a nice ice cold beer is very nice.

ebay and etsy sales

I’ve got 4 auctions ending Sunday. One each for the following items: PenSlip, Recycled Sign Cover notebook, Hedgehog with Graph Paper, and a hedgehog with cardstock pages.


I’ve got 3 items just listed, a set of 6 jotters, a set of graph paper jotters, and a set of recycled matchbook notebooks.

I’ve got some low buy-it-now prices and I’ve opened up my shipping to offer first class mail rather than just priority mail. I actually added this option after the USPS upped the price on their priority mail shipping but never announced it. I still believe that in most cases priority mail is the best way to go, especially if your ordering multiple items but I thought I’d give people a choice.

I”ll be loading some items up to etsy today as well. I’ve got a load of items on etsy- too many to list but you can see them all here.

Up on ebay and etsy.

I've spent a considerable amount of time in my studio the last 2 days. It happens to be the coolest place in the house! I've made a few penslips- listed 1 on eBay and 3 on etsy.



I've listed a recycled sign journal on eBay. I'll be listing a few more to etsy later today. I've gone through a frenzy of photography today and I must say that I think it's been good. I probably shot another 75 or so pics of journals. Crazy huh?

Jotters. Like I wrote below I made a load of them the other day, and you can expect fresh ones coming soon. I just got some fresh/ old signs to make new jotters. Some of them have a lot of print on them so they will be very interesting!

More Peslips on etsy

I loaded up a bunch of penslips on etsy, here, and I dare say these are pretty good looking. I forced myself to use yelets that I normally dont like- pure copper, and I like the combination. This is a small selection of the penslips up on etsy:

3 chocolate hedgehogs

These 3 hedgehogs are interesting. 1 is made with chocolate brown sep hide and the other 2 are made with new leather, a mottled chocolate brown cow hide. Its super stiff and doesn’t require backing (I’ll wax philosophical about this in another post) and makes a damn fine hedgehog. I was particularly impressed with the stiffness of the leather when glued down to the stiff card end sheets I had put on the 2 hedgehogs. It does require some special care when cutting.

In other words, use a SHARP blade! I would also suggest that anyone working with a heavy weight leather like this NOT use their good rotary cutter, it dulls the heck out of it and it’s not worth it I would suggest my favorite tool – the simple box cutter or click knife. (BTW this is 3.5 to 4 oz weighted leather, my usual leather is 1.5oz this is a heavy weight leather.)

Back to the hedgehogs, these are lined 160 pages of 20lb Wausau ivory colored paper. OF course they are stitched in the normal hedgehog way, clamped and glued under pressure. I used the book press to adhere the cover and it was perfectly smooth. The leather is flat and tight to the book block with no evidence of curling or cockling. I love the book press, I he’d never really gotten to put it through it’s paces before I gave it to my Dad to sse if he could make a heavier duty stronger press. I must say that it’s sweet, and I do wish that I had room for both presses, but alas I don’t.

The hedgehog above is the new cow hide with a sheep hide inlaid corner. There are some letters and numbers punched into the edge of the hide here, I'm t sure what they are for, probably something to do with the leather and color, to keep track of it at the tanning factory.
This one is choclate brown sheep hide- super soft and smooth with a hint of darker spots in it.
This is ALL the cow hide, when I ordered it I wasn't sure of the "marbled" coloring, but seeing it in person really made me realize how cool this mottled brown is, like milk chocolate.

Anyhow 2 will be on etsy and one on eBay or some combination of that.

another verbal post, but read for mole skin

I put the 400 page journal up on etsy today (see link to the right) and I’ll be putting the other on ebay tomorrow.

My coworker J’s husband T works for a local press company and has access to a supply of left over papers. Mostly small amounts f paper left over from printing jobs that company has, so it’s odd papers in small-ish amounts. Shortly before Christmas J slipped me a couple of envelopes of papers. I glanced at them and didn’t really have time to sort them or look at them too closely. I noticed some nice colors and nice heavy paper, enough to make a journal in each shade. Good stuff. Today I took the papers down to the studio to take a closer look and put them away with the rest of the paper. The first envelope contained some of my favorite Strathmore papers in some of my favorite colors. The next envelope had the stiff and thick paper. I pulled the stack out and found a nice stiff card stock, with barely perceptible gray dots all over it; another parchment and then what looked like at first a super thick slick white paper with a texture on the back. When I flipped it over it was black, and had a moleskine texture! I think its mole skin. Essentially it’s a heavy white cardstock with a texture black vinyl coating. I’m not exactly sure what I’m going to do with it but it will be cool to play with. I think that I’ll be playing with it for personal use, as I’m not sure how much my designs would violate copyright.

Original Press

This is the light duty press that I bought on eBay a year ago. I used it twice, it works well and is very serviceable. I'll be putting it back up on ebay sometime this week (probably Tuesday) I'm not sure how expensive shipping will be, but it won't be too much.

this could be a useful press for anyone who is making hedgehogs or other Moleskine style journals. I thinklso one could glue up some hard cover books. Also, one of the things that I've used it for is t press my moleskine after I've been painting the pages with watercolors. I think it helped keep the cockling down a bit.

Legality

Yesterday I received a little piece of cardstock in the mail, measuring about 3x7 inches, printed in green and black. It's my Sales and Use tax registration. This means that I can now get my Moleskines for the website as well as a few other items. I'm going to frame it up and hang it over my cabinet in the basement. Well it's all legal now.

So if you buy one of my journals and live in the grand state of Massachusetts I will be collecting 5% sales tax which I will then turn around and send to the state.

I have tomorrow off but a New YEar's eve party have to attend, but before hand I'll be in the studio for the day, now that he family has come and gone and the holidays are f the most part over (Valentine's fast approaches) I plan on spending a large amount time in the studio. What can you expect from the long hours spent in the studio- more books, a website that functions a little better, moleskine's ASAP, some more YouTube action and more books.

My new toy Tool

I'm very excited to say that I figured out how to imprint the cover of a moleskine as well as any of my journals.

I had figured it o previously but I also purchased a chase to hold the type.

If one were doing this on a small scale one could do what I did the first time and scotch tape the letters together.

I'm getting ahead of myself. I have a set 20pt century gothic BOLD Letter Press type. I had hoped a year or 2 ago that I would buy a small Kelsey press and use that n combination with type to print card and what not. IN theory it was a good idea, only the small vintage presses I like are very over priced and I need to play with a good one t figure out how to fix a broken one and a broken one was all I could afford. Needless to say, I bought a heap of items with which to print, quions, keys and type. Which I have up until now never had chance to use.

To imprint the cover of a mole without a chase- simply select your letters, arrange them, mirror image, and then use tape to hold them together. After that you can then whack the backside with a hammer or apply pressure in a vise or press of some type.

I managed to find a hot foil chase for type holding purposes, in a size that fit my type perfectly. I'm thinking of adapting it for my use, but I'm having a hard time reconciling my need for adapting it, the price I paid for it and the fact that it's an antique, and I could probably find a chase without the design if I looked hard enough.

That being said the results withe chase were very nice and the chase is exactly what I had beening thinking about when I first started monkeying around with the type.

I've decided that I'm going to offer this as a service on my website as soon a Kikkerland gets off their duffs and charges me and mail out my moleskines. I ordered them ages ago and haven't seen or heard anything. humph.

reeling with the feelin' don't stop continue

So my head is spinning with all of the things I worked on in the studio last night and as such i had a a hard time heading for bed last night! I wanted to keep on working in the studio and keep that artistic mindedness going. With that being said one of the most exciting things I worked on was imprinting my moleskine with my 20pt century Gothic type, oh it's cool very very cool.

The moleskine in the picture above was imprinted with type and hammer blows. I figured if I could put it into the vise I could use it as a sort of press and get even slow pressure, which seems to be important when pressing items like this. It's also a tone more controllable than hammer blows- I tighten the screw and so I can put exactly the right amount of pressure on the type as I want.

Needless to say I played around with my 2 finished moles that are in the videos below and really came up with a way to make it work. SO now my next objective is to make a type holder.

youtube 2

Here is the second video on you tube of my moleskine.

You Tube

I just signed up for a youtube account and took a video of my first moleskine. You cansee it here:

Hedgehogs

The hedgehogs that I finished yesterday are starting to get listed up on ebay. I'll also have 2 up on etsy and another journal up on eBay later tonight.

I royally screwed up on one of the hedgies. When I glued in the pocket in the back I accidentally glued it 1/4 of an inch in from the edge rather than flush with it. Since I've been debating if I wanted to keep/make myself one with this particular leather I've decided to keep it for myself.

Here are some pics to keep you busy until you head over to ebay/ etsy.


This one is mine:

Vise with Hedgies

Here's a picture of t vise, with 5 hedgies in it's grip. I estimate that it's about 1/3rd full. Which means that it can hold a dozen or so hedgies with no problem. Sweet!

Household Chores

The last few days here have been spent doing household chores. It as necessary to paint the stairway to the second floor and get it ready for the final treatment of everything. It will lookwonderful when finished. Also I had to finally rake up the leaves in my yard. it also gave a me a good chance to clean up the sidewalk which has been a mess it seems that when the wind blows down the street the leaves and trash tossed out on the side of the road collect at the end of our driveway. AS such it is always a mess.

To paint the upper reaches of the oddly shaped stairway it required that a piece of plywood be cut to fit into the stairway, so that step ladders and paint could be placed on it, with out the plywood,they were impossible to paint, even with extension rods.

That being said it's been a slow couple of days for the studio. I did cut 6 covers for hedgehogs this AM a glue them up. Right now they are in the vise drying and waiting for me to trim them and add elastic and a pocket. I use some really nice leather for them and can't wait to see what the vise does for them! I was able to really crank it down and use some HEAVY pressure. It will be even more nice to see how well they turn out with the added pressure.

So I have 2 journals up n eBay with day left, go check them out HERE!

I'll post some pics of the vise with hedgies in it and some pics of the laptop stand.

I had a great brain storming session about lead protectors for pencils. I'm not posting anything about it until I get the idea fully worked out, and a few prototypes out of the way. It could be very cool.

anyway, I need to get working while I've got the time to do it. Expect some hedgies up on ebay soon!

Laptop Stand

I just made myself a laptop stand. It will make everything easier. I had made one out of book board after having the laptop for about a month. It had too much flex in it and made typing difficult. Now when I type I notice that the keyboard doesn't flex and when I ht a key it appears on the screen rather than not doing so. Needless to say that means that entries and working on th website(s) will be that much easier.

Now to do some work on the websites.

I will be ordering Moleskines on Monday. Which hopefully means that you'll be seeing them on the site by Friday or Monday of the following week!