Embroidered Collage

I'm finding that one of the problems with not having much time to DO art is having too much time to THINK about it.

I thought myself into some knots about the idea of doing my footstep pieces based on grids when my favorite ones have a lot of movement in them, but then untwisted my ideas with reminder that I was trying to improve on one area - the integration of different media - and it would help with movement to have a little more mastery of that first.

I renamed my 6"x6" pieces in my head to "studies", even when they're complete works.  They are meant for ideas, experimentation, and entertainment.  Why I like them hasn't changed, only I pulled out better words.  I realized how much the tactile nature of my works on canvas meant to me. 

I got into thinking more about reproductions and business matters, partly because there was a discussion on etsy about some reproduction print sites I hadn't heard of before.  I've never felt that reproductions of my footsteps were particularly viable from a business sense, even though I currently have them available, because of the square size and all the texture that just isn't in the print.  So I wondered if I would like to have another line of art, something that would make it possible for me to justify my art as a business to the IRS before a decade or so had passed.

I figured that if I was going to do this then the art would need to be something with appeal to the market, likely something representational, and it would need to be reproducible in a standard framing size, like an 8x10.  I also wanted to keep my own style of working, although without as much texture.  I wanted it FLAT.  And then I would save all the texture and relief work for my art on canvas.  I realized I could meet my goals by doing watercolor crayon plus colored pencil plus basic embroidery on 11x14 sheets of paper.  I gave it a try, starting with a design in a Dover pictorial archive.  I spent a contented evening getting the first layer of the drawing down.  It was definitely less messy than needing to get everything out to work on the Footstep like I had originally planned to do during those couple hours.

It was turning out nicely but the next morning I realized that I really didn't want to do it.  The subject matter and treatment just weren't me.  And I started thinking agan.  Knowing it would be a few days or a week before I'd really get to do any art again.  I do have some more ideas, but I'll wait to share them until I try a bit of creation to actually develop them, otherwise they'll change and I'll spend all my time blogging little rambles!  This is rather frustrating.

I am also considering doing an art a day something - 5 minute sketch atcs or journal entries or some such - so I'm not away for days on end.  We'll see.