Holiday Recap (WIR 20240101)

Happy New Year!

I’m happy to be moving out of the Holiday Season. It’s been nice to spend some extra time with Liv and the kids, but I’m ready to get back to work! I’ll put up a studio update soon. Exciting stuff is happening with computers and motors and things. I also even managed to finish a regular painting.

Holiday Recap

We had a very Covid Christmas and a Covid New Year. We had planned on going to NYC to visit Liv’s family for Christmas, and I had a $1.3k Air BnB travel credit we were originally going to use to get a place near the boy’s grandparents apartment. The credit was set to expire at the end of the year. We found a nice looking place, but the host canceled the reservation on us a week before the holiday and there wasn’t anything else suitable available, so we booked a hotel instead and used the travel credit to book a nice place for a friends get together for New Years Eve. We got a great deal on the hotel with Hotwire and we were pretty excited.

Then the boys both got Covid a few days before Christmas. I had to stay home with them on what would have been my last shopping day, and we canceled our trip to New York. We couldn’t get a cash refund for the hotel, but Hotwire was kind enough to give us “Hot Bucks” to use on our next trip.

So we had a quiet Christmas just the four of us. We opened presents and went out to the Scoot Zone (a big parking lot complex for an abandoned industrial campus near our house) so T could try out his new (to him) Kettcar and we could all stay away from other humans.

Then I got Covid too the day before we were planning to leave for New Years. Some of the friends we were splitting the Air BnB with canceled too, and through what I will blame on miscommunication and Covid Brain, I canceled and then re-booked our NYE Air BnB, but due to the intricacies of the re-booking process, we were not able to use that travel credit. We were planning on having Covid positive members of our family stay behind, so the Covid negative members could still go hang out with friends on NYE, but those friends canceled anyway and so our whole family drove down to Little Compton, RI and the four of us slept two nights in a big old house near the beach with room for three families. We called it the Ship House. It was still nice. We walked to the beach and looked at rocks and things. It was F’s first time seeing the ocean, and only T’s second or third. We only stayed two nights and left a day early, spending the NYE at home like it was any other Sunday.

What a baby on his daddy’s shoulders on a rocky Rhode Island beach might look like

In Conclusion

We ended up doing a lot less for New Years and Christmas this year than we had planned and paying a lot more than we expected. (I also just found out a travel credit I had with Delta expired yesterday . . . aargh.) I’m grateful the three of us who had covid have had pretty mild cases. I’m happy to have gotten to spend some good quality time with Liv and the boys. T has even said both nights that we’ve been back, without prompting, when we say our good-nights after story-time, that he liked staying at the Ship House. We really haven’t traveled much with these kids. Hopefully we can find a way to travel more in 2024.

Week in Review 10/22/2023

Believe it or not, I’m keeping this up for at least two weeks in a row! I just checked my site analytics and four people visited the blog since last week, and I’m pretty sure I was at least one of those people. That’s kind of what I want at first, let me get some content in here before anyone starts paying attention.

I signed a contract with iCanvas last week to let them license some of my work. It could be interesting; it might lead to some passive income, it might lead to some positive exposure. It could also lead to some negative exposure, I’m not sure. If this results in cheap canvas prints of my work showing up at Target does that hurt or help my reputation as an artist? I really don’t know, but what I do know is that I love to make money off of my art, because that makes it so I can spend more money on my art, and that means I can make more and better art. So if people want to poo poo the idea of “selling out” by signing a contract with a big print retailer, I kind of feel like those people are gatekeeping a world I never had a chance of getting access to anyway.

Anyway, that passive income bit is still a ways away. When I signed the contract I promised to deliver high resolution images of 35 of my paintings. So far I’ve uploaded ten. The issue? Most the images I had on file were not good enough. I talked about a lot of this last week, I know, but I also know nobody read that. So I’ve got a real camera now, and I’m slowly getting new images for paintings I originally documented with my trusty iPhone XS (or, in some cases, my old iPhone 7+). I’ve gotten back into doing things with real cameras, and am pretty good at setting up speed lights now too. The new pictures are coming out great, with very little glare and terrific resolution on the fine details. Lines that look chunky and thick in some old photos are showing up as delicate in the new photos. Colors are not blown out. Part of this is probably the better sensor in the Canon 90D, part of it is probably all the computational photography tricks the iPhone was doing behind the scenes.

For each new photo I have to find the painting, put it up on the one stretch of wall that isn’t covered by painting storage or windows, get the camera set up, and take the pictures. I’ve got to import the photos into Lightroom. I’ve got to make notes on which paintings I’m working with in my task manager so I don’t just import into Lightroom and never see them again. In Lightroom I need to organize and find the best exposures. I edit the best full image picture in Photoshop to fix perspective and optimize the histogram. I band-aid tool any obvious nail-holes in the wall. I save a copy with a bit of wall showing behind the painting, and a copy cropped to the picture frame. Back in Lightroom I adjust exposure on all the detail images before exporting them to jpeg. Then I upload everything to Artwork Archive, which integrates with Squarespace to produce the Portfolio and Archive views here. Then I upload the cropped full image to iCanvas’s CMS. In my task manager I optimistically also have check boxes for “update Saatchi” and “update Singulart” for each piece, but I’m ignoring those for now. So anyway, it takes a while.

On a good night, after the kids are asleep and I’ve cleaned the kitchen, folded any laundry, done my 15 minute language lessons, and set up the coffeemaker for the next morning, I can usually get through editing and uploading images for one painting before I need to go to bed. That’s assuming they’ve already made it to Lightroom and are organized correctly.

This week, I’ve gotten imaged updated for:

In this studio this week, all I did was take pictures. I’ve got images for ten more paintings that are going into iCanvas, and six more that I just want to update. The plan is to slowly update everything, but these things can take a while and I need to get back to actually painting while I’m in the studio.

In other art news, I had high hopes for getting into a show called “Illumination” at Gallery Twist in Lexington, but none of the pieces I submitted made it in.

Ok. Hope to have more to report next week and not just moaning about how much work it is to edit photos. Thanks for reading.