Saturday, August 23rd during the day, Intatto Coffee (an independent, locally owned coffee shop which roasts their fair trade coffee daily - located at the Southeast corner of Tatum and Greenway in North Phoenix / Scottsdale) is having a small, local “Art Walk” showcasing local artists. I will be there with my art (and my portable wall, which I need to remember to repair before the 23rd. Hmm…) available for view and for sale in person.

I’m told the event officially starts at 11AM, and according to the sign on the door they close at 6PM, so I guess we’ll be done by then, right?

If you live in the area, or if you haven’t had a chance to come see my art in person at the Art Walks downtown this summer, or if you just want to come out and show your support for indie business and indie artists, you should come have a look and a cuppa.

Intatto Coffee Art Walk
August 23rd, 2008, from 11AM to 6PM
4847 E. Greenway Rd., Scottsdale, AZ
(Greenway & Tatum)

I’ve been feeling a bit down, lately. Getting things accomplished is somewhat more difficult in these emotional doldrums.  I’ve been feeling disjointed and unfocused, often even conflicted when it comes to how to proceed with my individual stories and pieces of art.  But I’ve got a bit done.

I put Chapter 1 of the Dragons’ Truth audiobook up at dragonstruth.com.

I added a link to dragonstruth.com over at teelmcclanahan.com, and re-arranged the page a little.

I’ve been waffling for the last week or so on exactly what colors to use for a piece I sketched out, but I spent a few hours working on it in Photoshop last night, pre-visualizing various color schemes, and came upon something which should be both in line with my original thoughts and interesting to look at.  I threw the first coat of paint on it tonight:

I also started and finished another painting this week.  I’m calling it “things i’ve lost“, and I’ll post later with more images and information on making it:

Yes, that’s my hair.

What else?  Hmm…  I’ve uploaded Dragons’ Truth to Podiobooks.com twice now; I’m told it should go online Monday.

Oh, and I’ve been Plurking a lot lately.

Haven’t decided whether I’ll be verbose or brief on this subject, here, today.  Have to look back and see, I guess.

Conversation threads this morning on Twitter (which I can’t retrieve, on account of Twitter is “stressing out” - and I don’t feel like trying to track everything down with tweetscan/summize), included one creator saying they were thinking of planning on releasing a project they’re working on … in September or October.  To which my mind replied: “I don’t understand.  If you have a releasable product, why not put it out there as soon as it’s ready? For a finished product, why wait?”

Now, I can see how with certain products - say, a dancing Santa Claus doll or a new line of Valentine’s Day candies - releasing at a particular time of year might be appropriate.  And I can see how products which will only be relevant for a limited time should be released in a specific time period - though that’s now, not later - to avoid irrelevance.

I can even see where something like a blockbuster movie, trying to maximize attention and profits would want to schedule its release to not be the same weekend as a directly competing release, which would not only compete for viewers dollars but for the actual, finite number of screens, but — and this is a big but — I can’t see why a studio would hold off on releasing a movie for months or, as actually happens more often than you’d think, years after it was ready to be shown.  The finite number of screens is (I believe) now well over 30,000 in the US alone, and even the widest of releases hasn’t topped 1/3 of those - there’s a LOT of screens, if you have a movie ready to go, put it out there!   If you don’t think it’ll make “enough” money in theatres, throw it to DVD - as long as you keep it in print, it’ll be available to whoever wants it.  As long as it’s sitting “in the can”, unreleased, it’s not making anyone any money, it’s not entertaining anyone, it’s not communicating anything, it’s wasted.

Which, I think, is part of my problem with the whole thing:  Someone, possibly a lot of someones, put their hard work and creative energy and ideas into creating something, and that work, that creation, is being held back, hidden, kept from its audience.

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I have been “self employed” for a couple of months now, and have been “networking” with and connecting to more and more independent people who are doing the same sorts of things; authors, authors doing their own audiobooks, bloggers, artists, illustrators, graphic designers, photographers… et cetera.  As I have spoken to them, I have noticed that there seems to be a difference between their ways of thinking and mine, about success and about what they are trying to accomplish.  Even the independent creators who -at first- seem to be the most successful and accomplished and appear to have a lot of fans and plenty of “true fans”… and presumedly sales to go along with them …seem actually to want more traditional forms of success.  Authors are trying for, hoping for, dreaming of getting a deal with a “real” publisher.  Podcasters seem to want to have radio or TV shows.  Bloggers want to get hired by a company and get a salary for blogging.  I haven’t managed to network with enough artists to figure out what they want, but it’s not hard to guess that it’s in the same neighborhood.  These creatives, these independent creatives, the ones using “social media” and “web 2.0″ and advanced technologies connected via the internet, print on demand, RSS distribution, CC licenses, crowdsourcing, et cetera…  Creatives who own their IP and connect directly with their fan base in a meaningful way - which I know for a fact cuts out a long line of middle men and increases the creator’s share of every sale substantially - seem to want to “sell out” as it were, or “hit the big time” as has been defined for the last 50+ years.

But that’s not what I want.  I’m not doing what I’m doing in an attempt to get a job doing something else.  I’m not doing what I’m doing because I want to get noticed by a big publisher, an internet startup, or some faceless corporate entity.  I’m doing what I’m doing because this is what I want to be doing.

I want to create art.  I want to write stories.  I want to record my stories, in my own voice.  I want to explore new distribution techniques (podcasting audiobooks, publishing books with some features of a wiki, creating an internet video channel of a poet reading their own poetry, et cetera), new ways of sharing, using and re-using ideas (all my novels and audiobooks are available under a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 license),  and new ways of connecting with an audience of interested people and of fans (twitter, blogging, facebook/mySpace, and platforms yet to come).  I want people to be able to enjoy what I create.

I hate money, conceptually.  It would be my preference to not have to deal with the foul stuff at all.  I have no desire to accumulate wealth.  Yet I must eat, and the grocery store doesn’t seem to accept stories and art in trade for food.  So:  I want to publish my books myself, not just because it gives me complete control and complete freedom with the finished product, but because as the publisher and the major retailer (via modernevil.com), I get those portions of the revenue (70%+ vs. 8%-12%).  I want to show my art on my own terms, sell directly through my website to the people who want it, talk to the people who are interested in it directly, and -yes- take the full retail price for myself, not just out of greed, but so that -as I’m starting out and building a name- I can set my retail prices lower (and hopefully make more sales), and still make a reasonable amount of money.  –  If I get a deal with a publisher, I still have to do most of the marketing (a fact that most authors learn too late; that except for the top few books, most publishers do little to market the books they print) for the book I wrote myself, but I only get a small percentage of the retail price of each copy sold (the retailer takes half or more, the distributor takes some, the publisher takes a chunk, and the author gets the leftovers).  If I get my art shown in a gallery in Phoenix, and hand-deliver it, the gallery takes half and I get the other half, but if I get shown in galleries out of state or -ohmygosh- in a big gallery in New York or internationally, then the gallery takes their half AND I get to pay (at least part of) shipping costs for getting everything there and -for everything that doesn’t sell- back again.

Advanced technologies, internet connections, and other modern wonders make these things possible.  One person, from anywhere, can run a business doing most anything.  They can have books professionally printed and distributed, and can do so with less overall environmental impact and for lower upfront costs than “big” publishers by using the bizarrely looked down upon technology of print on demand instead of giant offset print runs coupled with later pulping of unsold copies.  They can connect with more people, in more meaningful ways, anywhere in the world - far more than a traditional author signing tour or art festival circuit allows - and they can do it every day, all year, even while doing those more traditional marketing things.  This is the future, people.  Creators whose hard work pays them directly, and gets the IP into the hands of the fans directly, using technology.  It’s either this or a total collapse of civilization and a return to pre-oil lifestyles, and then the sell-outs lose, too.

Why does it seem like I’m the only one who not only sees that this is the future, but actually wants to make it a reality now?  I’m not doing what I’m doing because I want to be doing something else - this is what I want to do, and it’s possible now, and I’m doing it!  I may not be the best at marketing, but at least I’m getting every dollar of pitiful sales that I earn instead of a few cents of each dollar my weak marketing can pull in.  At least I’m trying to be both feet in the future instead of one foot in the future and both eyes on the model of success that is rapidly becoming past.  I’m going to get to work on another painting (write-up soon; it’s nearly complete).  That’s enough blogging for now, I think.

This one should be the most fun, though perhaps the least inspired, originally. On account of I shot a video of part of it. (Scroll down to see it.)

I started sketching in a cheap sketch-book I had on-hand, while waiting for the paint on ‘darkness looming‘ to dry, and started trying to see what might turn into another new painting. After several pages of messy nothing, I came up with a sketch for a something I liked. Sadly, for you, I didn’t take a picture if it, and I’m not going to, now. Maybe later. Anyway, it seemed interesting enough, and I annotated a few lines and spaces with ideas for colors, and after finishing the inking on ‘darkness looming‘, I started to work on the first layer of ‘1, 2, 3, 4, ‘. This layer was intended to be seen only in the vertical split between the left 2/3 and right 1/3 of the painting, and in the square in the lower right corner, but I wanted to do it right (and add a layer of texture) so I painted the entire canvas.

Purple.

Then I waited half a day for that to dry. And then, before I started working on the painting again, I set up a video camera to capture the rest of the process. I put a line of 1/2″ tape vertically on the canvas, and cut out a square of tape for the square - it’s like a sort of stencil; where I put the tape, the purple remains when I paint over the rest. Then I painted on the red circle, the blue background, the off-color right-side… You’ll watch the video and see it, right? I don’t need to describe it all in detail? Well, I painted on the colors, and as I’ve learned to do from countless past tape-involved projects before, I pulled up the tape while the paint was still wet. So, to explain the next part of the video: tape isn’t perfect. So some of the paint leaks under. What you can see me doing is cleaning up the worst of it, trying to maintain the purple background as intact as possible without hurting the (still wet) pink and blue foreground. The image you see at right is the painting when this process was complete; the main elements of color are present, but I hadn’t yet put on any borderlines, and certainly hadn’t painted the most-foreground element (the black, horizontal lines), so this image is sort-of an in-between-takes image. It was taken in between where the camera angle changes in the video. The camera angle changed, by the way, because I waited until the next day for it to dry, and I had to put away the camera before Mandy came home, or it would have blocked the walkway.

After the new color layer had dried, it was time to deal with the remaining (slight) leakage (mostly of white) at the edges of where the tape had been. I had taken a day to think about it, and had decided to use pearlescent purple and blue paint pens to both clarify the division by increasing the contrast from one color to another, and to cover up an otherwise unsightly evidence of my process which (in my opinion) did not improve the end result. The video of my tracing the outlines of the previously-taped sections is not particularly interesting, but I decided to just leave it all in. Then, semi-satisfied with the result of the colors, and after the paint from the paint pens had had a chance to dry, it was time for the three rough, black lines that overlap the piece. I put them vaguely on (for scale, placement, and some semblance of erraticism) first in Sharpie, then with a paintbrush and black paint. I knew exactly what I wanted, and it was no problem to execute this final step. There were only minor touch-ups of the black lines after the video camera was turned off, and ‘1, 2, 3, 4, ‘ was ready for hanging.

So that’s how I made this painting.  The title was selected while it was still a sketch, and ‘1, 2, 3, 4, ‘ is now available for purchase at wretchedcreature.com