Design Festa vol29

I’ve just now gotten my confirmation for signing up for Design Festa vol 29.  Design Festa is Asia’s largest freestyle art event.  The term “art fair” really doesn’t do it justice.  Twice a year, approximately 3,500 artists take over “Tokyo Big Sight“, the iconic Tokyo conference center.  Next May, I will be one of them.

The way Design Festa works is that anyone can obtain a booth.  It is then up to you as to what to do with your two tatami mats worth of floor.  Photos I’ve seen online range from people showing off paintings, selling t-shirts, jewelry, and vinyl figurines, rocking out on electric guitar, dressing up as a horse while painting a picture of a horse, doing crazy performance art, selling cardboard robots, metal monsters, and tiny faces painted on matchstick heads.  A personal favorite appeared to be a booth that sold or rented paper bags with happy animal faces drawn on them.  The idea, as described in an illustration, was that if you were sad, you would put one of these on your head, and it made you happier. As I said, anything goes.

The more I look around, the more strange and intriguing stuff I find.  (Beautiful tiny dyed fish skeletons!?) While I’m not too sure what to expect, other than an adventure, it is my plan to take myself and a large number of critters to Tokyo in May, 2009.

Finally done with documenting

It’s been a long week.  I finally have all the work photographed, sorted, titled and captioned.  I’ve even sent off the first boxes to galleries and costumers.  The photo is from Monday, when I’d been pushing really hard to get off an application to an emerging artist contest thing.  I was going to just keep working on stuff on my laptop, but between the soft pillow and the soft cat, I didn’t stand a chance. However, everything is now finally up! Enjoy!

Work on Flickr + Opening Tonight

So I just now finished getting everything photographed and uploaded to flickr! (well, almost everything).  I had been planning on re-photographing a few things, but decided that it was more important to have everything up now.

Anyway, in order to celebrate all this new work, I’ll be hosting a slightly impromptu opening at my studio tonight.  It’s going to be pretty low key, but I will have all of the new work there and on display, along with food and drink of some type. If you’re in the Seattle area, I recommend coming on by! It’s at 218 Florentia st, just on the south end of the Fremont Bridge. We’re in the building with the crazy mural. I’ll be there from 6pm to 8, and maybe till 9.  Stop on by!

First of the new pieces up!

I’ve spent the last 48 hours rushing to get off an application for an “Emerging Artist” grant. Now, the light box is finished, a first round of work is photographed, and the CD with my images is burned and in the mail.

I’ve only had time to photograph a few of my favorite pieces, and looking through the results, I think I’ll be doing a few more tweaks to the lighting set up.  I’m pretty happy with it, but I feel like fussing with it a bit more.  Once I have all the information on the new critters up, I’m hoping to put together a howto on building the lighting softbox.

I’ll have my work cut out for me with documenting all of my beasts, though.  I’ll need to photograph them, record all the useful info for them, and price them.  I’ll also have to decide which to send off to galleries, which to sell myself, and which pieces will be not for sale, reserved to enter into shows.  Hopefully, I’ll have all of that worked out by the end of the week.  In the mean time, I’ve uploaded some of the photos I shot today.

Kiln unloaded!

So we unloaded the kiln yesterday.  All in all, it seem like a pretty good firing.  It turned out that we hadn’t dropped cone 13 in the far back, like we thought.  The cones were only viewable from a very strange angle in the back, and someone misread them.  We were only at cone 11 in back, which isn’t bad, but isn’t 13 either. However, we were right about the cones in the front. Cone 13 was completely flat, and cone 14 was starting to bend.

In general, the firing didn’t seem to be hurting from shutting down 15 hours early.  The back was much drier than normal, which was ok for everyone who glazes their pieces (I don’t), but resulted in one or two matte blue gray critters.  I might refirer those two.

Most of the pieces came out great.  I need to now work on cleaning up everything, which should be easy this time, and get photographing.  Unfortunately I need to finish rebuilding my lighting set up from scratch before I can do that.  Photos of the new work (and the new photographic lighting set up) will be coming soon!