Traveling Plant

This is the clipping that my supervisor gave me to take home and plant. The pictures are from when we sat together on the bench at the train station waiting for the train.

Fetuses and Sprouts

I have two main themes in my work right now ... sprouts/beans and fetuses. The fetuses were around last semester, too, sometimes in the form of eggs or baby birds, but still fetal.

Today in my supervision time I asked if we could do scribble drawings and mine turned into a fetus that was growing a sprout. As the fetus is fed, it gives out energy that turns into life. An undeveloped being creates another undeveloped being. The sprout and the fetus are touching foreheads, connecting on an emotional as well as physical level.

I remember when I was 7 years old in the 4H club, we went to a farm and dissected lima beans.


(Click the photo to go to the original site)

The dissected lima bean embryo looked like a fetus to me, and after that I didn't eat beans for a while. How would I know what a fetus looked like at 7? Because my grandfather had given me a pop-up book about evolution (which I still have) and had pictures of babies in the womb at different stages. Also, in that class we tried to hatch baby chickens and some of the eggs did not hatch so we cracked them open and saw the baby birds at various stages of development (we organized the eggs in order of development). So I have seen fetuses/embryos of beans, chickens, and pictures of humans.

Anyway, now I associate beans with fetuses in artwork and have been making a lot of bean sprouts and bean/fetuses.

I'm not really sure what it means but that's what happens. We talked about it a lot and I think I am going to try to grow some plants. We have a basil plant right now at home and hopefully it won't die. My supervisor gave me a clipping of one of her plants in her office (which is a clipping from a plant in her grandmother's garden) so tonight I am going to try to plant it.

Anyway, it's interesting. There will be more pictures of bean/fetus artwork coming soon, too.

To sell or not to sell

I had an etsy. I still have the etsy thing on the side of this blog because I thought one day I would revive it. I had an etsy and my mom and my friend were really supportive and bought my paintings from etsy, but they were the only ones. I got a few views, but no sales, and all my listings expired. I felt a little sad.

I've made some more cards since then. To make it profitable I have to make a card in less than 15 minutes, because I need to make more than $7/hour. When I say I made $4/hour making those cards, I broke it down by supplies, time spent working on it and setting up etsy, the money paypal and etsy took out of my sale (and posting), and shipping. In the end I was making less than $4 for each card, which was a hand-painted watercolor painting with hand-drawn Hebrew calligraphy, and I could make about a card and a half in an hour. I've since learned a little bit about making those cards so I can speed up the process and also I have simplified the imagery to speed it up.

I've heard that etsy really isn't the best place to sell work but rather to get exposure and an easy way to refer people to your work (like on a business card "check out more of my work at tzipi.etsy.com!"). So the best place really is to go to craft fairs. Craft fairs charge a LOT for booths, like $400 for some, although if you split a booth with someone you could get it down to less. So I could probably spend $75-100 for a booth at a fair (I know someone who might want to share with me), and that would mean I would have to sell about 11-12 cards at $10/card to make it worth it (to account for supplies and stuff, but no shipping or etsy or paypal).

You might say, well, that shouldn't be so hard! But I don't think people buy little watercolors so often at craft fairs. AND that is just enough to break even, not even to make a profit. (Also remember that I can't sell on Saturday, so I only have Sundays to sell my work, unless I can get someone else to sell my work for me)

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This Shabbat some of my friends were asking me why I wasn't selling my work. I told them about how it wasn't really profitable. I told them all of the things I wrote up there. I told them how I don't have any sleeves to make them look professional, I don't have nice business cards. It's not worth the money.

They said, "but what about your dreams?"

"Yes, my dreams of selling little watercolor paintings at craft fairs!"

But I thought about it a lot, and today I had some free time and ended up at the art store of course. I started looking at packaging for little cards. Tonight I bought some little polypropylene sleeves to store my cards. I painted a bunch more cards a few weeks ago, so I've made it so I can work a lot faster. I've made some abstract paintings so they look like little paintings instead of Judaica cards. So maybe I will give it another shot. Maybe I will ask my friend if I can buy space in her booth on one of the days at the craft fairs. Maybe I could get a booth at the American Art Therapy Association Conference craft fair (booths are free to attendees). Maybe I could package the Judaica cards and sell them to some of the Judaica stores in the city or other cities.

I wondered why I was so resistant to their helpfulness. I know they wanted to help and wanted to be supportive but I resisted really strongly. I gave them so many reasons why it wasn't worth it, but really I was scared of not succeeding. I think there is a good chance that I won't make any money, but this is a relatively inexpensive hobby. I have all of the supplies from various classes and just for hobby reasons. The only extra expenses would be making business cards (which maybe I should have anyway) and these polypropylene bags and the few cents etsy charges me to post things on their site.

So ... I'm going to do it. I'm going to post things on etsy and maybe someone will buy some of my abstract pen and watercolor paintings and maybe they won't. It's kind of scary to put myself out there again, and maybe to put myself further out there with craft festivals and stuff. But....... it's doable.

Final Project Paintings Part 1

For my final project in my Fieldwork class I have to create an "artists book" about what I have learned about myself this semester. Since I do journal entries that include small pen drawings, I decided to turn some of the drawings into paintings, which I will then collect into a book. AND since I have heard that I am not posting regularly enough, I will post the paintings here, one at a time when I have a few minutes in the morning...

New art?

I have been doing a lot of little drawings in my journal but I am writing all around them, so I won't post them here. However, for my final project for my class I will be assembling a book made of paintings inspired by the drawings I'm making, so I will show that instead.

So much stuff is going on I am barely making art. But it's okay, I do make those little drawings, maybe one day I will have time to really do some art...

The Boy That Was A Wolf

Okay my grammar isn't amazing but OH WELL.

This was today's project. We had to take the story of someone in our internship and turn it into a fairy tale, making up as much as we wanted. It only had to be 3-5 pages so it doesn't go very much in depth.

Anyway, I couldn't think of what to write, so I started making a book to house the fairy tale, and then I was able to write the story. I've never bound a book like this before so it took a couple of tries to figure out how to tie it tight enough. But I never looked at instructions! (I don't know if that's something to be proud of or not!)

Ginkgo

Ginkgo tree on our street ... I have never seen a ginkgo tree in bloom before, I guess except last summer, when I didn't really notice it. Ginkgo trees have leaves right on the main branches, unlike most trees I'm used to which grow little branches where the leaves hang. I don't know if that sentence makes sense, but anyway, yay ginkgo trees.