Regrouping

www.marcydavy.com
is up and running!

I started the site as a way of covering and/or organizing all of my bases-- my recent work, links to Etsy/retail shopping, day job portfolio, and this blog, and even a space to share art education resources along with my resume.

I coded a website by hand for a class a few years ago, and the experience left me so traumatized that I ended up using Weebly this time around. Weebly is a really great web design site, easy to use and customize with some basic knowledge of how websites work. Its easy peasy to add pages, slideshows, downloadable files, your own html, links, text, etc. I hope to keep it fresh as time goes on, but right now its just what I need to get started. The best part: Weebly hosts the site for free, and its super easy to buy a domain name (I picked mine up for 6.99 and 1and1) and direct your site to it. So for under $10 and a few hours I had a site up and running. It was so easy, I'm concerned I might start doing it just for fun.

In other news, I have officially decompressed from the craziness that was the Ann Arbor Art Fair. After devoting 99% of last weekend to housekeeping and relaxing, I have officially rested up and regained my bearings. The fair was a lot of fun, and I have the seamless organization of the South University Area Association (hellos and thank yous in particular to organizers/show runners Maggie, Jill, Ryan and Emily!) for making my transition from little table to great big tent a wonderful one. The show was my most successful to date by leaps and bounds!

I have a few dates lined up through September (details coming soon!) and am hoping to also start looking into additional retail/wholesale/consignment opportunities in the coming months. Stay tuned!

Favorite Things: Brainstorm Print and Design

I had stored in the que a blog post about the lovely little group Brainstorm Print and Design, who sells limited edition screen prints out of their online shop. My favorite was sold out at the time, so I had a second print lined up and ready to purchase. Then, I swung by IndieFixx this morning and discovered they had released another print I'm absolutely in love with and a second edition of the one I liked so much in the first place.


Here they are:

The New One.
Love this for several reasons: 1) Take It Easy is my favorite Eagles song. 2) The vintage styling in the horizontal lines is pitch perfect. 3) Amazing composition

The original print I was drooling over.
Love this one because 1) the brown on brown is a favorite palatte of mine. 2) perfect pine silhouettes, a canoe-- its adorable! 3) I looooove camping.

I can't decide... help!
If you love these, get yourself over to the Brainstorm shop-- they sell out fast!

One More Day!

There's still one day left to check out the Ann Arbor Art Fair-- you can find my wall-o-prints on the corner of South University and Forest. Here's a photo of (most of) my booth in case you can't make it!


I started off with all three walls up in my booth, but on Day 2 I decided to take advantage of my spot on the end and ditched one wall for this setup. Tomorrow I'm going to mix it up even more with some unique clusters of work on the back wall.


Here's a shot of the screen prints in bins waiting patiently for new homes! The antique wood tool caddy is another item generously donated by my boyfriend's parents. Its been the perfect container for this show!

almost ready...

Here are all of the finished screen prints in my possession-- right around 200. I have around 100 more that can be stretched-- my plan is to get to those throughout the week as things sell. Living 10 minutes form the venue is fantastic.

Today we built three walls for all of my work to hang on-- one for small screens, one for small woodcuts, and one for large work from both. I, per my usual routine, came in with a sketch that was 100% structurally unsound. Luckily, my boyfriend's dad Dave is an amazing craftsman with a fully functioning wood shop (you know that big yellow saw they have at Home Depot-- he actually owns one of those) and he turned my vision into a reality in under 8 hours and charged me nothing. I threw a layer of deep brown on everything and its ready to assemble at set-up tomorrow.

I still have lots to do before I'm allowed anywhere near a bed-- so that's it for tonight! I will be posting on Twitter this week (I even know how to post photos now-- fancy!) so you should stop in there. I just added a Twitter feed to the side bar off to your right, so you can follow along.

Good night!

Print Preview: AA Art Fair

I've been cranking out the prints over the last few weeks-- here's a handful of the new ones!

Mesas
This print has been living in my mind's eye for months-- it was very cathartic to get it out on canvas. 5 screens, one in a lovely sky blue, four oranges ranging from creamsicle to rust.

Lake Leaves
A simple plant silhouette from a sketch made on Hamlin Lake. I made a huge edition of this one, it will be available in the green on green (as shown above) green on blue, brown on green, brown on blue, brown on orange and brown on natural canvas. I wish I had thought to pull out the burlap for this one-- maybe next time!

Mineral Deposit
Based on a painting made for my little sister and her husband to celebrate their wedding. Four screens in rich, warm colors-- based loosely on the soil content diagrams.

Sleeping Bear Dunes
It was only a matter of time before the crisp aqua waters of Lake Michigan started showing up in my work. Sky blue sits on top of aqua, on top of sloping drifts of sand in a buttery yellow taupe.

I didn't get very accurate colors for the photos due to the hazy, diffused light coming in our windows today-- a nasty side-effect of a humid Michigan summer day. I have another 6 or 7 new 8x8" prints pulled as well, and am noticing a huge gravitation toward warm colors in my work right now. I asked my friend Adam (a Florida native) once, what he thought of living in a four-season climate and he told me that its like having four pockets to carry your memories in. Now that I've been doing this for a year I can start to see the same principle apply to my work.

Tonight I pull some larger screen prints and get crackin' on the mountain of woodcuts that need to be made.

One Week Away (yikes!)

Hope to see you there!

Log-to-Logo

I've been rethinking my logo for awhile now-- tonight I took a little time to work the image in my mind into something more tangible.

I started by looking for the quintessential mid-century sans serif font. I struck gold when I found Turnpike, from the Font Diner Foundry. I am seriously crushing on Font Diner-- everything in their catalog is amazing! This is a classic, long-haul, trend-resistant font-- I'm looking forward to using it on everything! The more I look at it the more it reminds me of the letter chart they have you read at the optometrist office.


Looks like they stretched it out just a leeetle bit.


I knew that I wanted to substitute the 'O' in GROW with my log print, so I started by cutting it out and making the color more computer friendly.


I quickly realized that it didn't transfer as well on a small level (this particular logo will be as small as 150x50 in some cases) so I started with the O from Turnpike in the same dark brown, and turned it into a log.




I flooded my background with a lovely buff color, added the text in Turnpike, stuck in my log and viola!



and modified for Etsy:



I threw in a blog banner remodel too!