The End of Summer

I'm winding down summer with a handful of shows-- now that they're all confirmed, I thought I'd share.

First up!

August 14 & 21, 7-10 pm
Crossroads Summer Festival, Ypsilanti
Washington Street/Downtown
A free summer concert series Friday nights through August in historic downtown Ypsilanti. I'll be selling framed woodcut prints and screen prints two Fridays in a row!



Also in Ypsitucky, I mean, Ypsilanti:


September 4 & 5
The Jamboree, Ypsilanti
Riverside Park/Depot Town
A two-day festival over Labor Day weekend featuring lots of favorite local bands, artists and beers. Cheap admission, lawn chairs, and foot-stomping all on the banks of my favorite local river. I will be introducing new woodcuts at this show, in addition to screen prints.


And my first time selling work in Funky Ferndale:


September 19-20
DIY Street Fair, Ferndale
E 9 Mile and Woodward
Handmade Detroit Tent
A free 2-day show that celebrates the DIY ethic in everything from arts, music, food and homebrewing. I will be selling screen prints under the Handmade Detroit Tent. The Handmade Detroit Tent is code for: the most creative energy per square inch ever witnessed-- its really worth a look!

Not in Metro Detroit?
I have also updated the Etsy shop with some new screen prints from this summer-- more are on the way!

After spending the last few weeks putting my brand new retail vendor hat on, I'm happy to announce that my first batch of prints has been shipped to Renegade Handmade, an actual brick and mortar store in the spirit of the popular indie art fair. If you find yourself in Chicago stop in and take a look-- the last few prints from many best-sellers are there!


Other tricks up my sleeve:
- an online tutorial on how you can start making prints with bits you have laying around your apartment
- more retail
- if i can manage to keep up, the return of mixed media and embroidery into my work!

Print Photo: Rachel's Grouping of 6

Look at what Rachel did!


My friend Rachel has been collecting my prints for around 6 months now (she recently drove all the way down to the AA Art Fair to stop by my booth) and has arranged them in a really wonderful and unexpected way on her wall in this stair-step formation. This arrangement is fantastic-- I love how she managed to balance the composition by weighing the corners in the lower left and top right with busier prints, placing green ferns in the center, and simpler neutral prints in the other corners. Thanks for your continued support, Rachel!

Just a reminder-- if you send me a photo of your prints in action I'll give you a 20% discount on any future print purchase!

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!

Big Things in the Works!

In case you haven't noticed, I took it upon myself to take a little 'online' sabbatical for a few weeks. The dust-bunnies blowing around my Etsy shop and blog have been offset with frantic printing. The scale and duration of my next show is huge and totally new for me, so I'm trying to make lots and lots of prints. In the meantime I have become significantly more frequent with the tweeting-- please feel free to stop in there if you'd like!

I've also been thinking a lot about how to take things to 'the next level' after that, so it was very fitting that I received an email from Sue Daly of Renegade Handmade inviting me to sell work in her Chicago store. I am a huge fan of her and her husband Mat's work-- (he's one of only a handful of people I can find who use the same screen print process as I do!) and am well aware that it doesn't get much awesomer than Renegade, so I promptly accepted!

click to visit!

All right, back to work-- I've reworked some pieces with amazing success in addition to entirely new designs-- will be posting photos shortly!

Celebrate Summer

We always pull together a 'look' for the store entry for each new flyer-- this time we decided to go with 'Celebrate Summer' because it was nice and simple and we're just so glad that the sun is finally here!

I cut down a truck-load of triangle flags from four shades of textured cardstock in fantastic beach-side colors-- and then we hot glued each one to white string at 4 inch intervals and hung them up in long, graceful, 'county fair-like' swags. Adam made all of the signs-- from hundreds of gathered paint chips.

Its really simple, but came together so beautifully.
I love the negative space on the sign.

Here's a closeup of the fabulous paint chip job.

love this 2!

we carried the flags throughout the store. they were the perfect punch of color-- easy to make and effortless to hang. we'll definitely be revisiting them again, maybe with scantron sheets and old lined paper for back to school!

This seemed fitting to post tonight because I'm off to celebrate summer myself-- our first camping trip of the year starts tomorrow! Chris and I are meeting up with our friends Andy and Holly on Lake Michigan for a long weekend. I will be back next week with photos!

And another!

I had a blast in Mt. Clemens over the weekend-- shared a tent with lots of really nice people, enjoyed an elephant ear, and made a little money too. This show was huge in terms of exposure-- my work was awarded 'Best of Show' for the Urban Art Tent and I was also featured in Thursday's Detroit News Arts Section:

Hooray!

I don't have a lot of time to rest on my laurels because I was accepted into the Ann Arbor Art Fair last week! The Ann Arbor Art Fair is a famous group of four fairs throughout the downtown area that take place over four days in July. It draws about half a million people into the city, and claims to be ranked the #1 Art Fair in North America by various publications. Here's a shot of the fair from a few years ago:


This is just one block of many that make up the fair as a whole!

I will have a whole tent for this show, which means I need a lot more inventory and furnishings. I have many, many more screen prints to pull in the coming weeks and lots and lots and lots of woodcuts. Endless woodcuts. I'd like to say I'm not wasting any time getting started, but I already made plans to spend the next two weekends out of town-- so for now I'm doing lots of planning. Tonight I will be placing a very large Dick Blick order and trying to decide what to print. I'm buying a bigger screen so that I can make some larger work, and I guess I'll just hope for the best!

Three Days!

Tomorrow is the first day of my first multi-day show ever-- the Mt. Clemens Art Fair. This event has showcased fine artists since its beginning, but will be trying their luck with the indie crowd this year with an alternative and urban crafts tent, under which you'll find my little table. I don't know anything about this fair, so I don't have a whole lot of expectations, but I'm sure I'll have fun.

I like to try something new for each show-- at this one I'll be selling a handful of little screen printed acorn gift cards along with everything else. I've also decided to mix things up by playing some (very soft) music.

If you can't make it, feel free to follow me on Twitter. I'll be reporting in using 140 characters or less all weekend long.

Whoa.

This print from Tugboat Printshop took my breath away.
(click to enlarge)

How to Score Great Gifts and Influence People

I have something really awesome to show you!


Those little scanners at the big box stores are awesome, but what if you could supplement your baby/wedding registry with handmade items? My Handmade Registry makes it ridiculously simple. Paste your Etsy favorites onto the site, share the email address, and you're done! Not only will you wind up with original and amazing gifts with impeccable craftsmanship that will last a lifetime, but you support independent artists and crafters everywhere, and turn on your friends and family to the handmade movement!

Here's a tiny sample of Etsy offerings that would be a big hit at baby showers:

Chocolate Orchid Changing Mat from Made By Kate

Baby Business Onesie from IsabellaBoo. So Distinguished!

This natural toy set by Wee Wood Natural Toys encourages sorting, counting and other important skills.

This Discovery Tote by Helicopher Studios creates an instant play space for little imaginations!

In other news, I have a really busy week ahead of me. I've pulled around 200 woodcut prints over the last few days that need a color screened in tomorrow, and around 100 screens to frame up before Thursday. More info on my next show later in the week!

On Craftivism

I just reached my 100th sale on Etsy about an hour ago (thanks, Brooke!) and I've been thinking a lot lately about the money that I make from selling art. I was recently asked if I would mind donating a piece to the art center that is organizing an upcoming show, and the answer was easy. Non-profit arts centers are on the chopping block in Michigan right now-- and I'm so infuriated that I sent our Governor a nasty letter about it when she announced her intent to cut this funding several months ago. (If you'd like to email Jennifer Granholm and tell her that the arts are not expendable, you can click here.) Anyway, I eagerly signed up to donate a piece, and started thinking about how I could help in other small ways. I tried researching museums and non-profit organizations that run art auctions-- when I came up largely empty-handed I started to change my approach.

If nothing else, my work is about the places I've been. When I think about all that these places have given me, I'm amazed. My perspectives and beliefs have been so heavily influenced by the beauty that I've witnessed, and really, the only way I give back to these spaces is through voting for politicians who may or may not rally around them.

I think that its time to put my money where my mouth is, so I started to look for organizations who are taking monetary donations, and that was much easier.

1) Alliance for the Great Lakes
This group participates in a whole variety of activities in order to help preserve the largest freshwater system on Earth, the Great Lakes. If you've never seen the Great Lakes, you're really missing out-- they're an amazing treasure carved out by the glaciers, every bit of shoreline is stunning. I grew up with parents who were passionate about trekking us all over Michigan to visit these lakes every summer, and I've seen all of them by lonely Lake Ontario (the little guy on the far right)



Later I had the good fortune of meeting a wonderful guy who loves visiting these natural treasures as much as I do-- here's a couple of his photos of our favorite spot on Lake Michigan.




From now on I will be contributing to the Alliance for the Great Lakes by donating $1 from every Petoskey Stones print sold on Etsy. Most of these prints are sold to lovely people who tell me about fond memories of childhoods spent hunting for Petoskey Stones on the shores of Lake Michigan, just like I did. It seems fitting that I use this print to help keep that experience alive for generations to come.



2) Global ReLeaf of Michigan
Global ReLeaf's mission is really simple-- they want to plant trees in Michigan. This group is based out of Ann Arbor, where I work and spend a lot of my time paddling the Huron. When you start canoeing all over the place you realize that the Huron is special-- despite the fact that it flows through one of the most sought after communities in Michigan, its shores remain almost completely undeveloped with the exception of sprawling natural parks.

Here's a slice of autumn beauty on the Huron:

I'd like to offset some of the lumber that I use to stretch screen prints, so from now on I will donate $1 from every Hiawatha Birches or Log Slice print purchased on Etsy in order to help them realize this endeavor.

3) Odwalla Plant a Tree Program
My original intent was to donate to this project, which is planting trees in State Parks throughout the country for the rest of the year. Then I realized that Odwalla is donating the trees, and all you have to do is click a button and they'll plant one in the state of your choice! Please take a minute to visit the site and have them stick one in the ground just for you.




I would eventually like to donate from show sales to these organizations too-- first I need to develop an inventory system that works (or an inventory system, period.) I write down everything before shows, but then I get home and don't feel like counting what's left (the crucial step I'm missing) and then I sell a few online and before I know it I'm just kind of staring blankly at my storage.

Hopefully my little donations will help plant a couple trees and clean up a few feet of shoreline in the woods and lakes that have done so much for me.

Two Features

Have I mentioned Printsy before? Its a quickly growing online community of printmakers on Etsy who share their work with each other. Each week a member shares their thoughts through a little interview-- today its my turn! Click here to learn a little about my history with printmaking, my materials and workspace and what not. Some photos of my process and workspace are included. Thanks so much to the the very talented Amie Roman for inviting me! Here's a photo from the interview of my latest print drying:




I pulled a big batch of woodcuts last night, and am about to tackle another. I decided to go with Sarah Vowell's The Wordy Shipmates for audio-book companionship and am loving it so far. It traces the history of the puritans who settled America with lots of humor and a sprinkle of sarcasm. As someone who was historically nerdy enough to complete the entire series of North and South books (followed by the Patrick Swayze mini-series rented from the public library) during one middle school summer (I can't believe I'm telling the internet this) -- I'm enthralled by Vowell's take on our past and love seeing the connections still vastly apparent between our country at its beginnings and at present day.

I downloaded this one through Audible.com-- 2 free audiobooks when you sign up for a trial membership. They're not paying me to say that (obviously, since I have like 4 readers) but its really easy to give it a shot and very simple to cancel. I'm saving the other credit for our camping trip in June-- four hours in the car flies by if you're listening to a story. You can also find Sarah Vowell regularly contributing on This American Life-- the entire archives of which is available to stream by following this link.

All right, time to get moving. We took a decent-sized 5 mile trek down the river today and went to a holiday bbq-- I'm bushed!

Happy Listening (and Reading!)

Show Promos

Looking for something to do this weekend?
Come see me and all of these people:

at Movement 2009! In Detroit!

May 23-25
Hart Plaza
@ the Handmade Detroit Shop
(just to the right of the entrance gate)

My work will be there all weekend, my person will be there Monday from 4-9.

______________________________

In other show news, I received some information and a stack of postcards from the Mt. Clemens Art Fair yesterday, and was pleasantly surprised to see that one of my entry photos had made the cover!

That's me in the corner...
(resisting the urge to sing REM.....)

Saturday's plan is to pull as many woodcut prints as humanly possible. I find that I get into the groove with woodcut prints much easier if I have an audiobook to listen to, so I'll be shopping for one to download tonight. Any suggestions? I listened to a big chunk of David Sedaris' When You Are Engulfed in Flames last time. I think I'd like to stick with funny essays-- that way I'm not totally lost if my mind wanders or I have a hissy fit over off-registration or some other trivial set-back.

Screen printing is more of a high energy enterprise, so I stick with my tried and true 'fast' play list-- lots of Yeah Yeah Yeahs, The White Stripes, The Thermals, The Helio Sequence and so on. I would equate screen printing energy to fast house-keeping-- a lot of quickly moving back and forth in small spaces.

Feed Your Soul

I'm so excited to share this project with you!


Feed Your Soul is an off-shoot project of Indie Fixx to help supply us all with pretty art in these times of economic turbulence. With one click you open a PDF file of the art sized to fit a piece of printer paper. From there you can print it off on your inkjet at home, or send it off to your local copier. Final cost: the price of photo paper and a little bit of ink. I am all for affordable work, so I was really excited to participate in this project.

This also gave me the chance to skew the printmaking method to make a single, complex original-- something I haven't done in around a year. I opted for screen printing on canvas because I love the look of digital fabric-- it lends some extra dimension.I printed flat panels in all sorts of colors, cut them out and stitched them together to make this little guy:


We were only asked to depict something that feeds our soul in the download-- so I went with a little scene of our canoe chugging down the Huron. One of my favorite sections of the river channels through Nichols Arboretum-- the immediate scenery is lush and green with the slightest poke of Ann Arbor's skyline along the top.

You can download my print (or any of the others) right here

New Honeycomb Print

Used the same negative-print method over the weekend with this honeycomb print. I laid the yellow down first and then cut out and applied approximately 1 million little honeycombs before screening on the brown. I laid it out much more haphazardly than usual, but I think that the composition came out a-okay anyway.

Will be stretching around 40 screens tonight and attaching tags to all of them and taking inventory. Then I'll be ready to go for the Movement show, and thinking about the next one-- I have TWO weekends to get around for it-- a frightening thought! I'll be reevaluating after this coming show in order to decide whether or not to take a little time off the day job to get ready for the next one.

Sneak Peeks

I've been stalling on buying more business cards. I get lots of compliments on my old ones, and they match my shop "look," but I was never really sold on them. My plan, should time ever permit, is to screen print designs on card stock and then print out info a clear mailing labels to put on top. A bit like moo cards, but with a handmade spin. I think I really just wanted my cards to feel unique from one to the next. I also wanted type to play more of a starring role than a supporting one-- and that's not really possible in anything you can order.

Then I commited to selling work in Handmade Detroit's multi-vendor shop at Movement, (formerly the Detroit Electronic Music Festival) and realized that if I wanted to truly take advantage of marketing to 80,000 people then I'd need lots of new business cards in a hurry. Like 10 days hurry. So I bought some textured cardstock and went for a skinny horizontal format on my inkjet at home.

I like how they turned out-- I'm still itching to print my own though! The script/western treatment in my shop name is on its way to becoming my new m.o. I think.




My work graced the pages of Design Sponge this week thanks to Chicago designer Amy Allison's home. Amy picked up some work from me last year-- I'm so happy to see it tucked away in her bathroom! She makes really beautiful screen printed textiles and pretty white ceramic work with an etched feel.

Can you spot it?

My piece for IndieFixx's Free Art Project will be up sometime between next week and the end of the month. Here's a little glimpse at the work-in-progress.

You'll be able to download and print the finished piece once its up on the site!