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!

A very slight shop update

I spent tonight tweaking my shop banner a bit-- I think my photoshop skills are slightly improved since I last made it, and wanted it saved as a .png so its a little less fuzzy

I'd throw up a before and after for comparison, but I just realized that I don't have a before anymore! I bought a new computer this week and its either hidden in some super secret folder from my old files or the banner on etsy was my only copy!

Anyway, here's the new banner:



The back image has changed to a plant cell diagram, the text color is a little lighter than it was before, and I filled the little tree with a different woodgrain and refined it a bit. Just for fun (and because I was curious about this font) I made an entirely new banner as well:



I love how this turned out-- the font is really unique and the distressed look came together nicely. It just doesn't seem to match up with what I'm trying to do though-- there's something about it that doesn't do it for me-- too old fashioned maybe. I'll actually save this one though (what a concept!) and maybe pull it out in the future. It might work nicely with this group of prints I'm stringing together right now.

Speaking of new prints, I've started some sketches for this new series of prints and made a lot of choices already about which direction I'll be going in. One of my goals with this blog was to share the total process of screen and woodcut prints from idea inception to matting and framing, so look for the first post of that series in the next few days. Instead of working print by print, I'll be carrying this new work through each step at the same time and making much larger editions than before, so it'll be a journey worth documenting.

Launch the Blog!

Here's the deal with the blog.

First off, the title comes from a lovely little saying by John Cage:

"Nothing is a mistake. There's no win and no fail, there is only make."

I'm slowly starting to realize that even if I don't like what I make it served to teach me something about design, technique, process or myself. This philosophy appeals to me for two reasons. One, it values work. Somewhere deep in the family tree I inherited a really insane work ethic, so giving persistence value strikes a chord with that part of me. It also allows me to give myself a break and look at my work more like a process in a continuum than on a piece by piece basis.

So that's the story there. I'd like to accomplish a few things with this blog:
1) Process Posts: I would like to explain how the work I sell is made-- and maybe even teach a person or two how to do it themselves.
2) Print Previews: I would like a place to share work that is not currently for sale on Etsy because its out of print or hot off the presses.
3) Design/Inspiration: I pour through the internet looking for visual bits to jump start my creative juices all the time. I'd like a virtual filing cabinet.
4) Reviews: This might end up going a little off-topic, but I love to share things that are awesome, and I am religious about reading reviews before making a purchase.
5) Random other bits-- work from my day job, bits from my life.

More to come. Soon!!