The day job is wonderfully productive and I'm really digging all the shirt designs that have been assigned to me. There are the usual small jobs and typesets thrown in, but I created two illustrations by February for a company who licenses Chevy and the landed on the cover for their 2012 catalogue. Not the last awesome thing, but it was the first.
I also joined the board for Untitled, the Nashville art group who hosts quarterly shows, and am currently chairing PR. The seasoned members help me learn the new skills and it's pretty interesting to see how everything works even further behind the scenes.
I've become more selective with freelancing and plan on shifting that energy primarily into helping develop the publishing company, DNR Publishing, with my business partner and best friend/partner in crime. Currently we're running full speed to get his book, Parasites, ready for print at the end of the month, which we hope to have in hand during an event we're pulling together in August. We're hoping to build a partnership with a fellow artist and host monthly writing/performance events for the slightly ignored authors and poets around here. I may be wrong, mainly cause I'm not that privy to poetry/prose reading nights, but the response for my friend's first night spoke volumes in the lack of outlets for them.
Maybe eventually I'll find downtime to pick up my own art and continue the Dimensional Series. I had tenatively hoped to do so and have enough pieces to approach local galleries about showing, but I'm still stuck at 3 of 10 ideas, so it's pushed back a little.
This past Saturday, the 7th, I did attend an Artists' Block Party hosted by the gracious Robert Cortner, who had supplies donated by Jerry's Artarama (hit them up in Antioch on Bell Road!) It's essentially a casual gathering where the artist picked a spot, chose their medium, chatted and set to work creating a quick piece of art which Robert would haul down to Nashville's Art Crawl that evening to place in random public locations for a lucky passer-by to adopt for free. I made a little duck-guy based from a coffee stain turned pen sketching. Everyone who came created stunning pieces in a 4-5 hour span, look up Robert on Facebook so you can see the rest of the images.
