In the Studio

I have an open studio 3-4 times a year. Two of them are in conjunction with the Saint Paul Art Crawl and I invite guest artists to show their work with me. It has become a fun collaborative event! Here are 11 things you must do to promote your open studio event: Postcards – mail and hand out to everyone I know and many I don’t. Make sure you have contact information, address and a small map (or QR code linking to a Google map) Email blasts – I try to limit this to only 2; one announcing the event, and the second a simple reminder [...]

Artwork Archive is FANTASTIC. I signed up in December 2012 after looking for a couple of years for software that both did the job AND looked good (Seriously, this is the ONLY artwork database software that actually has a nice looking interface. Hello! When the target market are visual artists, shouldn't just a little bit of effort be put into designing a decent dashboard that doesn’t look like it came out of a beginning programming class?!?!), was intuitive to use and did not have so many bells and whistles that it bogged down its effectiveness and created a steep learning curve. I first [...]

Everyone always asks, “How do you do that?” Well, the answer to that is actually not too complicated. I start with an idea, usually a photo, or a sketch, or a painting. Then I begin choosing the glass. The glass can be in a palette that matches the inspiration imagery or it can be something that you may like. Either way, I begin by laying out the glass intuitively while glancing at the inspiration image Step 1 With the inspirational image of a Super Nova star exploding in the background, the glass is being laid out on the work table. You can see the [...]