Portfolio Website

I now have a new portfolio website!

http://kimberlylcarey.mosaicglobe.com/

I've chosen a site called Mosaic Globe. I searched for websites that would give me web space, and the majority of them were not free. (Free is really all I can afford right now.) The ones that you didn't have to pay for immediately could be used for free on a very short, trial basis. Mosaic Globe has three levels of membership: basic (free), standard (mid-range pricing), and plus (higher priced). The free membership gives you a reasonable amount of web space for the price. It's certainly enough space for me at the moment. With the plus membership, you gain the option of adding a "Buy Now" Paypal button to your page, which could be desirable to many people.

I don't know if Mosaic Globe is the right site for me for good, but it's a satisfactory place to start, and if I don't like it, I've lost nothing but a little bit of my time.



I have also created an account on Project Wonderful to bring in a little bit of traffic to this blog, since this is what will get updated the most. It's a wonderful site where advertisers bid on ad space. You can search by type of websites with space available, by price, by banner size, etc. I think it will be a good investment.

Look at the sites my ad is on!

Daily Skies (Part VII)

How was Art Walk?

This weekend, I participated in the May Art Walk at Essex Studios. It was definitely an experience. I shared a space with another DAAP student that I am good friends with. Our space was near the main entrance, although not very on-the-way to the rest of the displays.

We did not get much business, but I did sell a piece! It was the following image, one of my prints from my intro to intaglio studio. It was the last one I had done in this color ink; the rest are black ink. I also passed out a few of my preliminary business cards.

Near the end of the evening on Saturday, I went exploring. There were many talented artists showing there. The building is older and is pretty cool. Like my past visit to the Pendleton studios, it got my yearning to rent a studio space of my own. Most of the studios I saw at Essex were fairly large, too. Perhaps one could be shared between two artists comfortably.

Experiment: Oil Painting (Part IV)

The progression of a painting. I am not pleased with this one yet. It is roughly based on this image:

Daily Skies (Part VI): Storm Edition

Recently there was a nice huge storm. I was stuck at work at the time, and we wondered if our electricity would go out. But when the rain finally petered out, we looked out our back door and saw an amazing rainbow. In fact was a double rainbow, both bows of which were full intact Unfortunately, due to the limitations of my phone camera, I could not get the whole thing in one shot, and I did not have time to get enough pictures to Photomerge together to make one myself.

The morning after, the clouds were still beautiful.

Art Walk!

I will be participating in the May Art Walk: Bloom at the Essex Studios. The exhibition will be Friday May 4 and Saturday May 5. Check out the Esssex Studios website for more details. I haven't finalized what  pieces I will be showing, but I think it'll be some of my intaglio prints from this post and any of my oil paintings, if they are ready. I might bring some other prints to sell, but that remains to be seen. It should be a good time! If you'll be in the area then, why not stop on by?

Contact info:
Essex Studios

2511 Essex Place

Cincinnati, OH 45206

(513) 476-2170

Directions 

Experiment: Oil Painting (Part III)

The progress of a painting roughly based off of these photos:

FYASO Friday

Experiment: Oil Painting (Part II)

The progression of a painting, roughly based off of this image from my daily sky images:

 

 

Experiment: Oil Painting

I haven't posted a lot of my actual thesis work. That's because I've been mostly focusing on oil painting, and since I've technically only taken one class on the subject, much of what I've done this year I'm calling "learning experiences". I would rather not show these learning experiences to the public. For example, last quarter, I made a painting that was 4ft x 1.5ft. I decided to try my hand at stretching my own canvas. So I looked up instructions online (you can really find just about everything online!), bought a roll of unprimed canvas, gesso, and some pre-made wooden stretchers (the bars that make up the "frame" of the canvas).

4ft was about the tallest stretchers the store sold, and they only had two, so I had to buy both of  them. One of them was severely warped. But I made do; I tried to unwarp it with wet paper towels and heavy books. This seemed to be working, but it drifted back into place after I had assembled the canvas and had begun painting. So I was stuck with a warped painting that simply would not lat flat on the wall. I had to hang it in a thesis gallery show, and it was embarrassing. I did not take any photos of it.

Fortunately, I got instructions on how to build my canvases completely from scratch, stretchers and all. This quarter, I decided to go for broke and make four all at once.

The stretchers, made from 1x3s and quarter-round molding:

 Triangle corner pieces:

Here's where those triangles go:

Ready to nail together:

 The final product:
 

Only three of the four frames ended up useable; one of my long stretches ended up at least half an inch too short somehow, and though I tried to wrangle things into place, it was just a sad mess. I will get more supplies and make a new fourth frame sometime soon.

Daily Skies (Part V)

Daily Skies (Part IV)

The only problem with being so obsessed in taking photos of the sky is that my current digital camera is too bulky and unreliable to keep with me at all times. That leaves me with one other option: my phone's camera. It takes ok pictures, and I can pull it out reasonably quickly when I'm driving (which is when most of my photo opportunities happen), but it's not good enough. It can't capture the nuances of color my own eyes see. Plus there are often interesting cloud formations right on the horizon, and they look big to me, but on the phone's display, they are quite small. It's difficult and annoying when my phone simply can't capture what I want it to. A good, portable digital camera is an investment I need to make, and soon.

Case in point, this last image. The way I could see the sky through my own eyes, there was lots of the pink dusting on the underside of the clouds. But in the image my camera took, there is very little. It bugs me. This is an example of both the color limitations and the automatic zoom out/wider angle business I mentioned.