Developing new dancer piece

We had a lovely vacation in Canada the week before Thanksgiving and then went to our daughter's house for a small Thanksgiving dinner and amidst all of that, I have neglected the blogging.  Part of that is feeling like I didn't really have anything concrete to write about.  Vacation was a very relaxing time with lots of short walks along the bay and talk about books we're reading but I left my camera battery plugged in at home so my usual vacation blog about birds would have had no photos.  Altho I did take some interesting textural ones with my phone but talk about those will probably happen when I actually do something with them.

And Thanksgiving week was all about recovering from vacation and downtime with the family.  No big events there either.

So I almost did a book report this week.  Fortunately for all of you, I did start work on a new dancer piece using my new poseable figurine to give me some shots to work from.  I actually posed her on vacation and was very happy with how easy it was to photograph her with my phone.  That was the whole point of getting the gray rather than the flesh tone figure since it would give me an almost black & white silhouette to start with.

Once I got home and had uploaded my camera photos via Dropbox, I popped the picture into Photoshop for cropping and color shifting a bit.  Then printed it out and did a tracing with my trusty brush tip marker giving me this nice silhouette.

But wait, there's more.  This gives me the first silkscreen I need so I can lay down the background color for the dancer.  Next, I need the dancer silhouette with the body art so I pulled out some of my spiral screens & stencils and played around and got this. 

Unlike my earlier dancers, I stopped the tattoos below the arms.  When I tried them on paper in b&w I really didn't like the loss of detail for the face and arms so I went with this look.  Now, I've printed this out in multiple sizes and am ready to make my silkscreens to try out my new composition.  I should have some colored versions on paper by next week.  I am really happy at how quickly this process went as this makes it much easier to do composition changes and variations. And that means I get to focus my time & energy on the color play which is my fun place. 

Tracking time & productivity in the studio

This post was going to be about the fun experiments I was doing in the studio, but, alas, the flu struck on Wednesday so that whole thing got derailed.  Instead, I'm sharing one of my current tools that I find very useful in meeting my goals.  An app called ATracker.  The free version allows only 5 activities to be tracked but the upgrade cost is under $5 if I'm remembering correctly. 

I've been using it for a couple of months now and really find it helps me track how much time I'm spending on which part of being an artist.  I usually set my weekly goals for hours of work done in a particular area since I long ago discovered I totally suck at estimating total time for a project.  This way, I just keep working at it until it's done. 

History view for this week

So, how's it work?  You add activities you want to track, I added categories (Art, biz, selfcare) and then you click on that activity when you start working on.  Click again when you finish.  Then you get to pull up the data at the end of the day or week and see how much you got done where.  I also add a note to items saying what particular art project it was so I can see how much time I'm spending on particular things.  I use 2 views:  the history one above which gives more item detail and the pie chart from the Reports, see below.

And of course, I love the color coding possibilities.  Lots of choices on how you tag your activities, great options on how you can analyze the data and so far, only one minor bug.  (Sometimes the day shows yesterday's activities when I bring up the app so I have to manually set it to the new blank day. No big problem. )  If I were rating the app, I'd give it max stars because it does what it's supposed to do very well and is inexpensive.