Tuesday, January 14, 2014

Chiberia and New Year's Resolutions

If you live anywhere in the United States other than southern Florida or Texas, you've probably been experiencing extremely cold weather recently. Here in Chicago, the polar vortex effect has been dubbed "Chiberia." To wit, a week ago Monday, the high here was -14 with a windchill of -43 which broke a 20 year record. And we got something like 18 inches of snow to add insult to injury.

 Yep, this definitely happened.

Needless to say, between the holidays, the abysmal weather, and AT-ATs running amok downtown, not much has been happening in my studio in terms of priming or painting. (A fair amount of sanding though.) Happily, the temps climbed to 45 yesterday, a full 60 degrees warmer than the week before, and while it's supposed to get colder here again, it won't be anything on a par with last week. Warmer weather (relatively speaking anyway) means studio time!

In other news, in November, I started a new job, and while I like it immensely, it does keep me far busier than the last one. I haven't had much online time lately, other than a few minutes here and there to share memes on Facebook. But I'm finding that I'm happier than I've been in a long time, in large part because of the change of scenery so to speak, and I'm determined to make a fresh start in other aspects of my life besides work.

My biggest goal is to clear out all of my old commissions once and for all, and then take new ones on a monthly basis so as not to become overwhelmed. I also hope to offer one or two sales pieces each month. And then I'll need to address the state of my body boxes and my collection. I have models that I will probably never get around to painting that need to move along to new homes, and I have a bunch of OFs that I'm not sure I really need to keep after all. And then there are the books...and the clothes...and the old Blood-Horse magazines... It's going to be a busy winter!

That said, despite reduced internet time these days, I am hoping to keep my blogs more active, both this one for my studio and my Model Horse Collectibility blog. I have so many ideas; I just need to borrow Hermione's time turner to get them all done.

I'm also planning to scrap my Yahoo Group in the near future in favor of a newsletter-style email announcement system that will support images and other graphics, much like what several other artists have already started using with great success. I'll post details about that here and on my Facebook studio page once I've explored my options.

In the meantime, Happy New Year to you all!

2 comments:

GJ Berg said...

How's your tauntuan doing?

Kirsten Wellman said...

I ended up turning it into a coat. A warm, smelly coat. :D