Tick tock - where's the time for painting?!

Another week flown by. My cold is taking its time leaving fully but I do feel much better, though I’ve yet to have had a decent night’s sleep for the last month Finding it really hard to focus as I feel sleepy and lack my usual fizz. Think I need to clean up my diet too; it's random at the best of times but gets worse when I'm short of time. Realised as I type this that my attention has been skittering around to so many things recently that nothing is getting quality time and it's sapped me of energy. Result - stinking cold and forced to press pause.

Just a quick visit to some open studios in Carshalton this last weekend. Should have a bit more time for the second weekend though.

Sorting through all my illustrations, now up to thirty, and decided to split them into series, with around four per ‘issue’. Once I sort out the technicals of prepping them for printing, I’ll be looking to release a set every month; maybe every couple of months – not decided yet. It's about sensible pacing. It's fine to have future work ready to go but no need to feel you have to have a complete portfolio right off the bat. Obvious maybe but this was my admin plan-way-ahead-of-time head leading.

Of course I’m probably thinking way too far ahead (with a list or three) and should maybe just do one batch first and see if anyone notices them! The place I’m going to use has a catalogue on their site so I can put them on there as well as a link from here and the yet-to-be-set-up Instagram account. Also needs Shopify setting up - another thing on a long list of must dos. Such as - change one of my bank accounts to online, sort out a payment provider (I do not like PayPal - and they're expensive for small outfits) and get a mobile payment widget thingy. And all of this takes time to research to ensure I get the most appropriate and cost effective option, and every time I look at this stuff, someone's been bought out/gone bust/been superseded etc.

I’m also still working on doing some A3 matted originals for the New Artist Fair in September so some of the sketches will be just for that. Unless they aren’t. Decisions, decisions.

Hmm, I also remember having some earlier acrylic pieces scanned at a local print shop. Then I moved a bit further away - twice. I wonder if they’re still on file? I need to give them a call, and arrange a morning in the week to go over there. I do like those images but it’s not the way I want to go, not least because they use photographs as reference. Which is fine but I’d rather have my own photos to work from.

Speaking of that, one of the photographers is Tom Theobald who is one of the world’s finest when it comes to rhythmic gymnastics. I was poking around the rhythmic internet and was pretty shocked to find that he died at the end of last year in a traffic accident. Not much information to be had but a lot of people will be missing the man and his work.

We emailed a couple of times as I'd asked if he'd be of a mind to allow me to sell my prints based off his original photography. He was wonderfully approachable (as were all three of the photographers I contacted) and very laid back about the whole thing…though we didn’t actually come to a decision about how to proceed. Learning about this makes me very sad. I need to consider what I should do about the prints now.

Anyway, when it comes to sources of inspiration, for pete’s sake, if you’re doing any kind of creative work which you want to sell, ask before doing anything. It’s super bad manners, not to mention copyright infringement, to just go ahead and copy then sell without prior permission and/or attribution. If you get caught, you will be taken to court over it. Photographers really don’t make a huge amount from their work unless they're very lucky so don’t expect them to hand over their effort, time and talent to you for nothing. They might not charge you, but ask first!

I have a massive 'memory catalogue' of gymnastics images going back years and see art on the internet and know exactly which photograph it came from. Same with dance. I’m talking straight copy, not even tweaking it a bit - yes, like the pieces I've done - but I got permission first. I often wonder if these artists did and if a photographer requires a payment, that’s going to add up if you keep working this way, so better to get out your own camera and get your own images if you can.

I still have moments of worrying whether a piece might be considered derivative. Much of what I do is a compilation of images from memory. I can ‘see’ what I need in my mind’s eye, and turn things around, change arms/legs/whatever to create a new pose. I used to test myself by mentally flipping through every image of a particular gymnast at a particular event to see how many I could recall. Gym nerd I was! If all my books, magazines and the web went away tomorrow, I’d still have a trove of stuff to play around with.