Okay, I'm alive! I finally got power back. I have my computer set up so I can work over the weekend. Now it's just a matter of getting my psyche settled back down. As some folks know, I have adult ADHD and other neurological problems and health issues. These issues make having my routine in place extremely important for keeping my mental health intact. It was starting to go south well before the power came back on. Our food supply situation isn't great, but we're not starving by any means. My joints are very bad right now from days upon days of ice cold showers. My nerves are still a bit tattered, but normal things like posting this blog are helping get my brain back on track. We suffered only minimal damage to the apartment. The flimsy replacement window they put in after we were burglarized was, thankfully, sheltered in the balcony alcove and held up in the storm. Our bedroom window, more exposed to direct wind, lost the seals and it leaked into our bedroom, soaking the carpet. That now stinks to high heaven and I'm trying to get things straight enough to get in there and treat it for mildew and kill the smell. The window will need replacing. Other than that, I've not heard of any severe damage to our section of the building other than some broken glass in a few places. Others here didn't fare as well and have busted windows, holes in their roof and balconies ripped off by falling trees and what I can only assume were tornadic winds by the tree tops that look literally twisted apart. We still have some trees partially blocking the roadways locally.

Supplies are still a bit thin on this end of town because so many stores are only just now getting power and their first shipments after the storm. I'm waiting a little to try and restock us to allow people with families to feed to get their supplies. I've opened my apartment up to friends who need to get a hot shower, do some laundry for work or just watch a video to decompress in the AC. I have friends and family whose homes were a total loss down in the Kemah/Seabrook/San Leon/Bacliff area. I'm hearing that lots of places in the highway 146 area are just flattened, leaving nothing but debris.

If you're reading this and you have ever thought about buying any of the merchandise from my online shops, now is a great time to do that. I've been out of work for a whole week and money is going to be very tight for a while because of that missing income. Any extra income I can generate through sales will be helpful. Links to those places are below.

The Art of Jolie E. Bonnette @ Zazzle

The Art of Jolie E. Bonnette @ Cafe Press

I'll have a more full update and observations and things later when I'm not so busy putting the apartment back together. Those who are still in need are in my thoughts and I give you what energy I can spare to help you recover. Good luck to you all and BE SAFE! *HUGS!*

Jolie

I have to be real, folks. Right now I'm really over-stressed and it's telling on my health. For those who don't know, I do have diabetes,  a heart condition, degenerative disc disorder and arthritis. This combination of illnesses sometimes makes just getting through a simple day difficult. I need to streamline the website a bit in order to be able to keep up with it. To that end, I'm pulling down the direct online sales features for limited edition prints and hand crafted items. I just can't keep up with adding the new ones and tracking what numbers have sold online and all that. It's more work than I have time for. So those changes will slowly be implemented this weekend and through next week as I also work on adding new designs to the online shops at Zazzle and Cafe Press.

Limited Edition prints will still be available by request as will anything I have time to hand craft. You will just have to email me to make your request for the item, get instructions on making payment and to give me your shipping info. I may occasionally have them up in places like EBay or Etsy, though it's unlikely since those places tend to charge me for listing and I've never found them great venues for sales. I'll still be doing occasional vending events as I can find those that don't charge enormous amounts for the space and aren't so far away as to have additional lodging and travel expenses.

Now, in other merchandise news, I am now designing shoes and skateboards! Zazzle.com recently added these items to their long list of products. For some of these, I'm using already existing art. For others, it's entirely new designs not available elsewhere yet like this one:  "Can't Take the Sky" Skateboard. Others are a blend of a previously available image or character presented in a new way like this one: "Stinger" Skateboard. So check out the stuff at Zazzle! I'm hoping to eventually do some shoes to match the boards. If you're interested in having a skateboard or shoes featuring art I don't have up there yet, please contact me at aazaris_world@sbcglobal.net and I'll see what I can do.

That's it for now other than a reminder that I will be vending September 27th at Houston Pagan Pride Day and will also have the laptop rig and internet access to be able to take orders for drop-ship merchandise from all online stores. I will have some sample merchandise for you to look at and will also be taking requests for specific items if you have them.Some I may have to put together the next day for you. Others I may have the files on hand to put together on-site. So please feel free to ask if you want something specific.  I'm generally quick with the design work because I have the process streamlined for efficiency.

Since I'm bloody tired of having to waste time deleting spam blog comments, I've made it where only people on a friends list can comment. It's not as if anyone reads, subscribes or responds to this thing when I actually use it anyway (which is seldom). XD I just haven't time to keep updating it, really. I'm too busy with work, trying to make art an other things. I've hardly had time to properly update the Cafe Press shop or the website recently. The site is woefully behind on having available prints added. with any luck I'll get the framework set during CMA Beltain so I can upload it all when I get back. Anyway, back to the usual blog cone of silence. :-p

Jolie

     Well, once again Apollocon is behind me. I love this show despite the fact that I put in almost 20 hours of volunteer time from Thursday night to Sunday afternoon. I don't think I've ever found a place where I enjoy working so much. 

     The art show wasn't a great success for most of the artists this time around. Last year the bidding was brisk between noon and three on Saturday and a good many pieces were ready for auction already by that time. This year we practically had to drag people in to bid until the last late influx which we ended up staying open late to get. We had a scare of missing art when some uncouth person signed for a package they KNEW didn't belong to them. Luckily the art was retrieved Saturday morning and hung in time for the artist to at least get some sales, though she didn't do as well this year as last. I'm not sure if that was because last year everyone fought over her stuff and didn't want to get into high dollar bid wars again, just the generally slow bidding or if getting hung late had an ill effect. I find the last doubtful considering even Theresa Mather, whose works are normally either mostly sold or being fought over by noon Saturday, had sluggish sales compared to last year. The main theory our Art Show Director had as to why the sales were so sluggish was that fuel prices weren't $3 per gallon this time last year. We did seem to have far fewer folk driving in from other cities than I recall seeing last year, too.

     Another issue in what seemed to be lower numbers this year was likely the cranky weather. Here in Houston, if you live in certain areas, you simply do not leave the house when it's raining so hard you can't see ten feet in front of you. You either may not be able to get back home or may come home only to find that while you were out and not there to rescue your valuables to higher locales, your house took on several inches of water. Saturday was rather chaotic in the weather department, so that may also have made people who would otherwise have come out and bought a one-day pass stay home. While we don't sell a lot of art to them, we do sell some.

     I had the rather enjoyable task of being the runner/comic relief for the art auction Saturday night. I had entirely too much fun cutting up and playing gunslinger as I battled it out for my Peri Charlifu print. I'm still a bit miffed that I lost one of Brandy Stark's pieces I bid on. But, seeing as I know her, I can just beg her to make me one like it. LOL  Saturday night also brought a chance to hang out with some musicians from the AMTGard group from the Kingdom of the Wetlands. That was a lot of fun and it seemed to draw a crowd. Perhaps we should make a point of trying to make it an official feature of the con so we can have some event space set up where we won't have to worry about disrupting panels and whatnot.  I also got to sit on an interesting panel on Sunday about the schools and trends of speculative art. It wasn't heavily attended, but the few audience members we had were wonderful folk. Our artist guest of honor had to leave and bugged out of the panel on us along with the other of the four panelists. I'm just glad I didn't end up on that one alone because I really know diddly about the trends in spec art since I never follow them.

     The con wasn't profitable for me since I only sold 2 prints and traded a third for a small piece of original art. Though I didn't have the shipping costs, being in attendance also has costs even if I don't stay in the hotel. Add that to the cost of printing and matting and it was a major loss even without my fairly sizable designated art buying  and necessities budget. But I didn't really get into these to make cash anyway. I did it for the exposure. So it was still a very worthwhile venture.

     I really do love Apollocon. I love it so much that I've decided to start working now on a very special piece of cow/sci-fi/fantasy themed art just for them for next year. It's their fifth anniversary! What I want to do with the art when I'm done is print out enough for the folks on the planning committee with two extra. One goes to the con chair from this year (he passed the reins to his second for next year) and the other will go to the art show for bidding. I may also do a third which will be given out to one lucky volunteer. After that, I will call the edition closed. I also have a few other ideas for cow themed art for next year's program book. No one gets any sneak peeks at the special art except my fiance and best friend. *evil laugh* Everyone else has to wait until I'm done.

Well, yay me. I take off my glasses to clean them and SNAP!   So much for the unbreakable flex titanium frames. *smirk* Guess this is the gods' way of saying, "No, really... your doctor meant it when she said you need to get your lazy self to the eye doc for new glasses" Whee! I get to go geek chic with the tape on the bridge of my glasses until I can get these replaced. *groan*  Wow... this is messing with my eyes because it puts the lenses at just the wrong angle for my astigmatism....

I just finished a deal for a friend where I designed a logo for the fire department he runs for the Burning Man Flipside event and had it printed to some t-shirts. Having to take time away from other art related work for it, especially while I've been sick the last few weeks, made me realize something with utter clarity. While I can definitely use the money such commission work brings in, I simply end up despising it. More and more I find I dislike being told what to do when it comes to my creativity. A faint notion of that part of my personality has been what kept me from trying to be more "mainstream" with my art. Getting into galleries puts a lot of limitations and demands on your work because you have to play to whatever audience they are targeting if you expect to make sales and, thus, keep your work on display there. This same vague notion was what also made me nix the idea of ever becoming a book cover artist. I simply don't want some art director dictating what I do. I've always been one to cherish my creative freedom because, a long time ago it was the only real freedom I had. It was my one escape from a life that was often more like a waking nightmare. So now that I know what it's like to be all grown up and in charge of things, I'm even MORE loathe to let other people control my creative urges.  It seems to be getting worse as time goes on and I make my way toward the inevitable role of bizarre, crazy, bitchy old bat.

So, with this going on I decided to save myself further aggravation and just not take any more commissions or design jobs. I left the services page up on the bizarre chance I MIGHT want to go back to doing commissions some day in the FAR future. But for now people will just have to settle for looking at and buying what I want to draw.

Wow... I'm tripping out at how close it's getting to Oasis (FL), Opus (CO) and Apollocon (TX). I'm hoping I do decently at all three. But, as usual, I really go in expecting not to and I'm ecstatic if I sell a single piece that way. It's really much better than expecting to do well and being disappointed when I sell nothing.  Some people call that pessimism. I call that seldom disappointed.

I'm not even entirely sure what I'm sending to Oasis or Apollocon yet. I do have a couple of new prints to send out, but I have so many prints and ACEOs now that picking 8-12 items for one panel is starting to become rather difficult. Unless sales go up, I simply can't afford more panels to display on, so I just keep trying to rotate stuff around by region as I can, sending a mix of the older & more widely known pieces mixed with newer ones people in a region probably haven't seen yet in the local shows. Apollocon, being a home town show like Revelcon, is likely to get some prints having their first showing. I also have a bit more space at Apollocon because I don't have to pay the high cost of shipping two panels worth of work.

More soon than I want to think about it'll be time to hit the street again for the Via Colori Street Painting Festival in September. I find it hard to believe it's already coming up again. This year is going FAST....


Work, work, work. Between the day job, creating art and then having to wrestle the business end of all this, I just go nuts. But I manage.  Some stuff I've been working on in the last few weeks while waiting on approvals and other things with the logo I was working on:

1. "Winter Light", anthropomorphic arctic fox image.
2. "Sahara", anthropomorphic rat dancing girl (don't ask LMAO)
3. "Dream Bot", a cartoonish lil robot painting I've been working on off and on for a long while.
4. Random coloring of people's line art from SheezyArt.com's "The Coloring Book" club because I've had an overwhelming need to just do something because it's FUN, dammit!

I keep telling myself to get off my ass and update the prints page again, but it's got about the same priority as getting off my ass and going to use the exercise room here in our apartment complex. Yuh... that has about the same likelihood of happening any time soon as I have of winning the lottery. *snicker*

Anyway... I just wanted to let folks know I'm alive if not entirely well.

I just wanted to post a brief note to announce that I am reserving panel space at Opus in Denver, Colorado and Oasis  in Orlando, Florida. Both of these events take place over the Memorial Day Weekend, May 25-27. I've got enough images in print right now that I can't make promises as to what will go. If you have a request for a specific piece to go to either show so you can get a chance to see it in person,  please email me and let me know.


Jolie

This is just a little note to announce that I went ahead and got a lot of stuff added to the Cafe Press shop featuring the new "Drum Goddess" design. If you're interested in seeing what I have available, click here.  If there's something you would like that I don't have available yet (like dark mousepads, clocks, etc), please email me and I will add the items you request as soon as possible. Also note that there are now Plus Sized women's scoop and V-Neck tees available through Cafe Press as well as several new shirt colors available under light and dark tees, now. Don't forget to check out another new addition just in time for summer fun: "Alien-Ation: Surfer".

I'm also going to be vending at Houston's Pagan Pride Day this year and will give more information as it comes along.

Until next time....

Jolie