It’s New Year’s Eve already! What are you doing? I’m taking some time to think about the coming year and how I’d like to focus my art. The studio is getting a much needed sorting, organizing, thinning… the fiber stuff is getting thinned and packed away for another time. In 2008, I want to focus on my photography, digital work, and encaustic painting/collage.

Several months back, I tried photographing arrangements of things. I used a lamp shade as a light box and shone my home-improvement-store reflector lamps on the lamp shade sitting on a table with the camera pointing straight down through the top of the shade. It worked okay for single small objects, but I was never able to get the results I wanted with larger arrangements.

Thanks to my wonderful family, I have new studio lights! It’s a pair of Interfit lights, each with softbox and reflector. Each light head has 5 sockets for daylight flourescent bulbs. The bulbs can be turned on in any combination. (Click on the thumbnail for a larger image.)

These lights will be very handy for photographing my art. I had the darnedest time getting full, even, matching light with so many different light sources in my dining room for shots like this:

And, of course, the lights are perfect for shooting arrangements of things… I could (and probably have) spend hours arranging the tiny objects I’ve collected and photographing them.

So now, I’m off to organize my studio… :)

My fiber art Bird in Digital Shibori Landscape was published in the book “Innovative Fabric Imagery for Quilts.” Click the photo to go to my flickr page and see more photos.

(Argh! I’ve been a terrible blogger! Family & day job stuff has been filling the parts of my brain that apparently I use to blog… Please accept my apologies!)

I spent the weekend working on a new print, Flight Plan. It’s a bit of digital + gocco fusion. The background beige image (which is a photo of an old, slightly yellowed, linen sheet) and the spatulas and button were printed digitally. Then the cicada was screened in green with my gocco. And the whatever-they-are diagram lines were also gocco printed. I think it’s a little weird and I like it. I post some bigger images and photos of the process on flickr.