Lisa Call

To Africa

I leave for South Africa this morning. After 28 hours of travel and sitting in airports I’ll be in Johannesburg. I’m bringing my pillow along on the flight.

While I’m gone my small collectible textile paintings will not be for sale via my website as I won’t be available to ship them to you.

I do have another offer for you – a new art project inspired by my trip to South African. You can reserve a piece today at big discounts.

So far quite a few people have jumped on this opportunity to reserve an African inspired ACEO ($14 now and another $14 later will buy you one of my ACEOs – normally priced at $40) and quite a few people are reserving larger pieces as with this discount they can afford a larger piece of my textile art than with my usual prices.

These prices are available until I return from Africa or sell out as quantities for each size are limited. Based on the rate of sales of the ACEOs in the first couple days I anticipate those will sell out, especially after I start posting photos on my blog during my journey.

Full details here: South African Impressions Art Project.

For those of you that already pre-reserved a piece – Thank You – your support is much appreciate.

Make Big Art

In case you missed the announcement, I’ve started a new blog/website called MakeBigArt where I post my articles targeted to other artists. The tagline is Empower Artists as I believe that knowledge is power.

I’ve been asked to mentor/coach other artists repeatedly and it is through the makebigart umbrella this activity will be organized. Although I don’t consider myself a coach, I have no formal training as a coach and I have no interest in being a coach.

What I have an interest in is sharing my knowledge as I love teaching, so I’ll be doing classes, seminars, etc, mostly around the thing I’m really good at – organizing and systems. Although there will be other topics also.

In the meantime I’m writing 1 blog post a week on makebigart and the topic for this week was multitasking and thrashing. Everyone multitasks and sometimes it gets out of hand, using the analogy from the computer world (where the term multitasking came from in the first place), this article looks at how multitasking can go bad and some ideas on how to go about it more healthy.

You can read the article here: Stop Thrashing and Start Processing.

There’s now a link in my sidebar to makebigart to make it easier for everyone to find it also.

 
Now I must jump on my last few tasks before I head to the airport. Not sure when I’ll be posting again, but it’ll be from South Africa!

Structures #100
©2009 Lisa Call
Textile Painting (Hand dyed fabric, batting, thread)
22″ x 50″

WooHoo!!

Structures #100 is finished and I’ve reached a huge milestone: 100 textile paintings completed in my first major series!

Detail

Structures #100
 
 

A comparison to the first piece in the series:

Structures #1
©2005 Lisa Call
Textile Painting (Hand dyed and commercial fabric, batting, thread)
74" x 38"

[Post updated 7/29]

The History

I’ve taken several art workshops with Nancy Crow so I’ve known about her South African arts and crafts tours for years and have always wanted to go on one. I love the colors of the African landscape (at least in photos) and I love arts and crafts, so this is pretty much the dream tour.

In the fall of 2005 I was at a workshop with Nancy and I told her I wasn’t going to do anymore workshops with her and instead I was going to save up and attend her next African adventure. I had no idea where the money was going to come from but I knew I wanted to do this.

She only does the tours every 3-5 years so I figured I had some time to save up, so I did a bit of calculating and realized that putting back money each month for the trip wouldn’t get me there anytime soon. I still dreamed about going on this trip but saved no money for it.

When I took yet another artist workshop with Nancy in 2007 (never say never) I told her again that I was going to go on the next South African tour and to let me know as soon as she started taking sign ups as the trip sells out in a week.

At that time I had $0 saved up for the vacation with no idea where the money might come from but I didn’t let that bother me, instead I just thought about how awesome it would be to go on the trip.

Making it a Reality

So along comes June of 2008 and I got an email that the sign up page for the African tour had just gone live and did I still want to go? My answer was a resounding positive YES! And, not surprisingly, because I always seem to manifest what I want, I actually had the money to go.

That same week I sold my house and as long time readers might recall, I sold my house for more than I had asked for, a lot more. More than enough to cover a month long trip to Africa. So here I am – just 2 days away from being on a plane to Africa.

Speaking of planes, I hadn’t thought much about the expense of the plane ticket and it turns out I had enough frequent flyer miles to get there for free. Pretty convenient as it turns out tickets to Africa aren’t on the cheap side.

[The story of my amazing house selling experience here: Achieving Success - it's another way cool story about things working out exactly like I wanted them to.]

My Plans

I’ve never been on a group tour before. When I went to New Zealand in 2000 it was with my family and we rented a car and did whatever we wanted on our own schedule, so this will be a new experience for me.

I had originally intended to do a bunch of planning and figure out what I could see and do in the areas where we were going and be “in the know”. I then did a huge home remodel and those plans went out the window.

I’m now on the “don’t worry about it” plan.

I only read the itinerary a few weeks ago and only because I was sitting with the nurse trying to figure out where I was going and what shots I would need. She thought that was pretty funny. I figure the right stuff will happen as it needs to.

I’m flying out a few days before the trip starts and a quilter I met online has offered for me to stay with her family, which is just about as awesome as it could be. The internet is a fabulous place.

I have bought a Dell Netbook so I will be able to send updates and stay in touch (don’t tell the folks at the day job this). I’m not sure how much internet access there will be so I’m not going to try to make plans as to how much blogging I’ll be doing. We’ll just have to wait and see.

My Art

I have no doubt this trip will have a wonderful influence on my artwork. I have a new moelskine sketch book and intend on using it and my camera often to record my adventures.

Most of my planning has been on the art project that will ensue after I return home.

I’ve outlined a new South African art project, which I unveiled in my studio newsletter earlier today. It’s a chance to prepurchase artwork from this project at a fairly significant discount by paying 1/2 up front.

An ACEO is $14 now and $14 in October(ish) when the work is complete. Several folks have already reserved their South African Impressions artwork.

You can read about the details here: South African Impressions

The Photos

I’ve been including photos in my blog post, newsletter and art project page that my dad took in 2006 in Botswana and Zambia. This trip was his final big adventure as he was diagnosed with cancer a few months after his return and passed away the following year.

I love the connection to my dad that I feel in making this journey.

One of the Most Beautiful Spots on Earth

These photos were taken on the road up to Los Alamos, New Mexico on Sunday. Beautiful. I am still so thankful to have grown up in such an enchanted location.

Studio Update

With my upcoming trip to Africa (I leave next wednesday), things are all about packing and preparing at my house these days. I’m getting more excited by the hour – it’s going to be fabulous!

I’m also working on getting my July studio newsletter out the door so look for that in your inbox in the next few days if you are a subscriber. If you aren’t, subscribe here.

I’m also fitting in a bit of time to work on my website after the quarantine of last week. I’ve put most of the functionality back into the sidebar, although the archives are now on a separate page, which you can find in the new sidebar.

I have a ton of stuff to prepare at the day job to be gone for a month so I’ve been putting in long hours there this week also.

I have no idea how long the flight is to Africa, and I’m pretty sure I don’t want to know, but I’m pretty sure sleep is the activity I have in mind for most that event to recover from all this prep work needed before I go.

Studio Sale Update

News from artfulhome.com – they have decided to put an end to the year round studio sale so at the end of July (July 27th for me) all studio sale work will be coming down.

If there is something you have your eye on in my studio sale page you need to act fast. The next studio sale won’t come around again until december/january.

Merry Christmas

I came across The Soon-To-Be-More-Famous Artist Named Nemo on twitter and am happy to be aquainted with this positive thinking talented artist with big dreams.

When I posted image with ideas on how to display ACEOs and small art last month, he sent me a link to this beautiful tree decorated with his art by one of his collectors. more photos are here.

What a wonderful idea! Buy small art – decorate a tree, be it Christmas or the potted plant next to your desk.

Thanks for sharing Nemo!

Pricing

I wrote a long, transparent, and popular blog post about pricing a while back and am continuing with my thoughts on pricing, but this time over on my MakeBigArt blog. You can read my latest post, psychological pricing, there now.

Every artist must decide for themselves how to price their work, but my belief is that the more information we have the more empowered we will be to build the career we envision.
 

Chile Rellenos, Pinon nut turtles, Sopapillas. Yum. Taking a break with a weekend in Santa Fe. Headed up to Los Alamos today then home this afternoon.

ACEO #35
©2009 Lisa Call
3.5" x 2.5"
ACEO – textiles, beaded, thread
Purchase Here

Coaching

I hired Christine Kane as my coach this year and joined her platinum level mastermind coaching circle. I’ve learned much from Christine over the past couple years and appreciate all she has to offer and very highly recommend her Uplevel Your Life Mastery program and retreats.

Christine has leveraged a very popular and successful method of marketing online, ie The Client Attraction System + variations from other online gurus, and is now fabulously successful and teaching marketing along with the mindset work she is so amazing at.

I have no doubt Christine will be excellent teaching the business and marketing stuff also and I’m sure her clients will be equally successful when they follow these formulas because they do work.

Problem is that style of marketing is not for me. Doesn’t fit my personality, doesn’t fit my goals, doesn’t sound like fun to do, etc. The result was a lot of friction in our coaching relationship and so last week it came to an end.

I still think Christine is fabulous and am grateful for all she gives the world, she just isn’t the person to help me with my business decisions. I am now working with a local coach here in Denver as I find in person meetings to be a better fit for my needs.

Transparency

The standard of success in life isn’t the things. It isn’t the money or the stuff — it is absolutely the amount of joy you feel.

— Abraham

My way of writing and marketing is very simply stated with a single word: transparency. Pretty much not much happens that I don’t write about the “why” of it. Like pricing of my artwork or this post, explaining this decision. This is me at my authentic best and where I find joy.

I’m not a pioneer in this type of marketing (Steve Pavlina is an example of a very successful blogger using a similar style) and over on makebigart I’ll write more about the different styles of online marketing some day as it is interesting look at the marketing on the internet and think about how the different ideas can be leveraged in selling art online.

I absolutely believe in abundance and I have no doubt that my style of marketing will bring me exactly the success and joy and I am looking for.

Website

Some of you have may have noticed some problems with my blog/websites the last few days. Wordpress (the software I use to write my blog) is having some issues with taking up too many resources on the server where I host my websites. Oink Oink.

So the hosting company (I use lunarpages.com) quarantined the website and I have 2 weeks to fix the problem.

Wordpress is notorious for taking up a lot of CPU so I’ve cleaned up my site and put in caching and removed unused plugins and done everything I can think of and have read about online that might fix this problem.

So now fingers are crossed this will have done the trick and they will reinstate my site to it’s full working state because until they do I can not send out my studio newsletter. Oops!

Part of the solution was to remove most of the stuff from my sidebar. Sorry it is a bit bare at the moment. I’ll be adding things back slowly in a way that won’t hurt performance over the next few weeks. This is one way to update my website – because I have no choice!

In the meantime sorry for any inconvenience.

Ta Da

Today at lunch I packaged up the photos and CDs and stuff and shipped my info off to the curator. I made my deadline – woohoo!

In addition to my kids coming home from camp a week early, I also ran into some issues with my website so the last few days haven’t been as smooth as one might hope but I had a bit of a buffer built in just incase.

My website has been quarantined off to the “you are hogging up the resources” section of the lunarpages world and if it doesn’t stop I have to pay more money. I can still run the website but some other things are a bit broken. Like email.

I’ve installed a caching plugin on wordpress and hope that fixes the problem. I didn’t hear back from them today so not sure if that is a good or bad sign.

In the meantime I can’t send email or access old emails stored in folders, kind of a bummer. And kind of not. I read the emails and then ignore them cause there is nothing to be done. A mini email vacation.

Estimation and Meeting my Deadline

I was able to easily make my deadline for this project because I had a very good idea of how long it would take me and the rate that I needed to get my work done.

This is one of the side benefits of recording and tracking my studio time. I know how long it takes me to make my artwork. It’s not an exact science but it is a good ballpark figure.

My original estimate was between 120 and 160 hours of work and it turned out to be 130 – completed in 5 weeks in addition to my day job.

Celebration

To celebrate completing this work I’m taking my kids to Santa Fe over the weekend as a last minute vacation. They were supposed to be in camp, I was supposed to be in Tucson so I had the vacation scheduled at work. Now neither of those things worked out so why waste a great opportunity to go eat some green chile. Yum!

We aren’t making any plans and the primary purpose of the trip is to eat (I grew up near Santa Fe, in Los Alamos) and an occasional trip to New Mexico is required as the food is beyond compare. Other than that we’ll just see if we feel up to doing anything other than going to see the new Harry Potter movie. Might just hang out at the hotel (they have wireless).

Nothing better than sopapillas to celebrate a job well done!

Almost Done

I have another 5 hours of quilting left on the second textile painting for the deadline on July 15th. In addition there is the binding, photography and all the prep work required to get the info ready for the curator. And it’s back to work tomorrow so I think I’ll have my first late night tonight as a result of this project.

I am still not allowed to show the work (and probably will be asked to keep it under wraps until the show opens next year).

This is the hint for this textile painting – above are the thread colors I’ve put into this piece.

I’ve put in 41 hours in the studio this week so needless to say not much else has happened around my house.

While I’ve enjoyed the process of creating these quilts I’m now nearing the end and I’m getting a bit tired of them and am ready to move on.

Each of these quilts represents about 100 hours of work each. I have no doubt the next thing coming out of my studio will be some new aceos as I’m ready for a bit of instance gratification.

My kids were supposed to be at camp through next sunday, allowing me time to complete this project and recover before their arrival home. The health department closed down the camp today and sent all the kids home due to an influenza outbreak (my daughter has strep but they got her antibiotics and she’s now fine). So things will be a bit more hectic around here than I anticipated as this project wraps up.

I’m sure it’ll work out fine and now I’ll have some help hanging this huge things on the wall for photography.