Total Art Soul - for artists

Now, you can take that title how you like :) Obviously, we've been making fiendish masks, as you can see,  or it could refer to the feelings inspired by being halfway through something that once again, seemed like a great idea at the planning stage....

Not only did this require an awful lot of fiddling about with wire to get a weave that was strong enough but also lightweight so as to not pull the mask forward, but to balance those horns out visually, this mask required the use of yet more wirework in the main panels instead of our normal beading.

This seemed like a good idea at the time- after all, we had just finished this...





...which as you might gather, had involved an awful lot of beading. The beak alone was several days labour and a frankly terrifying amount of black and pewter seed beads.





So what exactly is all this manic activity in aid of? Asides from a natural curiosity about just how far we can go with our chosen medium (a lot further yet it seems), we realised we had finally got our basic range pretty much sussed. We now have a good line of standard party pieces, bridal wear etc that sell well and can easily be updated simply by using new colours.
So, it was time to really put our backs into getting the word out. It's a lot easier to attract attention by shouting so we set out to create real show-stoppers, things that would grab people and be passed around. With these now a reality, it's time to do a bit of housekeeping to ensure our various selling platforms are in tip-top shape then a creative photo shoot to display these pieces to their best advantage.
The results of that will then go on to various fashion editors we are already stalking and the additional publicity will help us on our way to global domination. Which was, of course, our plan all along....*does evil laugh*


Mwahahahahah,
Karen and Rich :)

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We are delighted here at Grin Hq to announce the arrival of our rabbit mask- not only because it is beautiful, but because it allowed us to have some fun with the photos :)



She is the next step up from our cat mask, constructing pieces that don't follow the human face shape but rather build off that to create something completely different. Crafted in silver plated, non- tarnish wire, the panels are filled in with tiny glass seed beads.



Shaped the way she is, the ears catch the light from behind like a real rabbit and so we took her outside for a bit of sun :) We are lucky to live in a house with painted walls so we hung the mask against the textured surface to bounce the light around a bit more, illuminating the beadwork.



Because we had such a glorious day here, we also took some against the sky, which made a great composition- such a strong shape and great contrast.


When you're working with what you have around you it can be difficult to get just the shots you want so we've learnt to experiment, taking lots of pictures from all angles then choosing those with the most impact to compliment our more standard product shots.
After all, whoever buys her is unlikely to leave her on the shelf, so it's nice to give the photos some life, a bit of personality.

On to the next one :)

Karen and Rich

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First up, may we apologise for the fact there are no recipes in this blog either - more Food for Starving Artists coming soon :)

What we did want to share was the joy of a free website. After a year selling on Etsy we felt we'd finally learnt enough to set up on our own. We couldn't afford to splash out, having just invested in a whole load of new materials but still wanted something that looked the part, worked and wasn't covered in annoying adverts. We asked around and somebody suggested Yola.
Now, we know about as much about website design as we do about the far side of the moon, but their site builder is so easy to use - just drag'n'drop - no more complicated than a blog. There are lots of choices of free templates to get you started which even, to our deep joy, come in black!
The biggest advantage I think to building your own site is that you have so much more say over content.  In our case, we got to explain a bit more about the sea glass we use, add a look book gallery, stuff like that.

Our only real criticism is the online shop/catalogue, though they are working on that apparently. It does just give you one picture of everything, displayed in a great long list. To get round this, we created a whole bunch of individual pages, each with a link back to a main shop page then took them out of the navigation bar (thats the list of clickable links at the side).

Even publishing it to the web was incredibly easy, considering. Everything is explained in detail, there's loads of help available, tutorials with pictures and if that's still not enough, how-to videos. You don't need any experience or to understand lots of complicated technical flannel.
Oh, one other tip - if you don't already own your own domain name (that's your site address), you can buy it from Yola but they charge a lot more. The up side of that is you don't have to faff about pointing it to your site when it goes live, but we were too tight and spent a quarter of the cost then read the instructions :)

So, if you're not online already but would like to be, give it a go. Nothing goes out on the net until you're ready and if you find you've made a hash of it afterwards, you can continue to edit, add and change things.
You can find Yola at http://www.yola.com and if you want to play with ours, go to http://gringrimaceandsqueak.co.uk where you can press as many buttons as you like. Oh, and when your site is built, don't forget to add your Total Art Soul button :)

Karen and Rich

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