CrashOctopus Blog

The Shop by Meg Lyman

5×7″ gouache on Gessobord

$45 – e-mail to buy

I’ve been blatantly non-productive for the past week. My ma visited for the holiday weekend, and it was great! but no art. And this week, the innards of my house are being painted, and my art supplies are all stuffed in boxes and my art table is jammed into the middle of the room. As I type, I’m huddling under a plastic tarp and surrounded by bookcases hovering like the evil topiary in The Shining.

At least I have my handy sketchbook, but I miss painting.

Cephalicide by Meg Lyman

Mixed Media (colored pencil, gouache, & ink) on toned paper – 8×10″

$50 – e-mail to buy

Being tagged got me thinking. I told you 7 things about me you probably didn’t know, but they’re random things and not necessarily related to art. Being able to lick my nose is cool, but it has no useful application in art. Or anything else, really. So I will share with you my short “art self” story, both to potentially help others, and to record it for myself, so that in a year I can read this and see how much more successful I became. Or how badly I tanked. You never can tell.

Quick history: I’ve drawn things forever. Don’t we all, as children? But some people stop; I never did. I took a few classes in high school and college, sticking to pencils and pursuing a totally unrelated career. After graduating and working for a while, I took a few community classes. The end.

Oh wait… that’s just the beginning! About a year ago, I saw some art that made me decide to abandon my fear of color and start painting. I started with single-hue paintings, using my experience with value and sticking to one color. Ever since, I’ve been expanding my boundaries and exploring color. The more color I do, the more I love it.

I still do pencil work and enjoy it. I am working on pencil illustrations for a couple RPG books, and trying to push my values even further.

I still feel like I’m experimenting with color, but I’m more confident now than I was a year ago, both with color itself and with the tools. I’ve dabbled in digital art and got paid to design two website logos. I’ve sold several originals. I’ve built enough inventory to call and visit a few galleries and shops. One local gallery said my stuff was good, then shut down for the summer – but it still sounds promising. I have some photos on sale in a small (but really cool) store in Iowa. I have had a couple portrait commission inquiries. And I have two restaurants that will hang some of my art next month.

I have a huge spreadsheet full of art ideas that must be painted before I croak. My next big project will be painting 100 cephalopod species. It may take years, but I’m excited about it. And to show you how far I’ve come since I started with color, my latest and greatest work is on display above (permission to roll eyes and snicker granted).

I also started this blog. It’s been wonderful so far (for me at least… I hope for you as well). I have a million ideas, questions, and tips I want to share with you. That’s the end for now. I wonder what the next year will bring?

Happy Memorial Day!

To celebrate the unofficial arrival of summer, this week’s beer is a lighter one; an ale with the soul of a dark beer. I was first introduced to Rogue Dead Guy Ale by a dear friend in Houston. I liked it. Since returning, I have only tried it on tap, so that’s the description you get.

First of all, it is dark for an ale. It has a skeleton on the tap (and on the bottle), and its black heart comes out through its dark taste. It’s fairly smooth and a bit bright. The first taste is sweet and dark, but then it gives you a small bite to remind you that it’s an ale. We didn’t rank it sky-high because it is still an ale, and is therefore competing against a tough benchmark. But saying an ale is good enough to stand up with the dark beers is saying something.

N: 7

M: 6.5

And in honor of all those who have fought or are still fighting for our right to drink whatever beer we choose, a toast. Thank you.

I’ve been tagged, so I guess I’m “it.” Or maybe I’m frozen. Wait, what game are we playing?

First, I apologize for the lack of content this past weekend; I was out of town. I’ll get back to riveting, crunchy content next weekend. For now, though, I’ve been tagged by arteest extraordinaire Rita Woodburne. Her blog is called “Purple Tastes Good.” Isn’t that excellent? She wants to know seven things about me that most blog readers don’t. So you get to hear them too.

1. I am a punctuation and spelling Nazi. See those periods and exclamation points inside the quotation marks? That’s where they should be.

2. I play the cello. I used to be good. Now I am out of practice, and Stanley sits in the corner, mournfully awaiting the day I change his Dampits.

3. I hate mannequins. They freak me the heck out. Especially when they sneak up on me, staring from the tops of department store escalators.

4. I lurve soccer, play it lots, and was a goalie from age 10-21. I don’t goalkeep anymore because it bashes my poor artsy fingers. I was MVP for our Division III college team.

5. I can lick my nose.

6. I compute with Linux. Did you know Microsoft just sued Linux programmers for supplying people with Free Software? That makes me so mad I can’t talk about it.

7. I have a one-eyed cat.

K, now I’m supposed to tag seven other artsy people. Problem is, I don’t know seven other artsy bloggers who haven’t been tagged yet. So here are some artists and some sorta-art-related bloggers, who should now consider themselves “it:”

Andy Hopp (fantasy artist of infinite imagination)

Sarah Trenfy (I just bought a really cool painting from her)

Nathan (fantasy writing catalyst)

Gulf Coast Gringa (The Sister, doing what we all should be doing)

Ready…. GO!

Undead Giraffe by Meg Lyman

8.5×11″ pastel on paper

$65 Blog Special – e-mail to buy

It’s so undead, even its spots fell off.

I honestly have no idea where this came from. But there it is. And it’s on sale – for blog readers only! Because who doesn’t want a zombie ungulate on their living room wall?

Using everyone’s great tips on how to layer pastels, I filled the Canson bumps with my cheap pastels and used the nice ones on top. They still show the bumps. I think I’ll try the smooth side next time.

I’ve been toying with the idea of selling art at online auction for a while now. I’ve read up about it, and I got a lot of great suggestions and tips from the folks at WetCanvas. But browsing eBay is one of the best reference methods. From this type of snooping, I learned that people who have a good following on their blogs often get good bids on their art.

I think this is because the blog brings the artist closer to the collector. Well, it can. Some art bloggers just post pictures and prices, and many get good sales. But I’m talking about the artists who add more content than just the art, whether as tutorials, lessons learned, or just good writing. I’ve heard it said that connecting to potential buyers in that way removes the “mystery” surrounding the artist and exposes their mystical powers of creation. Bah. I think reading about the art or the artist brings me closer to their art, and makes me want to buy it more. I enjoy the whole experience more when there’s a story behind it.

Anyway, I think that’s part of why good art bloggers can almost always get decently high bids on eBay. Blogging is a great communication tool. I have a long way to go in terms of marketing, and I know my listing is boring and already have suggestions for improvement. But here it is anyway:

Cat Prints ACEO by Meg Lyman

Click to bid

I bought a pack of Art Cards from someone online. Upon unwrapping them, I was immediately drawn to the hot pink ones. Not just pink, but neon pink. I thought, “what on earth am I going to do with these?” So of course, the first one I pull out is hot pink, and I use up about 90 seconds of my life drawing this. I’d love to get bids, but this is a learning experiment for me more than anything.

All suggestions welcome. We’ll see how it goes.

Black Hawk Stout is a reasonably-priced, average dark beer. Their website claims that their “intent was to create a Stout that did not overpower the palate.” They have succeeded. Maybe I’ve become hard to impress with all this beer tasting, but I need something a little more “overwhelming.”

There isn’t all that much taste to it. It is overpowering in one respect, though – it is very bitter. The aftertaste is even bitterer. There’s not much of a change in flavor throughout. It has little sweetness, is a bit malty, and sort of rough going down.

Ratings:

M: 4

N: 4.5

The Winoctopus by Meg Lyman

Digital – Prints Available

Cephalopods need more love and representation in art. They’re amazing, beautiful, intelligent creatures. They also happen to make great plays-on-words. What should I call this one? Winoctopus? Wineoctopus? Wine-octopus? Wino-octopus?

I don’t know about normal people, but I experience a lot of inspiration during that magical world between awake and asleep. Whether waking up or falling asleep, I often see vivid images behind my eyelids, usually taking shape from whatever I’d been thinking about that day. Sometimes the images are purely random, though, and from one of those incidents came inspiration to paint an abstract.

I’d never been one to do abstracts. I found them interesting to look at, but not necessarily challenging to paint. After all, it doesn’t actually have to look like anything. That’s true, but after having painted two of them, and after studying some of Casey Klahn’s work and his posts on colorist theory, I may have changed my mind. Casey does very interesting work in pastels using pure color, and he has some recent posts about Jackson Pollock, an artist whose work I’ve always liked.

Abstract work removes the challenges of representation, leaving only color, value, and composition. I think that makes it “purer,” in terms of art. Not better or worse, just less cluttered. It frees the artist to explore those artistic concepts, hopefully teaching them valuable lessons along the way. I’ve never felt more stereotypically artsy than I did when I was slathering paint around creating these two paintings:

Population I by Meg Lyman

6×6″ oil on canvas – $100

Population II by Meg Lyman

6×6″ oil on canvas – $85

The first one was random, starting with my half-asleep brain and going from there, just doing what felt right with the brush. When I was done, I noticed that it reminded me a bit of a population graph. I named it accordingly, and set off to do another that looked more like a graph. That’s it. I enjoyed using color straight from the tube and letting my intuition play with the compositions.

The best part about this experiment, and the reason I’ll do more of these, is the response from viewers. No two people see the same thing when they look at these paintings. Usually people look at my work and say, “nice octopus.” This time, I got impressions ranging from “pretty close” to “I would never have thought of that.” People say these remind them of a beach, warring factions, flags, elections, political parties, and tectonic plates. How cool is that? I am fascinated by the things people see in these paintings, and it really makes me want to do more.

What do you see?

We had a party this week, and in celebration of Cinco de Mayo, people brought Mexican-themed food and drink. Among these was Negra Modelo, a dark beer imported from Mexico. We hadn’t tried it before.

For a dark beer, it isn’t all that dark. I suppose it tastes dark when compared with lighter beers and ales and whatnot, but compared to our usual beer fare, it’s pretty light-tasting.

There is a hint of honey in the initial taste, and it lingers in the aftertaste a little. The rest of the flavor is bitter, with a darker bite… but mostly bitter. Initially I didn’t like it at all, but it’s growing on me. It still doesn’t hold a candle to our usual stouts and porters, but for an ale-like beer, it isn’t bad. And I could be biased, since it’s only been 24 hours since I woke up with a smashing tequila hangover, and I’m not really in the mood for beer.

Ratings:

M: 4.5

N: 3