Month: June 2012

….if you are a me-myself-and-I business owner and it’s an art studio/shop, EVERY day is a work day. Sometimes I have to crack the whip myself to get me into gear, but that’s just the way it is. Last night was the first of the Summer on Trade Music series for this year….Always my favorite event in Winston-Salem. Hell, it’s FREE music … every Saturday night … all summer long … at the intersection of 6th & Trade Streets which is basically my front yard, so to speak.  I like to set up a table outside on these evenings and paint hats. It’s pure painting time, which I really needed yesterday to calm down after a hectic afternoon.  After 15 years of painting in a fish-bowl environment on St.John, it’s really nothing new to me at all.  And I’ve always said, since the day I crash-landed back in Winston-Salem some 7-odd years ago, that the Arts District is like St.John, only in brick. Comments from the crowd are somewhat different…..in St.John, you’d get “Do you LIVE here?”   Here it’s “you sure have a fun job” or something like that.  Well yeah, it’s fun…it had better be fun, ’cause it’s my shop, and the pay is lousy, but hey—-it’s MY shop, and I’ve got a great boss……myself. But hey, “It’s my life, and I’ll do what I want….” One of these days I’m going to write the story of my life in song titles or lyrics.

A customer placed an order today for me to paint this fellow on a different size T-shirt for a little fellow who LOVES dinosaurs.  Since I paint everything freehand,  and since this is a shape and color combination that is different from other dinosaurs I’ve painted,  I pulled the shirt on the rack aside and took a  couple photos, just in case somebody else wants to buy this one before I’ve had a chance to paint the order. Otherwise, I may never remember exactly what I did to this one to make him so appealing.
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I’ve been painting more wrap-around designs lately. Big design motif, fun to paint, fun to wear. One little critter, in this case, a reddish-orange dragonfly, gives life some meaning for the dinosaur….