Thankful

I had a good Thanksgiving and I hope you did too.

I spent a good part of it firing the wood kiln at Adelphi. The firing went very well. The combo of dry wood and thickened walls turned the kiln into an efficient jet engine. We achieved high temperatures quickly and used much less wood then we thought we would.

The real exciting part will be Sunday, when we unload the kiln and actually see the results. Considering the success of the firing process, we are hoping that the work will be equally amazing.

Aside from that Pronto Comics is now a publisher on Drivethru.com. It is a comic site that allows creators to sell the comics via pdf files. Its my hope that many of the creators will use this tool and start making some money off their creations and build an audience. Whenever I think of publishing or looking for publishers, m y mind immediately goes back to a graphic novel symposium I attended about 3 years ago. An editor at a publishing company made it very adamant that what they look for is...SALES!

Basically editors and companies want sure things and are not in the business of taking risks. Thus they want to know that there is an audience for the product they are putting out. To that end, I felt it is important for the creators to get their product out there to be sold.

Wood Fire

This week Adelphi will be doing a wood firing, something I have been looking forward too for some time. I've been quietly making a discreet amount of work at Dowling in order to get ready for it. Not a huge amount of stuff, but enough that it will be worth doing.

One thing that I am curious about is this Jack Troy porcelain I got to work a little with. Recently at Dowling we had a guest artist who works with porcelain and she needed some pre-made bowls to demonstrate her carving technique. So I made some bowls/cups that didn't get used and figured since it was a wood fire porcelain, to see how it does in the wood fire.

Also since I had a lot of scrap porcelain and couldn't throw it into the recycle slop, I decided to make a slip out of it. I added extra silica and wood wash to it as well. I glaze fired it first to see if there would be any effect, but nothing. So lets see what the wood fire will do.

Anyway I am exciting and looking forward to it.

Holy Sh*T 200th Post

Well I would like to thank God...



Yeah, OK, anyway back to reality.

So I was hoping that this month would be a little calmer then last, and so far its been a fifty/fifty mix. The first week of November was quiet and I was able to get a couple things I wanted to do done. Last week however, not so much. There were some unscheduled changes, unexpected sub-dates as well as some other surprise events that popped up. This week however, has been calm and I've been able to get a good amount done so far.

There has been a lot of emailing and discussing on the Pronto front. Also a good amount  of editing has been going on as well. A lot of pitches and scripts have been read, some really good ideas out there. One really big thing, is that I've made some serious headway in cleaning my office/studio. Boring as this may sound, it really is very important. As anyone out there has ever had to write a paper and needed to clean their dorm room first knows, there is something cleansing about working in an organized space.

Mythologicaly/metaphorically speaking they say that your physical environment represents your mental environment. I believe this to be true. While everything  was going on and things we so busy, I was just jumping from one thing to the next, not much time to focus my thoughts. I had to just keep moving, and the space around me reflected that. Now, I have a little more time to think, plan and organize my mind has cleared up significantly, which is good cause the holiday season is coming and that a roller coaster in of itself.