I don’t expect that this will be a very long update as not a lot has happened since the last one.

Following the site redesign going live, I’ve been doing a bit of tweaking here and there to make the experience better. I added a sort-of-filled-but-not-really gallery which you have to link through via the portfolio. I’m still not committed to that being permanent, but for now I think having both a portfolio link in the menu and a gallery link wouldn’t be as clear as it is now. Besides, for those who scroll down to the link, what a fun surprise, no?

The next major event has been getting top coats onto the Alex Morgan painting — the temperature finally warmed enough. Since this painting has texture, that meant not only spraying the isolation coat (which I prefer as it avoids lifting any paint) but also the varnish. Spraying does mean about 2-3x more sessions than a brush application, but what the heck else am I doing?

I’ve been trying to decide what I want to paint next and whether it’ll be brush or knife. I’m leaning to another feature women sports, but I’d also love to do something I can sell without issues. Sketches and studies are still being made.

I spent a couple of days testing out the various new video and audio setups I can implement now that I have enough working equipment following the falling-tripod-fiasco. I still need/could use more, but I can return to doing videos with what I have. I think I’ve solidly gotten the audio squared away, but the video is something I’m going to have to deal with on a case-by-case basis. Now I just need to find a good place for the table-top stuff (my art table is currently employed with an easel and the kitchen table has been declared verboten for the task).

Other than that, I’m mostly waiting for orders of art supplies and frames to come in.

Well, the new website redesign is live. There are still elements that are to be added or modified, but for now it mostly seems to be working.

Baby steps.

It’s been a busy start of the year. Some of it is business as usual, and some is a bit of a consolidation to make life and work a little smoother. So, let’s get to it.

Art Committed

I recently finished work on Alex Morgan Celebration. It was a lot of fun. Had the holidays not taken up so much time and energy, I suspect it would have been done a lot quicker than it was — it basically took the month of December. Right now it’s just waiting for the temperature to warm up enough so I can varnish it. Since, as I’ve said ad nauseum, that I can’t do anything with it, it will find a home on an otherwise empty spot on a wall here at the ol’ Casa.

Interwebbiness

Lots of stuff happening on the Interwebs.

The first thing I did was take my Patreon off-line for a spell. Since the start of last summer, I only garnered one patron and they only stuck it out for a few months before leaving and setting my patron count back to “0”. As a result, my taking the site off-line inconveniences no one. And since I don’t have to worry about keeping it live “just in case” I now have more time to do other things and a bit less stress.

One of those other things has been revamping the CJCS website — again, to make my life a bit easier…at least once the upgrading is done. Let’s put this into the context that, as I write this, I’m in my late 50s. While unlike most in my age cohort, I did start playing with computers while I was in elementary school, I didn’t have to deal much with social networking and all of the complexity that comes with it until about a decade ago. While I’ve spent many a holiday in cyberspace (the place where assembly language and micro-code live), checking my phone every few minutes or recording my life and the events around me isn’t part of my DNA. So, trying to manage all the things you’re supposed to manage these days if you’re in business (and especially if you are a creative and/or a tech nerd) is a bit more fractured and distracting than I felt was helpful for a solo business owner with more than enough non-web responsibilities that I don’t feel the need to pile on.

At the start of the year, I decided that cjcs.com was going to be my primary hub. YouTube will still get the videos, but they’ll be linked here as well. I’ll still post to the Facebook pages and to Twitter, but updates will generally be prioritized to this site. I do plan on making my Patreon public again at some point, but I want to wait until it’s worth everyone’s investment (mine and yours) to do so.

As for cjcs.com, I’m moving things around a bit. The focus is going to be decidedly more toward art as that’s mostly what I’m doing day-to-day. I still think of myself first and foremost a writer, but the fact is that I can push out a lot more art in a given span of time than I can a novel. Since I don’t have baskets of cash for me to hire support staff, authoring requires me to not just be the writer, but also story editor, copy editor, layout, artist, publisher, marketer, and more.  As fulfilling as it is, it’s extremely time-consuming. So, the focus for now is art and the website is being tweaked to reflect that.

Coming Up

I’m still zeroing in on the next painting. I have a canvas all gessoed up for when I’m set to commit. I’d like it to be women’s sports related, but I’ll settle for something else if my attention is piqued.

I’m also going to work on getting more images uploaded to the store. There are several works I’d like to post, but I just don’t have good enough images for that, and the original works are with their owners — so some things just aren’t ever going to be available. sigh

And that’s it for now. I need to hit the sack as Monday morning starts pretty early in the day.