It came to me in a dream – actually, I did think of it just as I was waking up Sunday morning. I had worried about the iPad slipping out of the covers from the bottom. I was attaching the bands horizontally on both those covers and the Kindle covers. It worked fine on ereaders, but I “saw” that I should be putting them diagonally on the corners for iPads to keep them from slipping. It worked great. I retrofitted one of the covers that had sold but not shipped,and I think that the buyer will be a lot more pleased with the secure fit of his iPad! See the old version and the new, below:

Kenny Rogers sang it – you gotta know when to walk away. I tried a new and unfamiliar theme last night, wanted to visit the 30s and Art Deco. It didn’t work from the start – I didn’t have a feel for the images or the era and tried to bluff my way through using color and line. Along the frustrating way, I learned a lot, particularly to stick with what calls you and don’t try to force your art in a direction that you want to control when you don’t feel the story. See the photos and the resulting cover-up. The first three show that it wasn’t bad — it just wasn’t RIGHT. As I’m always saying, there’s more than one right answer in art and design, but this wan’t one of them.
The more I read in the book Art and Fear, the more I realize this, taken from page 56, “One of the best-kept secrets of artmaking is that new ideas come into play far less frequently than practical ideas – ideas that can be re-used for a thousand variations, supplying the framework for a whole body of work rather than a single piece.”
I still have thousands of variations to explore in themes that I love – Asian, Renaissance, surrealism. . for example, the rooster (last photo) in the now-recovered false start of a cover has a lot of potential and a story to tell. Can’t wait to see how he turns out.

This morning I had intentions of finishing the insides of a completed collage cover to be called Cloister. As I took a last look at the front, I thought it needed one more gold strip so I tried it in a couple of places using logical rules of composition. There’s not a lot of conscious talk going on at this phase — it’s just whatever “art/instinct/create/process” is.

Before I decided, I happened to see a spare picture of Empress Josephine from a previous cover next to the one I was working on. Hmmmm…what a difference it made to the Cloister story if I included the portrait of an intriguing secular woman – an artistic “aha” moment.

I found a likely candidate in my Raphael book, innocent and young but definitely up to something. I liked her in black and white, but it was too jarring, so I aged her with a bit of walnut ink and applied her to a small raised panel and attached he between the two main figures.

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The result? A new and stronger story – I love the art/collage process. It can “tell” you exactly what’s needed, sometimes by design and sometimes by the muse throwing in a happy accident. And it’s all done in a fraction of the time it takes to try and explain it.

There’s always more than one right answer in creating artwork, but this one worked for me.

I am the first to admit that my photos of my work are not the best. I have problems with lighting because of the reflective surfaces. Recently I saw a table light tent setup in a Sky Mall magazine on the plane back from Delaware for $99 plus $20 shipping, but once I got home I found this one for about $35 by doing a web search.

It arrived today from Cowboy Studios via Amazon, and I’m impressed with it. The whole thing, including lights, tripod and four backdrops fits into a fairly flat 18×18″ case that unfolds to make the tent. i didn’t have any new work to shoot, but I took a photo of a rock (see last picture) – hey, if it stands still, I’ll collage it 🙂

End of commercial, but I definitely think this setup will make my photos better, and it’s certainly affordable and portable.

I have been having a hard time finding exactly the right bead/button closures for my ereader covers. This morning when I woke up early, the good ol’ muse voice in my head said, “Make you own.” I had everything I needed – old leftover polymer clay from my art teacher days that was still good, complete with roller, some gold leaf from collages, and assorted other stuff including some long-ago clay-building ideas remembered from my studies with potter Tracy Dotson. I am very excited with the results! Take a look at the first batch, all done between 6 and noon today! From now on, all of my handmade collage covers will sport handmade closures.