Coffee is the THINK drink, right?

I started a CafePress shop. And I found their coffee mugs to be only "decent quality" product they make. (Their T-shirts suck! Unless you like $20. rags with your fav images on them in three months)

So, I'm sticking with coffee mugs (and a couple of book bags).

At first, I just had my paintings and illustrations proportionally printed on them. But then I discovered their wrap-around template. Now, I've been going nutty with creating new designs for each mug. It's been a blast!

Check these out:




































http://www.cafepress.com/slatts_shop

Keith without an S

A "cover" of a Rolling Stone

Here's "my take" on the original Rolling Stone, Keith Richards.




Here's where this piece was at sometime around 1:30 a.m., the "day-after" my birthday.

This has actually been some time in the making. Not that it's taken long to create. It's just that it started way back in the early part of this year as a PhotoShop digital-montage. Made up of a photo of a friend who posed for my original portrait of Buddy Holly. He posed a number of images in a suit and tie holding his red Strat and those were the images that became Buddy. In this collection of images, he included a couple wearing a white T-shirt. I decided to use these for "the body" of Keith Richards. (My model was also born in Buddy Holly's birthplace, Lubbock, TX. He's a guitarist and a big fan of both Buddy and Keith Richards -- so, he was quite excited to get "double-duty" out of his poses!)

The other images in this piece are of the "brick wall" in my house (used in my Brick Window Series") and the Immaculate Conception Church of Easthampton, MA.




You can follow a more step-by-step update on my Live-Journal blog but I will also follow up her with in-progress steps now and again.

The capture of the collage

The difficult part in working in this medium of "collage" is the capture. How does one capture something photographically when the piece is now 3-dimensional?

Rob Caswell at Skylake Studios in Easthampton, MA is my answer. We discussed what I'd like to see in the way of what angle the light should hit the pieces and he pulled it off!

(click images to see the proof)

Emily and Lennon: the trivial points

My latest piece contains the subjects Emily Dickinson and John Lennon. But this is not the first time I've combined these two. A very early piece titled: Not a Girl Who Misses Much was the first meeting of these two.



The piece has always been nicknamed "Red Em" -- for obvious reasons. This was the first piece of artwork I sold in a gallery.




As you can see from the framed art, there's more to the image than is shown in the close-up. Being such an early piece, I didn't have the image capture processes in place that I do now. It was too large to fit on my scanner bed. And I didn't own a digital camera when it was completed (prior to being framed).

And because of this, these are the only two images that exist.

Dylan paints me a picture...

I was driving home from work yesterday listening to Dylan's "Tombstone Blues" on my iShuffle. I replayed it a number of times. This image came to me and I wanted to get the words right. I wanted to "do this piece" after supper last night. Just jump into. But I ran out of time. So, I thought I would do a digital collage to work from. But that didn't happen either.

I made time for it to happen tonight....