Spikes Revisited, It's Not The Putting On It's The Wiping Off, More Beads and Happy Accidents

After a few months of working on other things, I had an urge to make some more spikes using my turned look technique. They always sold well so that was another reason to return to them. 

I never quite know what colours I will use until I start painting, and because I use alcohol inks I have the option of layering colours and diffusing them with rubbing alcohol. You can get nice blends this way.

The other cool thing about alcohol inks is that they subtly and not so subtly change colour when diluted. They seem to be dye based and have a sort of base colour that lies under the main colour which is revealed when you paint over it with rubbing alcohol, or a paler ink colour. For instance, some shades of brown revert to a sort of light blue, which seems strange but can look good.

I also find that wiping the ink off gently with a cloth reveals this under/base colour too. It also is a way of softening the hard line that forms where two areas of ink meet. It's fun to experiment with this, and that way learn a bit about the quirks of the medium. You can then use said quirks to your advantage.

I have been messing about with acrylic paints and acrylic inks too. Combining them with alcohol inks and wiping bits off here and there. An idea triggered by what turned out to be a happy accident with some rubbing alcohol ;-)

It's a bit drastic at first but a gentler touch makes the effect a bit more subtle. I'm a bit obsessed with it right now so various distressed looking beads and spikes will no doubt appear in my listings before long. . .

Oh yeah, and I also found a good background to photograph things against. An old roofing slate from the treasure trove of inspiration that lurks behind our shed. . ;-) It makes colour matching in Pshop or equivalent so much easier too, white backgrounds are OK but they are a pig to get right colour wise. So many of my shots against white had a pinky tinged or a bluey tinged background even though the bead colour was pretty accurate.

Thanks for checking out the way my work is heading. More in about a month's time.

best,

Jon x

Plumbing, Strumming, and a new Photography Set Up, which doesn't rhyme. . .

Turned effect and scratched design idea.

Well, it's been a while. Mainly because I haven't had a lot of blog worthy creative work to share owing to my time being tied up with other things. Constructively tied up with other things, but tied up nonetheless. . .
I have been refitting our bathroom, which is a pretty major undertaking for me. Not outside my capabilities but pushing the limits of my know how. Anyway, all major elements have been fitted (not without some tricky moments and stressful stuff, as is the way with these kind of projects. .) and seem to work as they should, so I can relax a bit more and get back to my creative work. Eventually.

Some new spikes taken with new photo set up. I need to lose the blue tint but the bead colours are accurate.

I did take an hour or two to follow up something that had been nagging at me for a while. I have had issues with the white point setting on my camera. Whatever I do, I find that I need to spent too much unnecessary time adjusting colour in Photoshop (or rather, Affinity Photo, which is what I now use) to get the colours to match the original bead/object being photographed.

So I decided to make a photo box thing. You know, a big cardboard box with the sides cut out and white paper taped in instead. There are various youtube vids on how to make/use one. You can buy them on ebay as well.
I knocked a crude version up in about half an hour. It hasn't completely solved my issues, but it has made a big difference to the consistency of my photos. I can use the same levels setting on each pic and hardly ever have to reach for the white balance adjustment layer, or any of the many other colour correction options, which is great.

Simple 'Pot' beads. Faux ceramic look

I have decided to rephotograph all my products using this set up. Which will be a time consuming process, but worthwhile I think. Or a big waste of time. . . whatever, I have decided to do it anyway.

Scratched and semi crackled 'primitive' beads. Faux bone, sort of.

The other thing that has added to my general hiatus from the creative process is that I had a couple of disappointingly unsuccessful selling sessions on Facebook, and realised that, unlike a shop, where something is on view and on sale until it sells, on Facebook, like an auction site, if something doesn't sell in the three days you have allotted, then it has to be removed. In which case it disappears from public view.
I found it kind of dispiriting. Not a very logical reaction I know, but I don't think I had quite thought it all through.

Spotty texture tube/drum beads

I don't think it is appropriate to list the same items more than once, (or maybe listing once again in a different group is OK. . ) on FB, so I will have to create listings on Etsy for them, until I can work out what my website strategy will be.

For the reasons detailed above my recent social media presence has been pretty minimal of late, which doesn't help my visibility much. I have started putting stuff up on flickr again though, so that's something.

With a bit of luck I will be back in the workshop/studio next week at some point, so I will have some new stuff to share soon. meanwhile here are a couple of reasonably recent things you won't have seen on FB or elsewhere.

Textured and deliberately crudely sanded black and white tube beads

Long spike. Spike end.

Long Spike. Middle

Long Spike. Loop end

As for the reference to strumming in the title, it isn't entirely accurate as you don't strum a bass guitar, or at least I hope not, though is technically possible and I dare say some players have ventured there at some time or other. . .

I had been hoping to run across some other musicians in my area ever since we moved in a year and a quarter ago, and as I think I mentioned a few posts ago, I ventured out to a 'jam night' in a pub in the next village only to find that the organiser and his wife were the only relevant people there, and she didn't play anyway. Which left me and him, and I didn't bring my amp with me as I hadn't quite understood the low key nature of the set up ;-) so we didn't play anything.
But on the due date the next month I rolled up again, with my amp in tow, and me and the him sat in a corner a banged out as many songs as we could remember the chords for. More of a sing song than a jam as such, and a lot of fun. It went on till about two a.m. The other pub goers enjoyed it too.
So we are going to do a new year's party there. Just him and me playing, unless a drummer materialises. It's great to be playing music again after about three years of not being in a band of any kind ;-)

Stop press! We had Snow! Not snow that anyone from more northern climes would get excited about, but a bit of a novelty round here. We had at least half an inch! ;-) . . . So I wandered round the garden and took some photographs. Enjoy. . . and see you next time, hopefully with some new stuff to show you.
Jon x

The orchard

Roses still in flower, for some reason best known to them. . .

Cameras, Lawnmowers and Etsy Trauma. .

I made some shards the other week. Always fun to do

Well, it's been a funny couple of weeks. Not funny as in deeply humorous, but funny as in a bit odd or not like one would expect. Though a bit of humorous crept in too for light relief. Nothing all that exciting really, which is why I haven't blogged about anything for ages. But in the interests of keeping this whole thing going, I can just about scrape together enough mildly riveting things to keep you amused. Probably.

Green abused image transfer disk charms

My trusty, or up 'til now trusty, camera suddenly developed a fault. The on/off switch thingy had been very sticky for a couple of years at least, and I guess the extra strain involved in turning it on and off finally broke something. Just in the middle of a bead photographing session too. So I have a few beads with no photos to show scale, next to a ruler, as per my usual procedure.
Anyway, after ringing up a few camera shops I tracked down somewhere that actually repairs cameras rather than just selling them, and drove the 50 min to get there. It was touch and go as to whether Fuji still sent out the relevant parts needed to fix it, but eventually it transpired that they did, and I will have a large bill to pay. Annoyingly, not quite large enough to warrant me getting a new (to me) camera of the same type instead of paying for the repair. Oh well, I can claim it off tax as I use the camera mostly for product shots these days. . . I'll have it back in 10 days or so.

A collage of four shots of a single 'pot' dread bead type thing.

Mechanical Breakdown 2 - The rusty and trusty sit-on lawnmower that came with the house, as the previous incumbent was moving to a smaller place with no need of such a thing, and we would need it to deal with the big lawn, also developed a fault. The height adjustment was stuck. It was fixed quite easily, but we had to call someone in to do it. As it was such an old beast, we had to get an agricultural machinery guy in to sort it. Modern lawnmower repair men wouldn't know where to start with a 40 year old machine. Hah! It's proper lawn mower, in that particular shade of green that garden machinery and metal playground equipment like slides and roundabouts used to be, you remember. . .

Brown abused image transfer disk charms

Anyway, talking of on/off switches, the forums over at Etsy are in turmoil at the moment. A great many shops are complaining about their views and sales suddenly stopping, as if there was an off switch that had just been thrown.
Sellers moaning about low sales on Etsy forums is certainly nothing new, it's one of those 'death and taxes' type constants, but the scale and intensity of complaints this time does seem to be much higher than usual.

Coupled with the lack of views/sales is the state of the search function. From what I read it is really not fit for purpose, throwing up hundreds of items not really related to the search terms at all. Sellers feel that they are just not being found, through no fault of their own. They feel that there has been too much tinkering behind the scenes by coders and suchlike people.

Also, to add another layer of resentment, it seems that Etsy HQ is one of those kind of corporate hippy places you hear about and roll your eyes. There are Yoga rooms, free organic gourmet food a couple of days a week, a communal loom and something called a 'breathing room'. And that's just for starters. . .
Obviously oodles of money has been spent on such organic fripperies. This metaphorically chafes the collective rear ends of the sellers, including me, who have been paying Etsy listing fees and percentages of sales only to find that the employees have been lounging about in breathing rooms, belching organically while buggering up the search function completely. The money could have been better spent, one feels.

Ridged and textured tube beads

To add yet another layer of resentment to the ferment, as if one was needed, the ousted CEO, before he was ousted, had made a seemingly strange comment that he saw Etsy as a 'Tech Company'.

Eh? . . . Mulling this over, I eventually came to an understanding of what he might have been on about.

You may think that a site that sells things is primarily just that, a site that people sell things on. Well, when you get to the scale of Etsy, (and Amazon and Ebay etc) issues of server size come into play. They have a certain amount of server space in which to accommodate a very large number of things/shops. So what they allegedly do is rotate the visibility of said things/shops as that is much cheaper than paying for more server space. Sellers have been suspicious of this for years but any evidence is circumstantial. . . Etsy says nothing. . . The 'tech company' comment could well have referred to the possibility that Etsy staff might be employed to write algorithms that enable this rotation to happen in supposedly non obvious ways, and the idea that Etsy would then sell on the resulting algorithms to other companies who require such things. So Etsy could perhaps be seen by those of a cynical disposition, as just a sandbox in which coders could test their algorithms. Sellers being relatively unimportant. . .

And some image trans tile squares. Double sided no less. The images are the same beads from different sides

It also turns out, according to said ousted CEO, allegedly, that Etsy makes more money from listing fees from hopeful sellers, than it does from actual percentages of sales. Leading to conspiracy theory number two, that Etsy manipulates shop visibility in order to encourage sellers to keep on listing, and for new sellers to buy into the dream of giving up their day job and successfully selling their work instead. The idea being that the manipulation of sellers visibility allows them to just sell enough to keep going and to keep listing, and not notice the down times as anything other than the ups and downs of retail life. Give 'em just enough to keep 'em sweet. . . All very cynical. Who knows what the truth of it all is, but there are a great many upset sellers on those forums. . . The new CEO may or may not be inclined to address their concerns. Time will tell. But by then half the sellers may have left. . . Including me. . .
Until next time,
cheers,
Jon x

A somewhat eccentric macro set up. . .

I've been messing around with close up shots for a while, using some a couple of add on lenses that had been lying around from when I had my previous camera. I kept wanting to get closer so when I noticed a cheap set of macro lens add ons on ebay I thought 'Why not?'. I mean, how bad can they be? with a 12 megapixel camera any photos will be much, much bigger than is needed for product shots and the like, so any lack of high end quality is pretty irrelevant. I'm not going to be printing anything big anytime soon, or probably ever, so all this gear-head sneering at cheap Chinese stuff you hear from time to time is a bit pathetic. (says I anyway).

They turned out to be perfectly all right, by my standards at least. But they didn't get me close enough!
So I turned to the add on lenses mentioned previously and stuck them on the end of the four stacked macro lenses. . .

So that was a 1x, a 2x, a 4x and a 10x macro add on, plus another cheap add on from before of unspecified strength, and a Raynox, sort of clip on macro lens, the strength of which I can't remember, but must around 10x. It looked a bit bleedin ridiculous, as you can see. The Camera is a Fuji x100 by the way, which has a macro setting but nothing that gets you very close up.

But on a tripod, which is essential with product type shots anyway, the results were pretty much what I wanted. Mind you the beads were almost touching the lens and the camera was casting a shadow which I had to work round. . .

Early days, but I think I can maybe get a style of my own going for slightly more atmospheric supporting shots alongside clearer, more clinical ones for those who want to see details.