Prints, Crayons, and...

Happy Sunday, y’all. By the time you are reading this, I could be down in Kentucky with my family celebrating Easter. My kid is super excited for the holiday and has been asking if it’s Easter every day. I’m sure they’ll be happy to finally wake up and see what the bunny has brought em. Also, I was in a March Madness bracket with this family. For those of you who don’t know March Madness- it’s a basketball tourney in March. So. Yeah. But people go ~mad~ over it. Hence the name. I’m pleased to report to you all that I did tie for 2nd place out of 6 people.

Printmaking: What’s Up With That?

I’m also happy to report that I have literally not done a single thing related to printmaking since my last newsletter. I said I wanted 2025 to be a real making year and I have not done a dang ol’ thing. Whoops! Between being sick for the first two/three months and then dealing with the news of the world… it’s been hard to focus on art. For a while it was some angry stuff coming out of me and although that’s totally normal- it’s also not really my “brand” or what I want to experience over and over again. Whenever I visit a piece, I feel its intent and I feel how I felt when I first made it- and if it’s something that comes from a place of anger, then I’m just going to be angry a lot and every I print it I’ll be like “look at this angry piece. Man, things sure were bad then and they still are!” And then I’ll spiral out. Also if you don’t know me super well- I’ve had my fair share of anger problems for many years and just really want my art to be a place of meditative fun idk. You get it. I don’t need to explain myself to you, but this is the joy of reading my newsletter. Learning about me.

I do have a new print idea in mind, actually. It’ll be different than my usual stuff because it’ll be a still life with food, but it should be funny. More details to come once I have something put to paper.

Did someone say… Crayons?

I thought while I took a break from printmaking, I could recycle crayons. I’ve always like the swirly colors remelted crayons made and this could be fun. So, I got my facebook back (I know, I know) and let my local buy nothing group know I was looking for crayons. The next day, I had hundreds of free-to-me crayons at my disposal. I thought it’d be easy work and, comparatively to the amount of steps printmaking takes, it is but I have cut myself more removing the crayon wrappers per project than I have carving. Plus you need crazy strong hands to break up the crayons. Yikes. I’m going to be able to crack a walnut with this mitts. Beyond all of that it’s fun to play around with color and learn about a new craft. Now I just need to find more places that’ll sell them- I would like to hope that selling these could fund my paper needs. We’ll see.

What Else Is New?

In my last newsletter, I mentioned making my new reading goal for 2025 be 22 books (it was 21 last year- ambitious babe in the haus). That seems to be going smoothly. I’m on book 7(?) which feels on track. I’ve also read (well, listened. I’m into audiobooks) Mickey7 by Edward Ashton, The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Klimmerer, The Greatest Nobodies of History by Adrian Bliss, and Who Ate The First Oyster by Cody Cassidy. I’m currently on Witchcraft for Wayward Girls by Grady Hendrix and I’m going to be honest- not a lot of witchcraft. Like 10% of the book is about witchcraft so THAT SUCKED. The characters were well developed and their stories were compelling, but my goodness it’s a long read for so little of what you expect in a book that starts with “witchcraft”.

But I will say, I did like the other books. Mickey7 was fun and fast, The Serviceberry was insightful and calm, The Greatest Nobodies was funny, and Who Ate The First Oyster was super interesting. idk this isn’t a book club I’m not going to go too deep into every single book.

And beyond that, I’m excited for the birds. I’ve already gone birding a few times this year and I have another outing scheduled for next week! I’d also love to save up for some nicer binoculars. Mine are fine, but I definitely couldn’t see as well as everyone else at the last birding event which made me feel sad that I couldn’t see a bunch of birds because they were too far away.

Finally, we took our cat on a short trip in our backyard this weekend and it was super cute and I think she enjoyed it for the most part.

Until next time- have a great day and I’ll see you next time. :)

Thank you for reading my quarterly newsletter! I hope you have subscribed so you can be sent my next newsletter in 3 months!

You can find me as Neptooncat on Instagram and Bluesky