Winsor and Newton

Yesterday I visited the Michaels in Altamonte Springs. I always love shopping there. There's a little bit of everything for the creative soul. I was almost finished choosing my loot carefully when I came across a set of Winsor & Newton Inks. The set contains 8 colors for $32. I used my 40% off coupon to bring it down to around $19. So, I get home, open up my black, canvas Michaels bag, open up my ink set so I can play, and realize the red ink is half empty. I immediately remembered that this was the last set at the store. Also, the store is around 45-50 minutes away. I'm not driving that distance for half a bottle of ink. I was way too excited to take the set back anyway. I was ready to play. So I typed up an email I found on the http://www.winsornewton.com/ web site and sent it off explaining the problem. I included photos and an image of the receipt from only a few hours earlier. I was ready to write off that half a bottle. To my surprise, , though, I opened up my email bright and early this morning to find they'll be sending me a new bottle at no charge to me. Now THAT is customer service I can appreciate!



Ohhhh, and the inks.....the beautiful inks! Do you have some of these? I had no idea how brilliantly vibrant these inks would be! I did some fooling around in my journal last night and just fell in love with them! I can fully support a company that has awesome products AND will take care of their customers promptly like that, too.


In other news, I have my Sketchbook Project journal, so look for those images coming to a blog near you soon. Wish me luck with it as I'm a little intimidated by some of the images I've seen from other artists and from the sheer volume of empty pages.

Until next time....wishing you lots of X's & O's!
Rischa

The Sketchbook Project

I've signed up for something called The Sketchbook Project. It looks like fun and it's a great way to get the word out that you're an artist. I think it'll be so much fun knowing my work is being displayed at The Brooklyn Art Library as well as many other places on the tour around the country. I might even take a trip to Atlanta when the tour makes its way there. I chose the theme, "This Is Not A Sketchbook". I thought it would give me more room to do whatever I want. I ALMOST chose nightmares, but I thought that might be a dark journey that I already have to go through in my dreams. I'd probably be drawing things like spiders, snakes, death, plane crashes, etc... That could be interesting, but I just don't feel like facing those things day AND night, ya know?

So, who's with me!? It costs $25 to sign up and they'll send you the journal in your color choice. I chose black only because they didn't have any more red ones. I can change the cover, though, once it's here. You also have the choice of paying more to get your work digitized for their web site so you can view your work on their site or send others to see it that might not be able to go to any of the tour stops. Of course, I always scan anything I make, but that wouldn't get me on their web site, so I figured it would be a good idea just to get more eyes on my work. Know what I mean, Jelly Bean? That will be a nice little link on my blog or soon-to-be web site.

In other news, did you notice the new (simple) header? I got tired of the boring font choices Blogger gives you and didn't really want anything elaborate. I chose Pointy for my font. Katie recently mentioned it on her blog and reminded me of how awesome it is. Thanks Cuz!

I'm still working on my two classes. The Flying Lessons one is over, but I'm not quite to the finish line, yet. Luckily she's offering PDF versions of it to her students AND she'll let us copy and paste into documents for us to keep forever, as long as we don't share, of course. The Gut Art class is going slowly for me. It's taken me so long to get the journaling pages right. I hope that's not a preview of how the Skethbook thing will go. Yikes! Naw, it has just been a really busy time here. That's all. I'll catch up soon. Here are a coupld of images from the book so far...

The unfinished cover: (which can be finished after class is over, btw)

And here's one of the journaling pages:

Both of these photos were taken with my cell phone, so sorry about the crappy photos.

I'm still working on ATC's for Christa and Sharon. I'll show those when they're in their recipients hands. I don't want to ruin the surprise for them.

I guess that's about it. I'll try not to be such a stranger. I know I've been slacking in the blog department. I just haven't felt really chatty lately. I have funks that I go through sometimes. The only few people I talk to are Joel, Kolby, and Christa when I get that way. Poor them, right? Ha!

Thanks for stopping by!

xoxox ~Rischa