This week I'm just focusing on sorting out materials.

Planning ahead is key. To make a cyanotype I've got to coat the paper, let it dry completely (in the dark) and then have enough sunny weather to expose them in the next few days. Old and unexposed cyanotype paper doesn't make for very good images. They look muddy.

This has lead to making a lot of images. Part of what I'm trying to develop is the muscle memory of quickly coating a large amount of paper while not making stupid mistakes. This has it's benefits. I'm a firm believer in Inspiration finding you working. I want to end this residency with a cohesive body of work. Not just a bunch of random images. Making a lot of work early on is going to help me figure out what is doing it for me at the moment. I'll take the little things I like that come up in this round and develop them in the next round of images. From that I'll develop a theme.

I'm having to try out a bunch of watercolor paper this week too. I'd settled on a Bergger COT 320 as my paper of choice. It's been out of stock everywhere for the last few months. I finally decided to track some down and discovered that it has apparently been discontinued. So the hunt for new paper is on. Paper choice is a big deal. Blues will be darker or lighter depending on the paper. Some clear really well. Others leave you with light greyish blue where there should be white paper. The texture of the paper also has a big effect on the final result.

I've learned my lesson from building my business around one leather from one tannery. If there are any monkeys with wrenches at the tannery my whole operation has to stop and wait for them. So I am limiting the scope of my paper choices to papers I can find at any art supply store. The idea that I can just run out and grab some more paper is very exciting to this leatherworker who is used to having to wait two weeks (sometimes six to eight) to get more leather in.

On the nitty gritty business end of things I'm having the biggest struggle with just figuring out what to do everyday. It sounds great before you have to do it. I can do anything I want. But then you show up at work and daylight is burning and you have to pick the one thing to do out of all the things you want to do. This tends to cause me to spend a lot of time worrying that I'm wasting my time on something. I had to get over this with my leather work as well. Ten years in and I know what needs to get done there. This will happen with cyanotypes too once I get used to the new menu of options I'm being presented with.

The other struggle I'm running into is figuring out how to document all of this. Leather work is good because there are lots of different things to take pictures of and movement to capture in video. I feel like you can only watch me brush sensitizer on paper so many times. Also a good chunk of my time is spent looking at images and writing down ideas. Not the most interesting thing to watch. But there is a story there. I just have to figure out how to tell it.

October Residency Week One