As an artist, do you have a favorite book or blog that you go back to over and over for inspiration? I do, and I can can open the book to any page, read maybe a page or two, and my brain kicks into overdrive. I keep this book sitting on the small table in my reading nook in my create room. It is so effective for me that sometimes I decide that I don't want to read it because it will get the wheels turning and they won't stop. This incredibly powerful book for me is "Show Your work" by Austin Kleon.

     Austin has a follow up book that I love too called "Steal Like an Artist" It seems to have a similar affect on me as "Show Your Work"  His newest book is from 2019, "Keep Going". I have yet to read this one but I'm sure its a winner too.

     What book or books do you go to again and again for inspiration? Do you have a favorite artist you follow that gets you moving creatively? Tell me in the comments. I'm looking to grow my creative library. Maybe I should do a post on my reading nook and creative library, hmmm.

     So I got in the groove and made three new pieces of art that I really like and I hope that you will too. I was digging through some of my older photographs on my computer and thought I'd see what they look like through the new filters I've been using on BeFunky. All three images are ready for you in the shop.

     The first one I did was the birds. I love how it really turned out kind of foggy looking. I knew immediately that this was going to be a fun one to play with and see what I could mold it into. I'm really liking the black and white with this image too.
Available printed on Red River Paper's Aurora 300 Matte or on premium canvas.

      For the next image, "Besties", I was digging through some photos I had taken at a nearby Clydesdale Horse ranch. I had been shooting from the fence next to the road, so no really staged shots. They were mainly just shots of a couple of horses in a holding pen but I managed to get this one of the two seemingly best friends looking out over the rail into the field beyond.
Available printed on Red River Paper's Palo Duro Soft Gloss Rag or on premium canvas.

      My last piece of the day comes from a photo I shot while hiking in the Olympic National Park. This is one of the many trails that wind through the park at the lower elevations. I had actually entered the park unknowingly on a trail from the south near Lake Cushman. This is such a beautiful and lush part of the country. I love how the light was being filtered through the trees. Leave me a comment and  tell me your favorite place to hike through the forest.
Available printed on Red River Paper's Aurora 300 Matte or on premium canvas.

     Since getting my new Canon ImagePROGRAFF-1000 printer up and running, I have started printing my own note cards and man, do the shops I sell them in love them. In one small shop, they've been selling 5-6 cards a day! That may not sound like a lot but when the shops are now ordering a couple hundred cards at a time, it's quite the boost in printing and sales. I love it!!

     I offer them in galleries and shops as single, blank inside cards with a white envelope. My card stock and envelopes come from Red River Paper and the clear sleeves come from either Amazon or ClearBags. The note cards measure 5.5" x 4.25" and can be printed in either landscape or portrait orientation, depending on the image. Have I said that I love this paper? Well, I do. It is such a great quality card stock that prints beautifully.

Here at TraysonArt.com, I offer any of my images as a 10-pack of note cards and envelopes. They will come to you in a nice clear acrylic pack. To order, just find your favorite image in the shop, then make your selection under the "Finish" drop down box. Now you'll be able to send some of your favorite art to friends and family.

I may earn a small commission from qualifying purchases through links on this blog.

     For years, I refused to print my prints. I dreaded the idea of fighting a printer, wasting a ton of ink and paper just trying to figure out how to get the prints to look right. My thought was, I'm a professional photographer, not a professional printer and that I should just let the pro labs do the printing. I also thought that as long as I sent them a good file, they should produce a high quality print. I did a lot of test prints with different labs to make sure that the final product was truly what I had envisioned and ended up with a very high quality final print. But then my favorite paper that I had been printing on for more then 10 years was discontinued by Kodak, not the print labs fault. So I switched to a different paper by Kodak that was similar in color reproduction. I went from Kodak Endura Metallic to Regular Endura, still Kodak's best paper photographic ever. I used this new, to me,  paper for about a year, when Kodak discontinued it as well. I tried a few other papers from the lab but nothing had the color of the Kodak Endura papers. 

     I was really at a loss for what I was going to do until I met up with a friend of mine that had been doing some printing of his photography with a new Canon printer and using Red River Paper's Polar Gloss Metallic. I was amazed at the color and quality of the print. It looked as good as anything I had seen from the labs, however, it was a pearlescent metallic which tends to zap some of the color out and also tends to be on the cooler side of the temperature scale. However, the quality was there. I went to Red River Paper's website and started doing homework on their papers and found that they have sample kits of all their papers. But first I needed a printer. I hated this part. After weeks, no months of agonizing research and and just waiting, I decided that the Canon Pro printers are where I wanted to end up. The problem for me was, the current model was over 12 years old and was due for an upgrade. I didn't want to spend thousands of dollars on a printer that would just be replaced in a year and soon not even be serviceable, so I waited. I wanted whatever the new version of the Canon imagePROGRAFF Pro-1000 was going to be or at least a discount on the sometime-to-be discontinued model. It never came, still hasn't come. Then the time came that I had to do something. I ran out of prints of my number one selling image, "Aspens".  So I made the decision and bought the Pro-1000 and one full set of authentic replacement ink. In doing more research, I found that Red River Paper has color profiles that match the Pro-1000 and other popular printers to their individual papers with instructions to load them based on your printer and operating system. Within 10 minutes, I had color settings matched to the different papers in the sample packs! Red River Paper made it sooo easy.

     I had been dreading the set-up and learn process for nothing. I now make all of my own prints and really have grown to love it. I am amazed at what I am creating now more than ever!

     Hey everyone! For those of you that may be unfamiliar with my artwork, all of it comes from my photography. I take a photo and then edit it to a completely new style. I use a couple of different programs to get there, Adobe Lightroom and BeFunky. With BeFunky, I use filters to get the desired effect and then go into Lightroom and work on my colors. Well, BeFunky just introduce a whole new series of GFX filters. These are truly remarkable. The watercolor one especially looks like a watercolor painting. In fact, after I printed one of my new pieces on Red River Paper's Aurora Art 250 White paper, I got real watercolor paints and added some of my own painted strokes directly on the print. Once it dried, you could not tell the areas that I painted from the printed artwork. Truly amazing! I am now introducing my Watercolor Collection available in the shop. Currently they are available as a 7"x9" print on an 8"x10" sheet of Red River Paper's Aurora Art White 300. Made in the USA using 100% cotton, Aurora Art White 300 is an acid-free paper made from cotton linters. These linters are considered "recovered fibers" by the EPA. By using linters, Aurora production is putting to use what would have become waste. I love this paper! (I am not affiliated with Red River Paper and I do not get anything from them for saying these things, I just really love their papers)

      The image below is of a tree located not far from my house. This was shot during a thunderstorm that had just passed us and there was constant cloud to cloud lightning going on behind the tree. There was a blanket of fog covering the ground too. It was quite the show. 

     Ever since I closed my gallery in Taos, I have been looking for a new space. I am being picky about my potential new space and that takes time and patience. I have flown to Oregon once and Seattle three times to check out spaces. I have spoken to commercial real estate brokers in Colorado, Arizona and here in Oklahoma too. I am currently waiting on a space to become available in Seattle's Pioneer Square neighborhood. Pioneer Square is the first neighborhood of Seattle and there are lots of art galleries in the district. The building I am waiting on has been vacant for several years. It's over a hundred years old and a new group just bought it. They are getting it ready to put on the commercial lease market. I am one of the first businesses in line for one of the spaces. But it is very much a hurry up and wait situation.

     I have lived in the Seattle metro three different times over the course of my life. I love it! I love the Pacific North West. There is so much to see and do. Things in Seattle you must experience...

1. Pike Place Market - this is the fish market where the guys throw the fish, check out the lower levels too
2. Seattle Waterfront - cool shops, great food, ferris wheel, ferries and cruise ships coming and going
3. Seattle Aquarium - really cool and immersive
4. Space Needle - has gotten expensive to go up but still cool to see, go up if you can though
5. Ferry Ride to Bainbridge Island - I like to ride over and turn around and come right back, best view of Seattle
6. Pioneer Square - Cool shops and art galleries
7. Go East - If you have a car, drive east on I-90, through the tunnels, across the floating bridges and out to Snoqualmie Falls *
8. Go South - If you have a car, head to Point Defiance Park in Tacoma. You won't be disappointed. **
9. Flagship REI Store - If you like camping and outdoor gear, this is it!
10. Washington Park Arboretum and Volunteer Park - beautiful parks (Volunteer has the Bruce and Brandon Lee grave sites)

* If you don't want to go all the way to Snoqualmie Falls, go to the botanical gardens in Bellevue. You may even be able to take public transport there. Public transport in Seattle is really quite good. I love to use it to get around.
** There is a ferry that goes over to Point Defiance but I'm not sure that it's any quicker. It may be more of an adventure though.

     After the crazy year of festivals of 2022, I was looking for a more cost effective way to show and sell my work. I was represented in the Taos Artist Collective in Taos and Wildfire Gallery on Paseo in OKC. Sales were ok in those two galleries but I wanted to be more proactive in the sales process as well. Touring festivals was great and I sold a ton of art. My sales were over ten times what I had ever done previously! But my expenses to tour like that were over six figures! I needed a way to continue to actively sell my work and get it in front of a lot of art buyers. I found a beautiful gallery space in Taos, NM that had become available and it had living quarters too! I opened Taos New West Art Gallery on Kit Carson Rd. just a half block from the Plaza. It was in line with several other galleries up Kit Carson. Locals called it "Gallery Row". The gallery was a gorgeous 300 year old adobe building with a kiva fireplace in the main gallery. The gallery showed my work plus 10 other local and regional artists in the "New West" genre.

      Unfortunately, due to several factors, I made the difficult decision to close the gallery in November of the same year. Sales had been good but Taos was starting some construction and tourism projects that were going to very negatively affect traffic to the gallery. I needed to close before I started really losing money. It was a smart business decision but a tough emotional one. A lot was learned about opening and running a business. Overall, it was another pretty cool year. Still better than clocking in for someone else!

     I'm guessing that after going back to work as COVID was waning, I stopped writing here and honestly forgot about this blog. I was dealing with memory issues after the car wreck. I was missing lots of pieces of memories for about a year and a half. What seemed to help was diving head first into my artwork, sans blog.

     I went full time as as artist Aug, 25th 2021. I had been doing art festivals on the side for over ten years, nut just in my home state of Oklahoma. My first out of state show was in Evergreen, CO and I killed it! The following weekend was another art fest in the same town and even in the same park, so I was a bit worried that maybe that town had had it's fill on the first weekend, but no, it was the same results! I was officially off and running as a full time artist. That fall, I had not booked a lot of shows because of deadlines missed since I still had a full time job when those deadline passed. But, I started applying to shows for the following spring and summer of 2022. I ended up doing 26 festivals in '22. I had shows in Oklahoma, Colorado, New Mexico, Nebraska, Texas and Arizona. I bought a travel trailer and new truck to pull it. It was crazy, exciting super fun, a ton of work, and way too expensive. I met so many artists on the circuit and learned something from everyone of them. Of course there were awesome shows and there were not so great shows. One thing that kept me motivated and positive was an idea that I kept in my head, and mentioned to other artists that may have been having a bad show. The thing I kept saying and fully believing (still do) is "A bad day at an art festival is, and always will be, better than clocking in for someone else". My summer was truly spent camping in Colorado, going to art festivals on the weekends to make money, and fly-fishing and creating more art during the week. One can only be so lucky!

Couple of exciting updates!

Award! - Honorable Mention at Oklahoma City's Paseo District Photofest with this shot. This is a home made car made from a Mazda Miata. The owner of the car pulled up in front of our building at work and thought it would be cool to take pics. I agreed! I have it printed on Kodak Endura Premier Metallic paper. The thing pops!

Award! - At the Medicine Park Flute Fest and Art Walk, I won 1st place artist! I had a fairly large representation of my current style of work. Here I'll post one of my newer pieces. It's definitely a favorite of mine. Title - Two Crows. It is said that 2 crows is a sign of good luck. So far, I'd have to agree.

Publish! I have been shooting different shots within the gallery at work and of the building. Our art director took notice and asked me to shoot some very specific images. This one of the outside of our building along with the newly installed Julian Opie piece titled "Faime Walking" was recently published in Issue 22 of  Art Desk Magazine.

Gallery! Now showing in Taos, NM! I have started selling with the Taos Artist Collective this fall. They are a very active, vibrant gallery right at the entrance to the Taos Plaza. It is truly exciting to be among some world class art in northern New Mexico. Here is a new piece available now. Title: "Rituals" available in a limited edition run of 25 printed on a 20"x30" premium gallery canvas and framed with a maple float frame. Bring on the sacred!

     It's May 17, 2020. My last post was longer ago than I hoped. We are in the middle of a worldwide virus pandemic and very few people have been out or to work or much of anywhere since the middle of March. Here in Oklahoma, restaurants are starting to ease back open but with half capacity. I have been "working" from home since March 13th. Sounds great, except, on April 6th, my wife and I were in a pretty bad car wreck and I was limited on what I was really able to do. Bed, couch, recliner, try to walk a bit, bed, couch, recliner, soft foods and no pain killers. I am about 95% now. Today, I walked about 3.5 miles. That's the most I have done in months. Just gotta keep moving.

     I have been real antsy to get out and go camping, although, I still barely get comfortable sleeping on nice soft surfaces, even with an air mat, sleeping on the ground might be challenging. During all this "work" from home time, all the campgrounds have been closed due to the virus, oh and gas is as cheap as it's been since high school ($1.25 /gal). I want to get out soooo bad!

     Since we have been relegated to the house, I have been shooting around the house and our neighborhood pond. It has been nice to go out for walks in the morning with my camera and just see what I can find. We've had a mated pair of mallard ducks, turtles, a rabbit, egrets, blue herons, a green heron, geese, a dead rat on the side walk (very strange), snakes, great sunsets, and thunderstorms. I did some night photography along with some long exposure shots with panning too.

     All of the spring/ summer art festivals and shows have all been canceled so I have been working on the Etsy shop (now closed). I have added new note card packs and a bunch of new art. Now through the rest of May, most everything in the shop is 25% off and free shipping!

     Thank you for staying with me. I hope everyone is staying healthy and practicing proper social distancing.

Peace!