Sorry from the schools, too

Hello friends, Hope you are well!
I have had a busy week (and in high temperatures, blegh!), but wanted to send you these snippets:

A link to Kevin Rudd’s sorry speech (text). (Mentioned here a week or 2 ago).

Also, from local school newsletter, the State Education Department sorry message:
“We, as South Australian educators, formally acknowledge and apologise for the role that we and our system played in teaching destructive and false information about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People, and for ignoring the true history of this land and its Indigenous people.
We also formally acknowledge and apologise for the role that we played in contributing to a social climate that condoned the removal of you precious children, and we say sorry to those children who were stolen.
We commit ourselves to working towards Reconciliation and building better relationships so that we can constitute a united Australia, respecting the land, and valuing the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Heritage and Culture so that we may provide justice and equity for all.”

Necessary and sobering. Hope we can do better.
Take care,
Meg

Tangerine Meg arrives at Etsy!

I have been busy dear readers!

At last I have scanned the artwork (bigger than for on this blog) for my Tangerine Meg Etsy shop. All of the prints I have been rabbiting on about here are available as an original print from me! I will personally package them up and post it to you anywhere in the world!

The only remaining pieces of the puzzle are to upload my free email newsletter sign up form onto my site, and make a couple more blog pages for the rest of the info.

Hope all is well with you,
Meg

Colour Wrangling

Hello lovely readers!
I am pondering colour schemes for the dancing/flying lady print today. Here is the colour-test print:

Joy dancing or flying

She was to have a similar coloured dress to Joy Riding lady, with pink background and blue pattern, but the whole thing is a bit dead without orange and yellow. Currently she has a great tie-dye dress thing happening as I trial the possibilities!
The big lady (the background colour) could be either blue or green or maybe darkish yellow. I thought I wanted the surrounding hearts and flowers to be pink, but now wonder if some should be orange.
This is definitely a work in progress, at the “live with the not knowing” stage. Need to do some more practise prints to fine tune.

Thanks for reading the musings of a colour-lover, who is in the midst of decision making!
Meg

Tangerine Meg at Red Bubble!

Greetings lovely blog-reading humans!

I am pleased to tell you that I have scanned some paintings, and have uploaded them to redbubble (the site that sells digitally printed artwork, on t-shirts, cards and for wall art). Here’s a link to my work:

Buy art

I was very excited to find that my work has been featured on the front page of two of the groups I am in. Both the “Passion for patterns” group and the “Artwork Appreciation” group have me on the front page at the moment! I am flattered.

Just been out to some comedy for the Fringe Festival. Have laughed quite a bit, but now very tired!

Take care,

Meg

Hi after circus training

Hi guys!
I don’t know who you all are reading this, but thanks again for coming (again?)
I am writing today after circus class. (Circus Static) Trapeze is SO FUN! I haven’t done anything like it for a couple of years really.
Just a short post today.
Best wishes to you all,
Meg
PS The paint has dried on the colour trial, hopefully will have time to get it to the scanner tomorrow. I don’t like it yet, so need to print some more practice ones to improve the colour scheme. Slow but steady progress I guess will get there.

3 things I have discovered or learned on-line this week

Hello bloggy buddies!

Hope you are all well, and getting things done. I notice this blog has had 225 hits, up from 184 last time I looked. Thanks for coming! Feel welcome to leave feedback.

This week I have been researching on-line and discovered a few things/places which may be worth passing on:
1 You may have heard of the Zen Habits blog. This has tons of life information and ideas, in categories such as Family and Finance, Productivity and Organisation, Happiness, Health, and Simplicity
2 Tim Ferriss wrote one of the manifestos I mentioned last time, his is on not being distracted by emails! (I guess we all know that can punctuate your whole day sometimes). He also is the person behind the book The 4-Hour Working Week. Tim does some very interesting things.
3 I read/realised that I don’t have to join up to everything I see. Some stuff will just take up time and spread my time/effort too thinly (thereby doing nothing particularly well). Will try to do just a few relevant things consistently and hopefully well. I guess the difficult part may be discerning which is which!

Now that work has become 2 days a week instead of 3, I will be doing more things from the home office/studio. As well as progressing my lino prints, I am aiming to get on with setting my website up, and get more artwork up on Etsy for sale. I have some other projects which are bigger and collaborative on the menu too. Fun! I will keep you up to date with links and things!

Circus training is starting gently (which suits me), as the regulars are rehearsing for a show in the Adelaide Fringe (a most excellent Arts Festival – 2nd biggest in the world). Would it be worth giving you links for those? (ie. ZigZag Circus in Adelaide, and the Adelaide Fringe?)

Take care,
Meg

Happy Sorry and Valentine Days

Greetings you fabulous blog-readers!

An important day in Australian history yesterday: Our Prime Minister (head of Government) apologised for past wrongs to the indigenous population! There was a really hopeful positive feeling in the air.
I enclose my sorry cardigan photo. I am holding one of the last plums and standing in front of a bit of the apricot/plum tree!)

sorry cardigan
I had better finally show you my latest lino prints.
At the moment I don’t like the cat one. The plum trees are too generic, and I don’t like the way the cat looks at you. I have carved a bit of the concern from his lino eyebrows, but I’m not sure if that will fix the problem. Will keep you posted (get it?)

 

Orange Cat in the Plum Orchard

The lady (Joy) dancing/flying one is not exactly what I thought it would be but I think I like it anyway. There were a few missed bits in the carving process which I have fixed, ready for an edition I hope. Thought I was pretty daring choosing a non-rectangular shape for the print! Can’t wait to start choosing the colours.

joy

Excuse the variable white tones in the scans, these were too big for my scanner and were made of a few images Photoshopped (I am pretty sure that is a verb now) together.

I have discovered a fun site “ChangeThis” which has heaps of interesting, optimistic manifestos to download, read and be inspired by. There is a Women Bloggers one, and I also like the “RenGen” one (“The Big Picture is a collage”).
(Those links should get you to the right bit. Just let me know if they don’t work).

Hope you have had happiness and kindness as part of your “Valentine’s” day (what ever you might think of the commercialism, you can’t get too much happiness and kindness can you?)
Kind regards,
Meg

Trapeze and Tangerine Tree

Greetings enthusiasts of blog,
I hope you are travelling well.
Hope too you will forgive me for veering far from my original stated topics today. Perhaps I should add to that “intention roll” (like a blog roll) fitness, gardening and life.

So excited this week…I did trapeze again on Thursday night!
I know circus training is good for whole body strength, but I hadn’t been for about 2 years, due to a couple of things.
About 4 years ago I lost about 30kilos (66lbs) (on purpose, for health reasons) and during that time started doing circus training. Crikey I must have been a sight up on the trapeze that first night after the strong guys had lifted me up there! (Don’t want to think about it actually). I panicked and came straight down.
But I liked the view and kept going back, and soon began to be able to do some stuff.
This Thursday, despite the full-on conditioning exercises being largely beyond me right now, my body was able to remember some of the trapeze postures. Isn’t the human body a wonderful thing?
Just to clarify, this is not flying trapeze or swinging trapeze, but static trapeze (see wiki).

Tangerine Tree. Have decided to call my newsletter Tangerine Tree (or The Tangerine Tree?).
Have been wondering what I can email out that would be useful to people who want to receive an occasional newsletter from me. I was planning on sending out advance news when I have a new linoprint available (ie. we let our friends in on things first). So to be fair I guess the mailing list would find out a little bit before blog readers, as thanks for entrusting me with their email address. Do you think that sounds ok? Do you think that is useful/worthwhile? As blog readers perhaps you disagree!

I promised artwork. Haven’t got on to my pile of scanning, so is next time ok? (Have decided I like one of them and not the other! I’ll show you).

Wishing you lovely things and a fine mid-February! (reminder: Valentine’s day next week, give it some thought!)
Meg

5 tiny little events (in a disproportionately long blog post)

Greetings friends in the world of blog! I seem to be wordy today.

I have had little I-can-move-forward type breakthroughs in thinking about my web-site. The site has been percolating on my mental back-burner, and now it’s starting to make its way to the front burner (?!).
1 Have been reading great info from Seth Godin, and what a relief to read the words: “…don’t even have a homepage!” (from Knock Knock – Seth Godin’s Incomplete Guide to Building a Web Site that works). (Download for free from Seth’s Squidoo lens (site)). Prior to reading that I was pondering and pondering what could go on this apparently essential page, but the concept of not actually having a “home” page makes sense to me. I now feel as if I can progress with my site. More on this later.
2 The other decision I have made is instead of re-inventing the wheel and having gallery, sales, paypal etc all coded into my own site, I am going to see what happens if I try to sell (the artwork) on Etsy. To get closer to that today I went to the Post Office to check out insured postage costs all around the world, and also uploaded A Cat named Magpie to my brand new Etsy shop today.
So all that time I thought I was wasting on the internet on the weekend came to be happily and unexpectedly fruitful as I realised it was in fact research!
I can still keep artwork progress and archives here at the blog or on the “site”.

Numbers 3, 4, and 5 are all prints.
I have made an trial of the 2 prints I was working on. And here I have to show you (drumroll…) the first ever view of the print for my site banner (tada!):

tangerine epiphany banner

(I may yet add colour to this.)
As I need to re-scan everything big for the Etsy site, while I am at it I will also scan the other new work to show you.
Hope all is well with you,
Meg