Kat’s Arts Blog

This week we’ve been in Tucson for tje extravganza centered around the famous Tucson Gem and Mineral Show (TGMS). However, my primary interest is in materials for casual beaded and wirewrapped jewelry, not fine gemstones, lovely as they are. The bead shows and polymer clay (PC) workshops have been totally worth it, even if some of the serious gem merchants may think they are just a side show. To me, they are the main event.

I’ve acquired a good collection of semi-precious stone beads, and a lot of ideas and tips from the PC artists gathered here. Even my husband has gotten interested in the possibilities and fun of polymer clay sculpture after attending a class and make & take PC party. Christie Friesen, the clay sculpture class instructor, was both informative and a whole lot of fun. Her enthusiasm is as inspiring as her originality and skill as an artist and teacher. I have a feeling we will look her up at future events around the country as well as visiting her website and buying her books. She has a chatroom on her site that she says is very active, so once we get our internet connection squared away I will check that out.

As we put our new knowledge to work, and create new things with the skills and supplies obtained here, I’ll post pictures of them in the gallery.

I’ve added a few pictures to start an album called Deserts & Mountains in the Photography/Landscapes category. Since we are presently in the southwestern US, where every place one looks there’s a photo opp, this album is likely to grow quite a bit. I have a number of other pix that haven’t been reviewed or resized for the Web yet, and we only arrived last week! We will be in this vicinity for at least two more months, so watch for many more images in the near future.

I posted more pix in the gallery, including a bunch from our visits to Monticello and Fallingwater and some from a fantastic trip to Ireland in 2005. Slowly the empty albums are starting to become populated.

I just heard from a friend that there is another website with an almost identical domain name as this one: Kat’s Art at http://katsart.com. It belongs to illustrator Katrine Dickau, who does some lovely work. I did try to get that domain before settling on this one, but it was already taken. That’s the way the Web works, though. There’s only so many short names out there, and you do what you can with limited resources. My things are different enough from Katrine’s that I’m sure nobody will be confused, but you might enjoy going over there, too, to see what she’s got.

I’ve just posted an assortment of photos to the gallery. Many of them are from our trip south this Fall. We stopped for several days in each of Pennsylvania and Virginia to take in some sights, some of which I now share with you.

Enjoy!

I mentioned in my first post here that I was going to add watermarks to photos I may sell in some form at some point before I add them to my gallery. Please let me clarify. These watermarks are not “hidden” information intended to be detected by some kind of web crawler. The kind of watermark I plan to use consists of a copyright notice added to the image in such a way that it is obvious, but not obtrousive. So, I will add a layer to each image, using PhotoShop since that’s my preferred image editor, and will create a semi-transparent text design with the notice, “© [year] KW Prawl”, or something similar. Maybe I’ll use the URL to this website, since it’s nice and short? At any rate, I will not be tracking your web usage with any kind of embedded code.

As well as identifying my work to prevent its use without my permission, with any luck at all this strategy will help create my “brand”. Developing the text design will give me a bit more practice with PhotoShop, too. While I’ve used this software since roughly 1992, there is always more to learn since it is so powerful and complex.

Welcome to Kat’s Arts blog. This side of the site (the blog) is where I’ll write about what I’m doing that will eventually wind up in the other side (the gallery). I created this site to have a home specifically for things I make, to avoid cluttering up my other blogs, and to organize them (or try to).

Right now my creations in the gallery fall into two main categories: photography and jewelry. The photos are themselves subdivided into simple snapshots, and smaller versions of images I will be offering in my online shop as prints, notecards or other wares (coffee mugs? t-shirts?). The latter will be identifiable by the watermark intended to deter misappropriation by casual web-snatchers. I do understand that it’s not a perfect solution to piracy, but what is? Anyway, I will do my best to make sure the watermarks don’t interfere with your enjoyment of them while preserving my intellectual property rights. If you do want to use one for something, drop me a line, or just link back to this site from the lo-res copy you take.

A warm shout-out to my friends in various social networks who found this site through my shameless self-promotion! I’ll be adding links in the blogroll to those places as soon as I can.

Above all, enjoy!