Fun with publishing

Longtime readers of my blog may recall that I have been dabbling in self-publishing for a few years now, making little books, magazines, business cards and calendars through the Blurb and Snapfish platforms.  Since getting emails last week about a big end-of-month special deal, I've been chained to the computer making a new book and business cards.  A while ago I wrote a bunch of helpful hints about self-publishing in general.

But today I want to talk specifically about calendars.

I now make calendars in two sizes: wall and desk.  Choosing a theme and revisiting old photos is always a great way to spend a day, and the publishing software makes it easy.

I bring up this subject not only because it's how I have been keeping busy, but because you might like to contemplate making a calendar yourself, and it's better to start thinking about such a project now than on December 27 (although I have made a calendar that way too).

If you want to make a calendar, here are some hints:

Find a theme:  As with commercial calendars, it's good to have all your photos relate to one another.  I've used food, ships, reflections, a vacation for past calendars, and the one I sent off yesterday features pictures of "found art" -- abstract compositions usually photographed from the sides of dumpsters.  The vendors seem to think that everybody will use family pictures, but your quilts would also look great on a calendar.

January on my new calendar

Find a picture:  Of course life will be simpler if all your ships or reflections or found art or whatever are somehow identified on your computer so you don't have to look through 80,000 images to find the ones you want.  I organize my photos by putting them into folders by theme, but I admit that I spend extra time browsing around in other folders just to make sure I haven't missed anything.  Many artists swear by the organizer function in Photoshop Elements, and I highly recommend the Pixeladies online classes for this and other aspects of Photoshop.  Unfortunately we've just missed their current class in Organizer, but I suspect they'll be giving another soon.

all my flag photos, in my computer directory

Use the simplest option:  When you get to the publishing platform and call up "calendars" they'll give you dozens of design options, most of them depressing.  They'll suggest that you place your family photo on a busy background or in cheesy frames with cheesy slogans around the edges or with watercolory flowers strewn around the background.  Pass those by.  Find the option called "simple" or "design your own" or "upload your own;" you may have to click around a bit to get one without a lot of pre-programmed frou-frou.  You want this calendar to showcase your photos, not a commercial artist's idea of "what's hot."  I like to choose a fullpage photo, and perhaps add a line of text to say where the picture was taken.

I don't recommend this design.

Watch the pricing:  The special offers you read about in promotional emails have lots of footnotes and caveats, and you almost always end up with a much more expensive project than you thought you were embarking upon.  But keep clicking, and you may find ways to improve the bottom line.

This weekend, for instance, I was putting in an order for 20 little books.  With the "free shipping" promo code the price was $423, but with the "55% off" code instead, it dropped to $282.

When placing my calendar order, I noticed the option to pick up at my local Walmart or Walgreen's instead of shipping.  Hmmm, maybe that would be a way to avoid the $63 shipping fee -- but after I priced it that way, I realized that I would indeed save the shipping but would lose the 65% off offer that sent me to the platform in the first place, and it would have cost almost $200 more.

Learn on the job:  Go to one of these sites and play around.  See how hard it is to use the software; experiment with how to include text and how to fine-tune the photo presentation.  For instance, I learned only by accident that after you load a photo into one of the "photo here" frames, you can click on the image and find an "edit" screen that allows you to rotate and resize, as well as adjust brightness and color.  When you're done, hit "save" -- and the project will be there months later if and when you decide to actually place the order.  There will probably be several special offers on calendars as it gets closer to the end of the year, but you may be busy the week before Christmas -- better to have a calendar in the can, ready to hit the print button when you see the big sale.

Or if you're in the mood today, Snapfish still has the 65% off deal through midnight July 31.  Good luck, and have fun!

Found poetry 30

Art report / England 3

One of Ai Weiwei's recurring themes is the destruction of China's history and traditional culture by the current regime and its replacement with shallow consumerism.  He has depicted this by finding old things and somehow redoing them for art.  His most infamous such act was to drop a 2000-year-old urn, documenting it in three photos -- holding it out, in mid-fall, and smashing on the ground.  (Critics have understandably given him a hard time over this endeavor.)

At the Blenheim Palace exhibit he wasn't so dramatic.  Here's a table from the Qing dynasty (somewhere between 100 and 350 years old) with legs sliced down to sit askew.

Here's a huge chunk of wood salvaged from the demolition of Qing dtynasty temples, which has been beautifully milled and polished into a map of China.

And here are a bunch of more 2000-year-old urns, painted in shiny automobile enamels.

I detected puzzlement from the tourists who bothered to look at these artworks.  Ai is an artist who requires an explanation -- if you aren't familiar with his life story, his political opinions, and the materials and metaphors of his work, you won't get much out of looking at the art itself.  I was fortunate enough to know the basics, and the Blenheim show made me want to see more.

Art report / England 2

The artworks were somewhat incongruously displayed in the ornate formal rooms of the palace, and our docents didn't seem to know what to say about them -- a few awkward and clueless words, then on to the important stuff: the furniture and the family portraits.  There was no signage anywhere in the palace, nor any brochures to read.  So I suspect 90 percent of the visitors got little to nothing out of their art exposure.  Too bad, because this is world class art!

One of Ai's recurring themes is the problematic status of the individual in the current repressive regime.  Ai himself was under house arrest for a time, and forbidden to leave China for years afterwards, so he worked on the Blenheim exhibit long-distance.  His passport was returned in 2015 and he now lives in Berlin.

Ai typically acquires old stuff and reworks it, as in this sculpture using three-legged stools.  In the past every Chinese household owned at least one stool, but many of them have been discarded, replaced perhaps by plastic chairs?  In some other artworks Ai has taken hundreds of the stools and displayed them in installations.  In this one, he has joined maybe a dozen into a puffball of legs.  I'm not sure about the metaphor -- are individuals stronger when they hang together?  Or have the individuals, forced into formation, been robbed of their ability to stand on their own?

Ai Weiwei, Wooden Stools

In another room, Ai made hundreds of porcelain crabs to recall a big party he threw for his friends when he was arrested.  He had arranged for the crabmeat before he was hauled away, but the party went on without him.  The crabs come in two colors, red and gray; he has observed that if you're a gray crab, blending into the landscape, you may be safer than the red crab who stands out.  (But don't they all get eaten in the end?)

(Please forgive the photos -- my camera couldn't seem to decide what to focus on and we were hustled away before I could get a better shot.)

Found poetry 29

Art report / England 1

Seeing photos last week of the Trumps' gala dinner at Blenheim Palace, outside of London, reminded me of our visit to Blenheim Palace a couple of years ago, during which we saw some Serious Art -- and I never got around to writing about it.  So here's my belated report to you.

NYTimes photo

The fabulously grand Blenheim Palace was built about 300 years ago as a gift from Queen Anne to John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough, who led British forces in the Battle of Blenheim, which won the War of the Spanish Succession.  Winston Churchill, whose father was the third son of the current Duke, was born at Blenheim Palace and is buried in the churchyard of the local parish.

When we visited the palace it was the site of an exhibition of work by Ai Wei-Wei, the great contemporary artist from China.

In the palace courtyard, two of Ai's "Pillar" sculptures were installed between the indigenous pillars.  These are tall-man-size vases, suggesting the human form; he has made many of them.



In the huge reception hall of the palace, Ai's crystal chandelier looked totally at home.  He has made many chandeliers, in different forms, to comment on the extravagance of contemporary Chinese consumer culture.   Ai's father, a poet, was one of the victims of China's Cultural Revolution, sent into exile in a labor camp when Ai was one year old.  He grew up without lamps or candles in the home, let alone chandeliers.

By contrast, you immediately walked down a hallway covered by a carpet that replicates the surface of a dirt road with tank tire tracks.

More about the Ai exhibit in another post.