"Life is sometimes hard. Things go wrong, in life and in love and in business and in friendship and in health and in all other ways that life can go wrong. And when things get tough, this is what you should do. Make good art."―Neil Gaiman, Make Good ArtI'm off to a rough start this year, I've been battling sinus problems unable to smell stuff for quite a while. So new products have had to wait.It's just as well there are more infrastructure things that need my attention. The end of last year saw a lot of DTS equipment fail, and so I've taken the time to fix or get things replaced. New supplies coming in. There's some reorganization/building going on in the workshop, as well as completing my yearly environmental audit on a supplies and packaging and trying to divine a direction for DTS's future. Oh and taxes. Lets not forget the evil, evil, crappy, thieving, taxes.Even all that was not productive enough for me and I was feeling inspired, so I dove into creating some new art for Story-time Candles. As I promised there will be a minimum 4 new Story-time art candles a quarter, I started them last fall at a good pace with six initially and adding one more for the winter. I have had several people ask me over the last few months if the Story-time candle art will be available as art prints and it's something I'm looking into. I don't have a printer that is for this kind of printing and investing in one that is is not feasible at this time. I also don't want to get involved with another website or service to manage, stuff like Redbubble and similar are out of the question. I'm looking for a print shop that is willing to do small varied runs at good quality. I'm hoping by the end of the year I'll have one sorted out and will open a new section on the website called Dreaming Tree Workshop for art prints, sculpted jewelry etc that I also make.Can you guess which candle this will be? The work in progresses title is " You summoned a guardian?"You'll be able to see the final art when the candle is released, this one has a few more days for the art alone. I work mainly in pencils, cake tempera, and watercolors with a little bit of digital painting in Rebel 3 in the end.I was working at a great clip and making plans to get ready for production when.... the winds came. And the wind took out a tree, that took out our utilities. Sadly and not by our choice, everything in our home and workshop is electric based, so we had no power, no heat, etc for the better part of two days. This is the second winter this has happened to us here so we need to find a backup system for our home. This time we went and got a small propane heater for indoor emergency heat, lit a million led candles and piled on the blankets essentially winter camping in our house with our cats for a few days.Making lemons into lemonade while winter house camping I began art for what will be a mini collection passion project. I'm not sure if the theme is still relevant to most people but it is to me and the scents I've developed to go with the art are truly delightful. In working on this rough draft I realized...I had never drawn fish before. So while I take the next few days to finish my antibiotics for my sinuses and recovering from winter camping in freezing temperatures I'm gonna need to do a few fish study doodles.With any luck I'll be back to my normal strange self again next week and be able to get to production with new things rolling out at a regular clip. I'm looking forward to this new "no major release /collection" schedule. New things will just be added to the website as they are ready individually. First will be next Friday's release of a brand new product! Here's a hint:Thanks for reading and have a magical day!-M
