Anne Leuck 4/3/08 Anne Leuck 4/3/08

Website Updates!

Several times of year I seriously think about hiring a web designer,but then time slips away and I just continue morphing this monster Icreated so many years ago! That's what I did this week:

I added my newly completed painting "65 South" to my front page. I love this painting and am now ready to let go of 12 Acres if the right buyer comes along.
Reworked many of my Custom Dog & Pet Portrait Order pages: Starting with the Sketch Process Page, I used Brutus as a case study.
Updated and simplified the Face Portrait and the Full Body Custom Canvas Painting order forms.I still have to figure out how to get a downloadable pdf on my site. The dangers of doing everything yourself. The other problem I can't update my leftside menu frame, it'sm making me crazy.
Uploaded my Mission Statement page...I recently completed a longer version for a potential licensing deal and have meant to post this on my website forever. I just want people to adopt and not buy animals, if they really new the statistics I think they would adopt. Speaking of: I heard Oprah is doing a show on puppy mills tomorrow...I am so happy about this, people need to know. She could in this one hour show change the lives of thousands of homeless pets (I'm hoping in addition to getting these mills shut down that they make the point to encourage people to go their local shelters to adopt instead of buying dogs). We'll see how it all plays out tomorrow.
Updated my Animal Inspiration page - added a few more recent photos to the very old ones.
Updated my listing to show recently SOLD pieces...always a joy to do!

Anne Leuck 4/3/08 Anne Leuck 4/3/08

Trucks & Planes

I clicked a few photos of trucks that I'm working on at Lill Street. Sadly an hour before I took the wet clay photo I lost a cab from another truck, lopped right off onto the floor into many pieces. Very frustrating...you just have to let go when it comes to clay. It's fragile and unpredictable but also really therapeutic and so much fun to play around with. This white truck is actually underglaze on bisqued (that means fired once) terra cotta ..it was bright orange before I slopped on the white.I do this so when I add the color I can get brighter hues. It is going to be a milk truck..to go with the egg truck. The first one is my crazy version of a cement truck..that was my Monday night.

And I got my plane back last week. I included strategically placed holes, the plan is to thread wire through andhang it from the ceiling. I also made clouds but they still need to beglazed.

Anne Leuck 4/2/08 Anne Leuck 4/2/08

Sunday...back track

I'm backtracking a bit with this post. On Sunday I had lunch with my friend
Johanna in China Town (dim sum!), got to see her ubercool new loft, then
stopped by her fiancee's studio (master furniture maker Mark Cwik) to get
some reclaimed lumber...if I can call it that? perhaps recycled, re-used?
They were scrap pieces he could not use. I can't wait to paint on them.
Here is a photo of one of his beautiful Bubinga Tables (no this is not the
kind of wood I'm painting on):

After picking up my boards I delivered my print (top image): "Dreaming
Uphill" to Woman Made Gallery for their April 12th Art Auction. Then
came home and got creative in the kitchen with a new recipe. I did a
Butternut Squash / Hazelnut Lasagne. The recipe was passed on to me
from my art pal & jeweler, Sara Lenart. You can find the recipe at
epicurious.com It was pretty tasty,I felt guilty not inviting anyone over
to share it with us!

Anne Leuck 3/26/08 Anne Leuck 3/26/08

Art Business News

I was very happy to find my booth shot from the One of a Kind Show featured in the Picture Gallery section of the March 08 Issue of Art Business News Magazine! This is a national trade journal for the art, publishing & framing industries.

Anne Leuck 3/25/08 Anne Leuck 3/25/08

Lips Locked

We are doing some spring cleaning in my studio. I have some really fun black & white prints of drawings I've done over the years...many created while sitting in my booth at Art Fairs...over the next week we will be listing many of these prints in my etsy store...this one is called Lips Locked.

Oh...and I had a change of heart about the blog being called Anne's Candy Colored World...not descriptive enough...I'm going with my signature tag line "Contemporary Folk & Urban Pop Art". But it still works perfectly for the everyday category.

Anne Leuck 3/24/08 Anne Leuck 3/24/08

My Candy Colored World...

Inspired by Kathy Frey's blog: "Taming the Tangle", I recently revamped my categories. She has one called "Personal Glimpse" I edited mine to "My Candy Colored World" it's just more of a focused peek at the everyday here. I also thought that made for a good name for my blog since I've always said my hues are candy colored, and as you can see here in these photos, so is my life!

In honor of the everyday..things that happened around here last week:

Home Improvement...we had the wonderful guys from Samanco working here this week, the jobs not huge, but closing the walls and ceiling back up made for a 4 day event. We now have insulation in our laundry room (the pipes froze last winter) and we have fabulous pendants hanging over the kitchen island....this will add so much ambiance to our dinner hour...not too mention dramatic lighting for our high stakes Scrabble games! Also replaced the very froofy brass fixtures that were hanging in the living rooms that join the kitchen. They are very simple schoolroom style period fixtures that echo the age of this old house. I love them...!! And a plug for Angie's List, this is how I found Samanco, they also did our bathroom rehab in our old house on Oakley....sadly that bathroom no longer exists as the house was torn down.

I hung my fun Birthday gifts from my dear pal Erica by my desk..shrinky dinks! She did a portrait of me and one of each of our hands...they are precious little talismans. She also presented me with this sweet hand sewn birthday cake! Perfect...I can take it with me on my annual sojourn.

I went to the Art Girls Pot Luck for the first time since December! We met at printmaker, Judy Zeddie's house. My big tip for the night was to get the business book "The E Myth Revisited". I went with the unabridged audio version...I have too many books stacked on my bedside table and I want to get right into this one...I can listen while I paint!