My Brother Scan N Cut machine arrived this week, and after a slightly tense first day of banging my head against a wall of new software and unheard of file types, I think I’ve cracked it.

I mean, I can’t believe I’d never heard of these types of machines before!

My brain is fizzing with thoughts of all of the things I can make. In fact, I was able to start a new coin prototype without wearing out my hands, and this one is much better than the one I lost.

What swung it for me when deciding on a Scan N Cut was the fact that I could scan in my own drawings. I have no interest whatsoever in replicating someone else’s designs, so being more able to use my own spontaneous freehand drawings was a big deal for me.

Navigating between art and craft

One of the things that interests me is how these cutter plotter machines are marketed. There are no-frills vinyl cutters that are priced for industry, and then there are machines pitched squarely at mostly female crafters, with lots of soft lines, pastel colours, flowery decoration and cutesy names.

These home maker machines have a lot of potential for all sorts of really ambitious construction projects, but you’d think they were only for cardmaking or scrapbooking.

Sometimes the biggest difference between art and craft is simply purpose – you could argue that originality and derivativeness play a part, but then that would eliminate the Jeff Koonses and Koons-lites… so purpose and intent seem to play a huge part.

Designing my second journal is taking longer than I thought…

I’d wanted to be able to produce a second journal within a week – ambitious, I know, but potentially feasible. The problem was that I chose a topic that required a bit more research, whereas my first journal was based on an article with lots of ready-made questions.

These aren’t just blank notebooks – the prompts and questions have to be relevant and thorough.

Besides that, I had to revisit the cover design for the first book and revamp it as I wasn’t totally happy with the print. That took about a day’s work.

Naturally, that means recreating the book mockups, which will eat up a chunk of another day… ah well. It’s still been a great week for getting stuff done – the ball has definitely started rolling again!

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Last week I was feeling deflated and couldn’t get my head around going back to work on my sculpture. I couldn’t decide on the right equipment to buy either, so it felt as though I was spinning my wheels.

Just this minute I’ve settled on – and bought – a Brother Scan N Cut – so the design and construction process can resume once it arrives!

KDP self-publishing

In the meantime I had one good idea – ditch everything for a while and do something totally different. So with a couple of days’ worth of concentrated effort, I produced and published my first guided journal.

I’ve published e-books before – just cleaned up academic essays – but never tried publishing a paperback myself.

A few months ago I had taken out a 2-month Skillshare trial and came across a course on publishing low/no content books. Because of my longstanding (and long deferred) interest in writing a graphic novel, I played the videos in the background whilst cleaning up the studio and had a lightbulb moment.

The AHA! bit was that I could definitely create journals that I’d be proud of – and I have a mad love for notebooks, so two birds with the single rock, right?

The bleurgh bit was knowing that I had too many ideas on the go at once, so it sat on the back burner. That is, until last week when I decided to re-watch the Skillshare videos and do it straight away.

Designing and publishing

I didn’t create a blank book – it was more of a guided notebook based on a popular article I’d written on my finance blog.

So with a relatively high content level, I just had to design the page spreads, format and lay out the text, design the cover illustrations, export them all in the right formats and upload.

I say, “just” had to do all that – ok, it was a solid block of work, but the foundation’s been laid for at least four more notebooks based on my existing articles.

If you want to have a go at creating journals yourself, here are the resources I used:

• DesignCuts for illustration packages. They have freebies every Friday that you can use in commercial projects.
• Creative Market for fonts. They have free goods every Monday, including fonts.
• RawPixel for stock imagery. You can get a free trial (and use the photos you download after your trial ends).

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What goes up must come down… it’s always hard to say goodbye after a visit, and I’m well and truly fed up with more than 20 years of living an ocean apart from half of my family.

But hey, that’s the life of the immigrant/expat, and you just get on with it.

Back to that mould-making failure

As I was writing this, I heard an amazingly salient phrase in a podcast – “never waste a failure”.

It was directed towards entrepreneurs and I immediately thought about the ways that I’ve learned from failure before, but I’m staring despondently at this mould that I thought would be the one, and wondering how to get my head back in the game and start all over.

So now I’m seriously having to think about everything I was considering about my working methods before: why I naturally gravitate to doing everything by hand and how I can get over that.

It’s a tug-of-war between the conceptual and the physical artwork that I go through all of the time, and to be honest it’s still wigging me out right now… but I’m just going to get over it and invest in some equipment.

Designing and publishing

Since the mouldmaking and comedown from family time I’ve had to jump into something completely different – creating journals – to fulfil two objectives:

• Cheer myself up by tackling a project on my long-list
• Create more recurring revenue

This project can cross over between my art business and my separate web publishing business, but I’m focusing on creating products for my other business first, since it’s the bigger one, and as it’s less reliant on imagery I should be able to create several different books that will form a single series.

Distractions are usually something I beat myself up over, but this time around I definitely need it!

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The last week has been fantastic – we’ve had a great time as a family and worn ourselves out traipsing around Lancashire. I made sure to get a few reference photos of Mum for a future portrait and as usual, she gave me instructions to magically erase a few decades.

A dismal failure with Composimold

I cut open the mold I made last week and found that although the disaster with the wax that I had anticipated hadn’t actually happened, another disaster took its place.

The paper and card form stuck to the Composimold and disintegrated. Maybe it was because it stayed in there for a few days… maybe if I’d have cut it out straight away it would have been alright.

So with my positive destroyed, I really needed the cast that came out of it to be a hit. Unfortunately, the wax melted the Composimold in parts, split the sides and lost lots of the detail. All of the modeling work from the last few weeks was wasted.

Right… next week I’m back to the grindstone I guess. This week I’m too busy to be upset about any of it.

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