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This weekend at the Bell Museum: Me!

I will be at the brand new Bell Museum this weekend as an artist-in-residence in their #SolutionStudio Lab. The exhibit in this space talks about how sometimes the things you need to do your work aren’t things found in stores and how artists and scientists have to sometimes make the tools that they need. I am going to talk about how I use recycled paper all the time when I make my work and then we will be making containers from recycled papers: pieces of origami art that you can use to hold things like art materials or your rock collection. I will even show you how to make a paper cup that holds water. My sister and I used to make these all the time and thought it was super fun to drink out of them. Saturday & Sunday August 4&5, 1-4 pm.

Hope to see you there!

2018-08-03T18:39:08+00:00An Artist's Life, Classes & Teaching, Out & About|Comments Off on This weekend at the Bell Museum: Me!

Tutorial: Make a valentine cut-out design

Since Valentines Day is just around the corner, I thought I would post a quick tutorial for making a heart shaped cut out design. You can use any image or pattern and “cut it out” to make it into a heart shape. (Or any other shape you want to use. The steps are the same.)

Make a heart

The first thing is to create your heart. I want a nice smooth shape that is basic black and white. You could use some clip art, but I really prefer to make my own “clip art”. (pun intended) With my own art, I never have to worry about using a copyrighted image or inadvertently stealing someone else’s design. I could draw something in Illustrator or use the vector tools in Photoshop, but I think it is so much easier to just start with a piece of paper. Seriously.

Why? I like the quality of the shape. Vector designs often look too perfect to me. It is really fast and easy to use the circle tool and the pen tool to create something that is symmetrical and has perfectly smooth lines, but I think that’s boring. It is also fast and easy to use scissors and a piece of dark colored paper to cut out a shape, and get all kinds of imperfections: little wobbles of the scissors, curves that are more irregular and so on. It looks less computer generated to me and I like that.

So I sketched a heart with an arrow design on a piece of black paper and cut it out. I used a paper punch to make the little dots. Then, […]

2018-02-05T13:34:56+00:00Classes & Teaching, Freebies & Patterns, Spoonflower & Fabric Design, Tutorials|Comments Off on Tutorial: Make a valentine cut-out design

I think I forgot to eat breakfast this morning.

You’d think by this point in my life that I wouldn’t miss things like this, but there it is. I was focused on a project (taking photos for some new classes) and then I had a meeting to run to and I am pretty sure I didn’t even finish my cup of tea. So then this afternoon, I was kind of scatterbrained and not very focused and suddenly I realized that all I have eaten today is a bowl of lettuce and a hard-boiled egg. That explains a lot.

Forgetting to fuel up, in the metaphorical sense, came up in a couple of conversations today. Back in the late summer, when it was time to schedule teaching gigs for this winter, I was 100% apathetic. I scheduled almost nothing. I was busy and the thought of scheduling one more thing was just completely unappealing, no matter how far away it was on the calendar or how easy it was. They were all classes I had taught before and venues where I know all of the quirks. I was so bogged down in the boring details of contracts, descriptions and logistics that it was just easier to say “no, I’m just too busy” and know that I was really just bored.

And that was kind of the conversation that we had today. Being so caught up in the “getting it done” part of your job, that you don’t have time for the reason you were there in the first place: because it is something you love.

Just a couple of weeks ago, I taught a class at a new venue to a new group that I haven’t worked with before and it […]

2018-01-29T18:20:05+00:00An Artist's Life, Classes & Teaching|Comments Off on I think I forgot to eat breakfast this morning.

“What if nobody shows up?”

Last year, I got a grant from the state arts board to make some new work. Part of the requirements of the grant was to have a part of the project that the public could participate in. This could be a performance to attend, art making, a video to watch. Something that they could interact with in some way.

I chose to do a series of mini-workshops where I showed participants how to do a tiny taste of my process making the art for the exhibition that was the culmination of the grant. The workshops were well attended and I had so much fun. A friend recently did a similar series of art making workshops for another grant. She posted about her nervousness and excitement about the events and one of the commenters on that post of hers really stood out for me. The comment was something like this:

“You are so brave. I could never do an event like that, I would be too scared that nobody would show up.”

I read that comment and I thought to myself, “Oh honey. Nobody always shows up. You can count on that.”

When I say “nobody” I don’t mean literally nobody. I mean that you never know exactly who is going to show up and it is never going to be who you think it is. I do a lot of art making events and residencies and pop-up kinds of things in many different venues because I love it, but the reality is that:

  • 80% of the time there are fewer people there than I would wish for
  • 5% of the time there are way more people than I am prepared […]
2017-09-11T17:31:16+00:00An Artist's Life, Classes & Teaching, Everything Else|12 Comments
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About me

Becka Rahn

fabric designer • Spoonflower Handbook author • teaches classes in Photoshop, fabric design, Spoonflower, embroidery, artist business skills, dyeing, surface design • Etsy seller • artist

Minneapolis, MN

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