Wow! Matt just pointed out that I am super close to my next official Patreon Goal! As of right now we’re at $2842 and the next goal is $3000, so that is getting super exciting.
Matty of course is particularly excited for this one, as in some ways it affects him the most, hehe. It’s for us to buy/build a separate framing & printing office for my paintings & canvases in Florida.
Currently as far as our Florida stuff goes, I paint downstairs in our Celebration house, having turned that floor (mostly what was supposed to be a dining room, part of the living room & kitchen) into my painting studio. Upstairs we have our bedroom, and then the spare bedroom & hallway has been turned into framing & printing/Matt’s order processing room. Our garage is now pretty much only used for spraying varnish on canvases which takes up the whole garage (no room for a car, no more room for Matt’s woodworking, nothing, as we can’t have sawdust near the canvases that are drying with varnish, three 8 hour shifts per day, it’s insane).
Which leaves us with part of a kitchen, one bedroom & the bathrooms to actually “live” in. Which theoretically should be fine for two people, but the fact is that almost all of that area is lined with boxes of paper, rolls of canvas, bubble wrap rolls that are taller than I am, countless boxes of stretcher bars, big jugs of ink, literally hundreds of picture frames & mouldings, etc. We literally have to move things out of the way each time we go upstairs. Have you seen “Hoarders?” Our house is starting to look like that, but it’s all nice new boxes of paper & canvas and shipping materials, rather than personal possessions. It is kind of embarrassing, we literally cannot accommodate visitors in our house, I am kind of ashamed to take photos that show our house in the background (even of my cats, lol – I can’t find a place to take a photo that doesn’t have boxes and bubblewrap everywhere!).
Our plan is to create/renovate a completely detached building – another garage (so that our current garage can become Matt’s woodworking shop and possibly a place to put our trailer again) with a large office room/apartment on top. I think hitting the $3000 Patreon goal will give us enough to get started (and 100% of this will go to that, I promise I won’t use it to buy fancy shoes or anything, lol). We’ll also then be able to have a dedicated varnish spraying area, a dedicated framing area, and a dedicated printing area. Matt can then use our spare bedroom as a proper office and get to do his writing more, etc. instead of having it filled with ink & stretcher bars.
It will also mean we’ll have enough room and $$ to upgrade to a new even BIGGER printer, to make ginormous canvases and larger prints (especially for Pop Gallery, since we supply all my canvases to them!) and larger full-sized masterpiece editions. At the moment we have several of the 24″ wide printers, which means (since 2″ on each side has to be wrapped on the canvas stretcher boards) we are limited in one direction to 20″ wide (which maxes us out at 20″ wide). If we upgrade to my “Dream Printer” we would 44″ wide canvas, so we could do 40″ wide by pretty much any height (ie, almost three or four feet by five feet or six feet – who knows?). More importantly we can also fit several canvases next to each other in one print run, which will mean less waste, less canvas needing to be trimmed or thrown away, less recycling, etc. which is an important part of my initiative to try to reduce my company’s carbon footprint and material waste.
We have picked out the property we are going to buy, so if things keep moving along here at Patreon we will be starting work in August! Since of course it is YOU guys who have helped make this possible, we will be documenting everything with photos so you can get excited along with us while the project comes about. Matt has already drawn up some layout diagrams of how he wants to build his big framing table, and his ideas on making a whole entire 200 square foot wall entirely out of pegboard to store picture frames! He is also excited because getting his woodworking workshop back at our home garage means he can start making me some fancy Matt-made frames (like the triptychs and altarpiece style ones I used to have from him!) again, so that in turn makes me excited to plan new paintings for them……
Thank you all so much, we couldn’t do this without you!
XO
Jasmine
