Lane Finds and an emotional plea.

I have an episode of Lane Finds for you. It's the 16th one and I am truly getting exhausted. If you follow my feed you will see a post from the Downtown Eastside asking for donations of clothing and pet food.

The situation is dire so if you can donate, please do. Just go there directly, they are looking for any kind of warm, clean clothing. Pick one and just go and give.

My regular pick-up went on vacation for almost two months and I had so many bags to donate in my apartment I really got disheartened with the whole project. People have the way and means to get these donations to the people who need them. I do not have a car and I am physically lugging all of this back to my apartment, washing it (lugging it up and down 3 flights of stairs and paying $2.50 a load to wash and $2.25 to dry). I then bag it and get it ready for Gloria to pick up and she takes it to her garage and sorts it for the many places who either pick it up from here or she drops it directly to.

This is truly a labour of love.

The downtown East Side needs help and everyone is pledging to help in some way or somehow on social media. This is one way you can get involved, donate a bag to a shelter of good clean usable clothing that you are not using anymore. DO NOT THROW YOUR OLD CLOTHING AWAY.

I literally grabbed an armful from a lady who was just about to throw it into the bin last week.

I know she thought I was crazy and I don’t give a shit. Why throw out perfectly good clothing?

I am not talking about donating to Value Village - they are a for-profit company and are not doing anything to help the DTES please dispel this myth, If you don’t believe me please do some research and you will find what you need to know what they actually are and who they are currently supporting.

Want to buy something for them - they need socks, underwear and toiletries to get by.

Each day there are ‘sweeps’ at 8 am, the city is taking everything from people who are sleeping on the street and leaving them with nothing, rain, shine, cold or hot it’s constant.

Lane Finds EPS 16

My process

Things are hot and smokey here in Vancouver and I am having a bit of trouble settling in and focusing by sitting in front of my computer now.

I had to think a lot about what to post this week, I am knee-deep in marketing, sorting out my journey and making plans for my next moves, thinking through the need for the next moves and the desires behind them.

Alongside this time of processing plans and feelings, I am working on my virtual artist residency. Drawing, projecting images and drawing so I can practice with spray paint, using water-soluble paint in a refillable pen on vellum over top my large format printed vogue images. A trip to Layout Art Supply to pick up more supplies, spray paint, smaller refillable markers, different types of markers, more water-soluble paint in the colour of purple, some extra nibs for the refillable pen and some extra caps for the spray paint so I can experiment with different types of ways the paint can come out of the can. I am capturing my process during these days of the residency in my Instagram stories, mostly with timelapse videos if you want to come along and see the process unfold. I also created some long-form IGTV videos with specific goals of my process.

I filled out my final application for an artist residency in Montreal this week too. The application needs to be juried and accepted and I will not know for another 10 days so I will have to sit tight and exercise patience.

I think it is worth filling you in on my photographic process at this point because it also drives the rest of my art practice of continuous line drawings. The lines, shapes and the connection created in each image gave me the want to draw the lines to symbolize the process and how we need to connect, now more than ever.

We know each other by our lines, wrote William Blake after The Book of Ruth. He was referring specifically to the bounding lines that keep everything together, the lines that bind us, without them there is chaos. Chaos is unmanageable for anyone, the lines, the connections we have in our lives keep us grounded and keep chaos at bay. With this in mind, my process of planning and executing a shoot can be traced with a line.

I am inspired by an idea and reach out to the agency I work with to select a model to work with and book them. I then find the clothing I want to use during the shoot and print out inspiration images to use during the shoot as inspiration for the model and myself. I use them as a guide to keeping the original idea in mind during the entire process. I also use them as a guide for posing so the model has a reference.

I make JPGS from the shoot after a quick edit in Lightroom and send them to the modelling agency so they can make selects. I also make my own selects and add them to a submission cue. I always work ahead and plan my days by working ahead, planning for me is key.

Then I decide if I want to draw the lines in digital form using procreate and my iPad or if I want to make a print and project the image so I can draw it big or if I want to just use a smaller print and make a drawing with a 4x6. All of these decisions are based back on the original inspiration of the editorial I decided to create.

Turns out sitting down to tell you about my process became a much longer blog post than I intended and I’m glad. Sharing the process with you will also give you a window into where I am moving next with my art practice and my photography.

Each of these series of steps is long and takes a lot of energy. For a long time, I thought I just had to take photos and that was that, it is only now over a decade into this journey do I know and realize that the process is so much more than gaining recognition. The connection for me is the key and in that key is the line I am using to be so grateful for what I do and for me to engage with you.

Thank you for reading this far, I appreciate your support and am so grateful to have you along on my journey.

The images in this post are a recent editorial I created, some expired polaroids and images used in my formal artist residency application.

Marketing.

Yeah, it’s a bit of a big word. Especially when you work for yourself.

But you know what, someone shared an idea with me, or rather a concept that I wanted to share with you because it has changed this whole beast for me.

Have you ever heard of Agile Project Management? It has 4 key values; individuals and interactions over processes and tools; working software (insert your service/product here) over comprehensive documentation; customer collaboration over contract negotiation; and responding to change over following a plan.

There is also an agile form of marketing, I know right? Who knew you could be so agile in freelance? I only thought agility was for dogs. Anyway here is what agile marketing is; the field of advertising and content creation. For example, a marketing project can be segmented into a landing page, Ad campaign, content creation, and so on. Next, these tasks are carried out and eventually, the team reviews and makes adjustments based on the lessons learned.

So my friend has a new job at a big company as a project manager and we were talking about her workload. She has 1 project that is following the old school waterfall project management where everything kind of flows into the next. It has a very specific task list and you chip away at it with a specific goal. It is the typical way of managing a project and also an effective way to get a team to work together because everything is defined.

Agile is a totally different animal, at least my interpretation of it is. It is something that is always moving, always changing and having your own business, especially in a pandemic has needed a master class in adaptation. I feel agile project management is a way to ebb and flow with your business plan and goals in mind in a more attainable way.

I have been through two self-employment courses, one at BCIT and one at Centennial College, both were great and I wrote business plans in each program. In one we even learned about and implemented the lean canvass business plan, it is the way of the future. Or so they say. https://leanstack.com/leancanvas

At the end of writing both business plans, you do write an action plan, and it gets you going, month by month with attainable actionable steps but what agile project management gives you is a way to be more flexible with that plan. I have my main goal in mind and both of my plans were very similar and I know that you need multiple revenue streams to stay afloat as a small business owner. What agile project management gives you is a more flexible way to execute those goals in two-week increments.

Does that make sense or am I just babbling?

What I did was take a large piece of paper and on the outer edges wrote the main end goals and then made a list of numbers to identify the weeks and gave myself goals to achieve inside of each of these weeks. IF the goals are not met or need to change that is ok, it is part of this process. Part of the ebb and flow of having a business because it does become a living breathing organism and it needs to be able to grow in a way that you may not have planned. Agile project management gives you the ability to encourage that growth in a much more functional way.

So that has been the last couple of weeks and today I just met my first goal so I will move onto the next. I will keep you posted on how things go here, I just wanted to tell you about this just in case it can help you too.

In other news, I went to see the VanGogh exhibition and it was just as they said, like being inside of a daydream.

I have also filled up a sketchbook with some new types of figure drawings and I am really liking them. I created a silkscreen of one of them and am thinking about putting the simple face on a tote. I then will take everything to the streets to sell. Sit out on a blanket with my wares and my SWAG, a simple sign, my square (to take electronic payments) and a smile. If you want anything DM me on Insta and I will hook you up. Right now I’m figuring out how to do screening properly so please stand by.