just a quick note to point you over to my facebook page –> artbymags.com where i’m throwing pics up of some old art/craft stock i’m finding around the house. stuff’s going fast so check it out!!
Tag Archives: money
an army of lovers cannot fail!
so this just happened. (click any picture and it will take you to the order page.)
i’ve been wanting to make a shirt with this phrase for many years but just never got around to it. this year, i finally have both the time and the motivation – i’m broke and i really want to go to fest! so here it is.
i’ve posted several pics of the different types of shirts that are available, just so you know there’s a wide variety. and a few styles even go up to 3XL in size. the color of the shirts will vary slightly from brand to brand and style to style, but generally they will all be a light grey/silver colored shirt, with black and red type in a distressed stencil style font. the shirts will be silkscreened professionally and i think will look better than anything i could print up at home.
as for the backstory… the concept of “an army of lovers” is attributable to plato in ancient greek times. the phrase “an army of lovers cannot fail” was adopted by activists in the early gay and women’s liberation movements and used widely, and rita mae brown popularized “an army of lovers shall not fail” in her poem “sappho’s reply” in the early 1970s. it’s something that has often been said in workerville amongst my family/tribe of womyn at the michigan womyn’s music festival and so, what with the whole summer of love feeling of fest these days i figured it was time for this shirt to appear.
i almost put a women’s symbol (with or without a fist) into the design but ended up deciding i’d rather leave it more universal, since it was a battlecry for the early queer and women’s movements, therefore hopefully making its appeal more widespread.
i humbly thank everyone for their support ahead of time. for the past several years since i started the pet business i haven’t really been creating art or designing anything, and i’ve really missed it. so i set an intention a few months back that i wanted more free time in my schedule so that i could get back to doing more creative stuff.. and lo and behold, several of my pet clients moved on and freed up some time in my schedule. so i’ve been working hard to get back into the creative swing of things… and designing tshirts is one of those things!! so i appreciate everyone’s enthusiasm and feedback and support – more than you’ll ever know.
ok.order away here:Â http://teespring.com/armyofloverscannotfail
we’re in the fucking woods! again!!
ok folks. it’s that time again.
i’ve gotten several queries about whether i was going to print these again or not. and yes, i am, due to popular demand! as usual, i am only going to hand-print these on easy-to-acquire hanes or fruit of the loom mens ribbed a-tanks – because i don’t have to work very hard to find them in town readily and i really don’t have the time to figure out anything else. if this shirt style doesn’t work for you, just hang on… when i get a minute to breath i’m going to work up another teespring campaign and offer the design on tshirts and other items too, since that’s much harder for me to manage printing at home. but i’m going ahead and putting up the paypal button here for the tanks, for those who’d like the traditional style. (i will also mention it helps me more if you order here as the reason i do this is to help fund my time in the woods and i make more $$ on the ones i print myself. but i know lots of folks want shirt styles i can’t offer so i’m going to do the teespring campaign to make everyone happy!)
so. hit “buy it now” and it will take you to a paypal checkout page. sadly, paypal’s buttons no longer work with wordpress to specify sizing so the only way i could do this was to have it be for ONE tank plus shipping. if you want more than one, just email me what you want and i can invoice you individually for it. (or i guess you can always just go through and make several orders and i can refund you the excess shipping charges.)
i will leave this up probably for about a week and then i will close pre-ordering and acquire shirts and print sometime next week so i can get them in the mail well before long crew leaves.
thanks everyone for the support and your continuing enjoyment of this silly tshirt. it makes me smile every time i see one of you in it either in person or in pictures. and stay tuned as i have another fest-related shirt idea i will be running in the next coupla weeks and hopefully bringing with me to fest to sell.
UPDATE 6/29/14: i have taken the paypal button down. if you still want a shirt, email me or leave a comment here and we can talk about it. i have 1-2 of each size  (small through 2xl) extra that i am planning on bringing to fest to sell at the worker craft sale but if you want one before then, we can work something out.
artbymags on tv!
i know i’m technically on hiatus right now and haven’t been writing here, but as i was just enjoying the latest episode of one of my favorite new tv sitcoms this fall, 2 broke girls, i FINALLY saw my stencil painting that their set designer bought from me on etsy! i guess the camera angles just hadn’t gone in that direction yet in the set apartment on the previous two episodes, but it’s right there, hanging on wall in the living room:
 see it? smack in the middle of this screen shot. it’s a small painting, and it wasn’t much money and i don’t even like the painting – it and its companion piece which i still have were just silly little stencil things i sprayed on thrift store canvases one afternoon when i was thinking about my relationship with money. i had absolutely zero luck selling them at markets for almost a year! i almost don’t even like claiming that it’s mine… except that it’s kinda exciting to see something you made on the set of a new hit tv show that’s on every week!
this is what the painting looks like:
see? not really indicative of my usual work. kinda sloppy. though i guess it does have a little street art feel to it, which is probably why they liked it for this set. it does kinda look like the kinda crap you can buy on the streets of new york for $20!
if you watch the show (which you can do online from its homepage), you know their apartment is totally thrift store funky. it must have been a really fun job for the set designers to come up with, and there’s clearly a lot more etsy art on the walls beyond mine. but, hey, it’s still cool.
and this makes my second film/tv “credit” where something i made has appeared on screen. those who’ve known me for a while will remember that my popular “evildoer” stencil t-shirt appeared in the indie film “flakes” starring zooey deschanel many years back.
i guess i do keep getting signs from the universe that i am not done creating and selling my creations… but i’m still not really feeling it right now. but who knows. maybe i’ll get a rare burst of inspiration sometime soon. we’ll see.
putting it out there…
one day last week i got the sudden itch to make myself yet another website. i’ve been thinking for a while it might be nice to have a simple page for myself that was not about my art and craft, but all the other things i do and have done. sort of a calling card for all my side-gigs and other so-called professional life. (as it were.)
much to my surprise, i had a free domain registration with my hosting service, dreamhost, who i love. i’ve been using dreamhost for years and years and have never ever had any problems with them (knock on wood). i highly recommend them if you’re ever on the hunt for a hosting company.
anyways, half a day later, http://www.margaretcoble.com was born. catchy, isn’t it? i thought about trying to come up with some snappy business name or nickname but since i do so many different things and none of them are full-fledged businesses, it just seemed easier to make it a vanity site of sorts. it is, of course, all about me. 😉
you’ll notice a few things are missing now from this artbymags.com site. i moved the non-art/craft menu content over to the other site. this blog will still cover just about anything i want to talk about, but i am going to try to talk more about art, craft, my various creative projects, and my process here. and i guess if i end up having anything to say about, oh, dog-walking or digitizing vinyl records, i’ll say it over there.
for now, it’s just basically a business card site for me, very basic and not meant to garner loads of traffic. just a sign-post on the information highway. and now you know.
the empire is expanding…
ha! if only my arty-crafty biz was an empire. i’ve got a long way to go.
but i am starting to buckle down and get more serious about it. and due to an out-of-the-blue wholesale request the other day via email, i’ve decided i might as well put it out there that i am now interested in wholesaling my stuff to shops and stores. select signs, clocks and even t-shirts if you want ’em. or really anything i make, i’m willing to wholesale if you’re willing to buy in quantity. just get in touch for pricing and minimums and we can work it out.
you can see my current inventory online in my etsy shop – always accessible via the widget in the upper right of this blog, but here’s the url if you want to bookmark it: http://www.etsy.com/shop/artbymags. and please take a stroll through my picture galleries on this site using the menus to the left – they link to my flickr site where you can see pics of all kinds of stuff i’ve made over the years and see the latest things i’ve been working on in the studio.
i’m also now expanding my stencil obsession to portraits. i’m currently working on a series of pop icon prints/paintings purely based on my own interests, but am open to commissions of anyone or anything you might have in mind. i’m even doing one of my cat, sticker, and if that turns out well i might totally start offering that service for pet owners. it won’t be cheap cuz it takes time to go from photo to stencil and then also figuring out the composition and coloring of the painting, plus finding some salvaged material to paint it on. but if this is something you might be interested, please email me.
it’s time to start making some $$ with these skills i possess and stop being so passive about it. so help me out: share me with a friend (or all of your friends via facebook or twitter!), give me feedback about my stuff here in the comments , and let me know what you’d like to see/read more of here on the blog.
new small canvas, working out some new ideas about $$$