Art: Behind the scenes of early March photoshoot for 710Visuals tie-dye

Welcome to another behind-the-scenes edition of the blog! On this post we're going to be delving in to a photoshoot we recently undertook in our home for the Etsy shop and our tie-dye business 710Visuals. These are some of the shirts I've been showcasing the making-of process for, so we're super stoked to finally be showing their final form to you guys! It's been a long time coming and we're still troubleshooting the ideal photoshoot set up for ourselves, but this was... something. The blank white sheet is to help prevent the background from competing with the shirts as well as to provide a template for when I needed to go in and tinker with the colors after in editing. I never want to over-do it in the photo processing stage because I want the colors to reflect as close to reality as possible. I don't even edit out my zits the majority of the time, haha. Luckily, when these photos were taken my skin was doing pretty good- no real pimples to cover up, and I didn't feel the need for much foundation or powder. I normally use a BB cream with Too Faced's Peach Perfect Loose Powder patted on top to set, but for these photos I just patted on some Milani Powder foundation real quick to even and brighten things up a smidge. 

Antho, of course, didn't need any make up for his fabulous face (not that I need make up, but I do appreciate it's power and really enjoy using it). We did, however, opt to put some of my Lime Crime Diamond Crusher in Trip on his lips at the end, though. He wanted to feel fancy and why not? Guys deserve to feel fabulous and have glitter lips if they want, too.

The tie-dye shirts photographed in this shoot are all now available in our Etsy shop for purchase, should you happen to find any that strike your fancy. We had fun doing the shoot and experimenting, though we'll likely be doing things a bit differently in the future. If we choose to shoot inside our home we will do it in a different location and/or with a different angle as the lighting was rather difficult to get precisely where we wanted it to be. Everything is a learning experience, though, and we'll figure out something even better for the next round! Keep scrolling for more photos!

Art: January 2018 tie-dye round 2

Malcolm Gladwell once said it takes roughly 10,000 hours of practice at any craft before one reaches master level proficiency, and while it's been disputed since it's initial publishing, I think it's a reasonable sort of goal-post for anyone seeking to really master their craft. If that's truly the case, though, we're going to be working at this for awhile yet... Though we started tie-dyeing some time in 2015 I'd estimate each individual shirt or fold design works out to roughly 30 minutes of hands-on-time with all the processing time included. I'd say we've hit around 200, maybe 300 hours? We're younglings in that sense, because there's still so much more experimentation to be done! Even though we've made over 400 items now, there's always so much more we could try, and there's always new colours and folds to experiment with! I suppose that could seem intimidating, and at times it has... when your budget is limited and your aspirations grand, it can be frustrating trying to work within the confines of your available funds- but, that too is in and of itself a great learning experience. We have a bounty of colours available to us right now, an amount I might even consider mildly absurd, but as a lover of colour I really can't complain. Every shirt shows a new aspect to a colour that might not have been revealed otherwise, and I sometimes find myself growing especially fond of a particular shade as my reserves of it dwindle to naught. In all honesty, if I'm happy to own 20-some-odd shades to slather on my lips, I can't at all be disappointed at a collection of textile dyes exceeding that! I'm not at all chagrined at having too-many-colour options beyond the logistical need to find a place for them to reside between dye sessions... and, alas, with our rather limited space for the time being I'm scrambling to find a balance between practicality, utility, and sanity. We're getting there with Antho's help, and once we sort and organise our back-log of new creations we'll have more room to work with. 

But the creative impulse is hard to ignore... so here we are.

Art: Winter ice-dye round two

More ice-dye! What can I say, I love almost everything about this process and it's so much fun! We tend to have a variety of blank t-shirts floating around at any given time so all we really ever need to pick up is the ice so we're prone to spontaneous dye sessions when the mood strikes. This is ideal for us as inspiration can occur at the most random of times and I like to strike while the iron is hot- or, in this case, while the ice is still cold.  This being the desert the ice tends to change states pretty quick during the warmer months, though currently we have a little more wiggle room which is nice. In the process we've been accumulating quite a back catalogue of freshly made shirts that have yet to get properly photographed and listed on our Etsy shop, so for now they're in a bit of a limbo. This has been a little frustrating for me as I'm definitely the hardline type-A in this relationship and feel a need to stay perpetually productive. I always carry two different agendas and a plentitude of pens in various inks and viscosities to work in tangent with the complex color-coded system of tabs I use for my agendas denoting tasks accomplished or goals and events I'm looking forward to or striving towards... I make spreadsheets for fun. One of my biggest goals for 2018 is to dramatically increase our shop inventory and I've felt pressured to get cracking on it before this month slips away into the next. On top of that we've been cycling through various illnesses in various parts of our bodies (chest, stomach, sinus, blah) for most of this year so far... so, really, I suppose there's a very good reason we've been in a bit of a stagnant pause on listing items. I'm grateful that we're still being productive and at least creating, but I've got high-in-the-sky dreams for what I want to accomplish this year and I tend to put a lot of pressure on myself... perhaps 2018 is the year I should breathe deep and try to be a little gentler on myself. These things will get done, and soon, but they'll get accomplished even more gladly when I'm not stressing myself or Antho out about having not already done it. We've still been scouting locations and making new inventory, after all, so it's not like we've simply sat idly by... though, in a sense, that's a lot of what ice dye is- waiting... but I digress.  

Here's some pretty pictures of the process!