f e s t i v a l s

When you start a creative collaboration together with someone, you never know how it's going to develop and change. What's most important is to have a shared, common goal, so that when things don't go as planned or change when you least expect it, and they will, you still want to keep going.

In 2008, we started BubbleArt with a shared interest in the ocean, enthusiasm for the brilliantly colored sealife therein, and a longtime desire to create something to find ease, laughter, and enjoyment with. Gig played around with circle and arc forms because, well, they made her feel happy. Wendy played around with images from her underwater photography and the color she was capturing. The first BubbleArt images were then drawn by hand, scanned into digital form and colored using a wacom tablet. Prints were made, matted and framed. Then came prints on canvas.

To see what others thought of our work, we started doing festival art shows, mainly for feedback and a chance to see what others thought about it. This was a lot of fun! We shared our initial work with friends, family and got a chance to meet folks at festivals from all over. The feedback was encouraging! We also sold some of our work at the Artist Xchange Art Gallery/Boutique in San Francisco.

Then came Halloween, and Gig drew up the cutest little, bubbly-looking bat hanging from a tree. Since folks probably weren't going to hang a print of a bat, black cats, and witch's hats from their living room walls, we decided to make it into a Halloween card. Then Wendy got the idea to writeup a rhyme for it and wha-lah!, people loved it! So we started a line of cards with rhymes. And from that came the idea to create The Life & Rhymes of Sea Creatures books, with both an image and a fact-based rhyme, describing the creature. Well, before you knew it, the paper, inkand printing rendered expensive and environmentally strained, so we decided to try and make electronic books for new tablet devices coming out. This worked! We launched our first two eBooks in the iBookstore end of 2010, plus a line of cards with images accompanied by fact-based, lyrical rhymes.