August Work in Progress - on various fronts!

Like last weekend's thunderstorm that crashed and banged overhead then faded away into the distance, only to return hours later, the IRS tax withholding issue at Zazzle rumbles on!

This is the third month that I've had very little art work in progress to show 
because so much of my time has been taken up with trying to make sense of the legalese of tax treaties and IRS instructions, writing emails to Zazzle and generally trying to persuade them to drop the 'burdensome' ITIN (International Tax Identification Number) requirement which they have told us throughout comes from the IRS. 

Of course, I haven't by any means been working alone on this. 

Click to enlarge

We have more than 200 members in the International Zazzlers United facebook group and by putting our heads together, we have the HMRC Tax Treaty team taking this issue up with their US counterparts and have recently obtained a letter on IRS headed notepaper that states clearly that the IRS do not insist on us getting an ITIN.


We are currently waiting for Zazzle to respond to this, having sent them a copy of the letter last week. (see update below)

In the meantime the group has been helping members get their updated W-BEN forms approved - no simple matter! - so that they can get paid at all! And now we are trying to spread the word to all the international designers/artists who had 30% tax incorrectly withheld from their August earnings, that they can reclaim the money from Zazzle directly and do not have to get it back from the IRS, a process that would require them to get the dreaded ITIN! (Scroll down to Adjustment for Overwithholding.)


But I haven't been totally idle on the art and design front.

I have added a new pattern to my 'Egyptian' collection, the rusty red 'Tribal Shields' pattern on the clock -

Egyptian Patterns
by poshandpainterly

And I've made a start on my 2015 Christmas Card, better late than never -

Christmas Mice

And finally, the Annual Phlox I grew from seed, that tried my patience when I was faced with about 160 tiny seedlings to transplant, is flowering and is begging me to make it into a new floral, cottage-style 'mini-print' pattern that I hope to have at least started by the time I write next month's blog post!

It's definitely feeling as if summer is all but over here; I was tempted to put the heating on first thing this morning. Not that I've had much time to enjoy my little garden this summer - the Great Tax Debacle began in early June!

Will it be all over by the time I write my next Work in Progress blog post? The jury's still out on that one but I very much hope so!

Edited at the last minute to say that we've just had this announcement from Zazzle: 

We wanted to let everyone know that Zazzle has reached a temporary resolution with the IRS on the US TIN requirement for non-US resident Designers. Based on this new information, a US TIN will not be required on your appropriate W-8 form for the moment. The requirements may change in the future, in the IRS’s sole discretion, as Zazzle is a US-based company that must abide by the requirements of our governing tax authority, the IRS. 

Zazzle will continue to accept W-8 forms that are correctly-filled-out, and which do not have a US TIN but do provide a foreign TIN, in order to minimize your withholding tax deductions. We are continuing to ask all non-US resident Designers to submit an updated W-8 form as soon as possible in order to avoid the IRS’s default withholding rate of thirty percent (30%). Please submit your updated W-8 form to Zazzle-w8@zazzle.com as soon as possible.

It’s possible that the requirements may change in the future, so we appreciate your flexibility. Zazzle will continue to support and advocate for our international Designers. We are currently working under the assumption that this temporary resolution will remain valid through 2/28/2017 when the current law is set to expire; however, tax requirements may change at any time due to new or updated tax laws and/or IRS requirements. 

There's still the issue of the Refunds to deal with but even so, this is VERY GOOD NEWS! 

Little Mice and a Mosque

I still have a huge backlog of floral greeting cards to upload and I haven’t been able to make as big an inroad into them this week as I would have liked. 

Not just because I had an overnight guest, Thurs/Fri – a rare occurrence for me and one that required a fair amount of tidying up and some food preparation; but also, on Wednesday, a builder arrived to start painting the high up woodwork on the outside of my house, and I had community police officers visiting and phoning, along with the local council and various neighbours, all because someone scrawled some graffiti along the side wall of my house. Then another Graduation 'customer request' late on Friday and today, a nasty Trojan, revealed by my anti-virus scan!

Time, then, to call a temporary halt to the floral repeat patterns and dig out a non-floral design that I painted a while back but hadn’t yet got around to making into cards –

Little Mouse New School Good Luck Card, Grandson by helikettle

This one has only given rise to half a dozen cards, plus a custom front one, in case customers would like to add the recipient’s name. So I hope I'll have time to attack the backlog of florals as well this week.

Surprisingly, amidst all the chaos of the past few days, I have made a start on a new Eid card for 2012, though I haven't got very far. There are a few months to go till Eid but it’s always worthwhile uploading well ahead of each special holiday or festival to give the search engines time to find them.

So here's my rather faint tracing of the famous 'Blue Mosque' - which I hope to turn into a card design for Eid by this time next week -

I haven’t yet decided whether to paint this mosque in watercolours or make a collage of it. But either way, I'll need a tracing. I think it would be a very suitable design for a collage but it would require a lot more accurate cutting than a floral design, as so many straight lines are involved and straight lines never were my strong point!

The same primary school teacher who offered to pay a shilling to any pupil who could find a tree with a brown trunk, also offered a reward to anyone who could find a straight line in Nature. Maybe it’s this absence of truly straight lines that usually steers me in the direction of ‘natural’, living things and away from anything remotely ‘architectural?  

But Eleanor Rossevelt apparently said, 'You must do the thing you think you cannot do' - so, I'll give it a try!



.

All Creatures Great and Small

If you are one of those talented artists who paint wonderful pictures of animals, this is definitely the moment for you to look away!

I've never been very good at, or in fact particularly interested in, drawing or painting animals. As a little girl, I habitually drew ballet dancers (I wanted to be one for a while!!) or sailing boats - obviously the result of living by the sea. In later years, I went on to paint landscapes, people, flowers, interiors, still lifes - and, apart from once making my big brother a birthday card with an elephant wearing a mortar board, standing by a blackboard, when he had just started teaching, I seem to have largely avoided attempting to draw our four-footed friends!

Today my teaching was postponed till tomorrow so I got around to making cards from some sketches I'd been working on in the evenings whilst watching my regular ration of whodunnits - and these cards involved animals!

I'd been putting them off for a while because I couldn't decided which medium to use. I wonder whether anyone else ever comes up against the problem that whatever I plan to do, someone famous has already done something similar and I worry that I'll feel as if I'm plagiarising! Sometimes I wish I hadn't looked at so much art and illustration and could start from a completely clean slate. For instance, I wondered whether to use pen and wash for my 'animals' cards but then Quentin Blake has made a pretty good job of a pen and wash elephant on a thank you card! But if I went down the collage route for this 'range', one of Leo Lionni's first and perhaps most famous children's book illustrations involved a wonderfully simple but effective collage mouse! So thank goodness for my newly discovered 'watercolour pencil and watercolour' technique!

I like to have two of these on the go at once so that I can work on one while the other is drying. In the past, I've had a few disasters when I've tried to tidy up the outlining before the 'wash' is completely dry!

So from a couple of decidely large animals to some of the smallest -

I haven't used this method very much yet but there's something I've learned about it which I'd like to pass on to anyone who may be thinking of trying it after reading my step-by-step instructions for painting a leprechaun for St Patrick's Day. If you use a mixture of different brands of watercolour pencils, BE VERY CAREFUL about how much pressure you use. Some are softer and/or more crumbly than others and this can result in flakes - or even chunks! - of the 'lead' breaking off and staining the paper. And it's practically impossible to then remove the unwanted marks. I've found that it's OK if I stick to using those softer ones because I get used to the amount of pressure needed, but once I start to go from one type to the other, I'm on dangerous ground!

That apart, I'm beginning to really like this way of painting and think I learnt some useful lessons from my Hot Cross Bunnies - and rather importantly, I'm hoping I won't wake up tomorrow with a painfully stiff shoulder, like I did this morning, as a result of  yesterday's fiddly collage!

'Mice' Kids' Apron by helikettle
Design kitchen aprons on zazzle