South Dakota artist Linda Roesch is no stranger to the Monday blues.

“I used to dread waking up in the mornings” Roesch says,”especially on Mondays. I had an okay job with a reputable company, but it just wasn’t the right fit for me.  That wasn’t the life that I wanted, and with each passing year I felt like I was giving up a tiny bit of my soul.”

Roesch has always had a passion for making art, and in 2013 she embarked on a ‘Volunteer Road-Trip Gift Giving Arventure’; a project funded through kickstarter.com that took her on a watercolor sketching tour of the American southwest.  This journey led her to eventually quit her day job and spend the next eight months volunteering at her cousin’s animal rescue organization in California.  She had no plans to return to South Dakota, but came back home in April at the request of her family.

“This was an unexpected turn,” Roesch says, “and I didn’t want to just go back to work. I felt like my whole life I’d been waiting for this chance to ‘make it’ on my own, and I wanted to see if I could really make a living using my own brain.”

And hands.  Roesch entered art and craft fairs throughout South Dakota, selling her art, upcycled clothing and accessories.  She began showing at smaller, local venues, but has gradually worked her way up to larger festivals.  She’s looking forward to growing her business next year, but the festival business occupies only a portion of Roesch’s time.

“When I’m not making art for festivals,” Roesch says, “I’m in project mode.”

Roesch keeps a list of project ideas tacked to her bedroom wall. “It’s the first thing I see when I wake up in the morning, and the last thing I see at night before I go to bed.  Some of these projects I’ll never complete and some of them aren’t even good ideas,” she laughs, “but the others could potentially be pursued at any time.”

For her latest project, Roesch again turned to Kickstarter.com, a popular crowdfunding platform.  Her new project is called Meow Mondays, and with it her goal is simply to make people smile on the least exciting days of next year.  For this project, Roesch plans to create a drawing of her cat Bitty Cow for every Monday in 2015, and then email these drawings to anyone who supports the campaign.

She hopes Meow Mondays will give her friends and fans something to look forward to when they go back to work after a relaxing weekend.

“No one wants to come into work on a Monday morning” she says. “I want people to have a reason to be excited when they open their emails on Mondays.  I hope they can’t wait to see this week’s silly drawing of Bitty Cow.”

Roesch hopes the project will spread via word of mouth and through social media.  She’s thinks that as more and more people see the project, they’ll get excited about it too and want share it with their friends. And, she’s already received accolades from the Kickstarter staff.

“I got an email within 2 hours of launching the project November 1st, saying that someone from Kickstarter loved the project and it had been selected as a staff pick.” Roesch said.  This means the video will be featured more prominently on Kickstarter’s website, and it will show up in their Twitter feed and on their blog.”

You can check out Roesch’s project by visiting www.kickstarter.com and searching for ‘Meow Mondays’.  The project will wrap on December 1, but the campaign needs to raise $2000 by that day in order to fulfill the funding goal.  If the funding goal isn’t met, no one will be charged anything, and Meow Mondays won’t happen in 2015.

Roesch isn’t too concerned about that right now.  Today, Roesch is just happy to be making her art, and excited about the possibilities of Meow Mondays; a project she believes has the potential to go viral if enough people hear about it and spread the word.

View the Meow Mondays page here: www.kickstarter.com

Contact:
Linda Roesch
linda.m.roesch@gmail.com
Roscoe, South Dakota
916-221-8586