Our Earth Day Contest had a modest twitter turnout, but it was a turnout nonetheless. Thank you all that support EcoPatterns in our daily fight to raise awareness for endangered animals. We’d like to extend our congratulations to Jason Springer and Shahnaz Mohammed. Thanks again, and don’t forget to follow them on twitter as well as @ecopatterns.

I like breathing clean air. We all do. Now that Earth Day is running 40 years strong as of today, it is showing that recognition is global. Businesses are going green and growing more environmentally motivated. Despite all this, the state of the Earth is still in trouble. We’re losing trees and plantlife at alarming rates as well as losing wildlife to extinction. I started my business a little under 2 years ago to spread awareness and hope and I am pleased with the strides I’ve made. But you know what? We can do better. I am going to up the ante today.

In honor of Earth-Day, EcoPatterns is prepared to give away a free 8.5″ x 11″ art print of your choice to two lucky winners. How do you get one? Easy! Retweet this post and follow @ecopatterns on twitter using our nifty little button below. Later tonight we will choose 2 lucky winners randomly.

Sometimes, a change in surroundings is needed. Over the past year, most of our success and headway was made in Manhattan (particularly in the Union Square Artist’s Market) as well as ongoing interactions and collaborations with artists from Brooklyn despite being temporarily headquartered in Queens. After much thought and planning, Ecopatterns decided that change was a concept we’d dive back into.

This week, we packed our boxes and moved back to our old digs on the Upper West Side of Manhattan (where we originally set up shop for our first year in business). We couldn’t be happier. Not only is this move exciting for us personally, but we feel that it would benefit us professionally as well. See, we see a lot of promise for the Upper West Side artistic community. We know there are a lot of cool, hip folks here that would be open to talk shop and share ideas. Stressing the importance of community is key especially to the development and nurturing of artists and their businesses. While we are doing everything we can in the online circuit (with places like Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, Etsy, etc.) we can’t forget the local, physical aspect of networking. Hey, we can’t let Brooklyn get all the press.

That said, we’d like to give a shout to all of our artist neighbors. We want to hear from you in hopes of getting a dialogue or movement going. What do you work on? Where do you market your work? What are your artistic goals?

Photo credit: Jamie – “From Me To You” Photo Blog <-- please check out her site. it's awesome. also, check out her stunning Upper West Side FREE iPhone Wallpapers set.