24th February 2008: Who's made a mark this week?

The website for Vivien's classes at The Welland Park Community College

"Who's made a mark this week" has a couple of themes this week - (1) education and workshop and (2) museums and art gallery blogs. You could say it's all about learning........

Art blogs, education and workshops

• Three weeks ago, professional artist and teacher Vivien Blackburn, (Painting, Prints and Stuff), started a series of weekend posts on teaching styles (see below). Vivien also used Sitekreator to create a no-cost website for her class which provides basic access details and includes an on-line exhibition of the work produced by her students. I'd love to know if any other art teachers/bloggers reading this have ever written a similar blog post or are stimulated to write one after reading Vivien's blog posts or produced a similar website.
  
• Teaching and Learning Styles Part 1 - approaches to making a student feel comfortable in class
  
• Teaching Styles Part 2 - Differentiation - on working with mixed ability students and the celebration of originality, individuality and differences
  
• Teaching and Learning Styles - Part 3 - sets out Viven's perspective on the core elements to an effective approach to teaching drawing and painting.
• Last June I highlighted Irene Brady's Nature journal workshops on this blog (and her blog Irene Brady's Nature Drawing and Journaling Workshops). Irene has recently had one of those 'life lessons' you could really do without on her return from her recent 4 day workshop trip to Costa Rica which you can read about here. I feel sure there'll be a lot of people commiserating with Irene and probably citing a good few examples of similar experiences! In a later post, Irene writes about journaling principles.
  
• Toni Kelly (A Spattering) has documented an explanation about how a process for Alcohol Transfers works using using 70% rubbing alcohol with inkjet transparencies. You can download it as a pdf file from her website here.
  
• Elin Pendleton (Daily Paintings and Painting Lessons by Elin Pendleton) has been demonstrating her work in progress using an egg timer - see this post and the previous 7!
  
• Last week Sharon B (Mindtracks) has been providing research tips and links for students at the beinning of the Australian academic year, which includes a link to resources for researching images online - as listed by the Australian National University. Take a peek also at another of her posts last week which highlights the findings of some new British research (PDF) commissioned by the British Library and JISC which looks at Information Literacy and the Google Generation.
• Many thanks to all those who commented on Life drawing class - an introduction. The comments received will be used to revise the pdf publication A Making A Mark Guide: Life Drawing and Life Class. I'll also be including some tips about drawing in life class.
  

Art Museums and Galleries Blogs

More and more art museums and galleries are getting involved with blogging. I am in fact involved with a pilot project which I can't talk about just yet! In the meantime here are three blogs which have not been featured on this blog before.

• Two museum blogs which are new to me - both commenting on Artshare on Facebook (Note: I've gone distinctly luke-warm about Facebook as previously reported)
• ArtShare on Facebook: A Progress Report by The Brooklyn Museum outlines how use of the facility has progressed and which other museums have also joined.
  
• Last week the Robert Goldwater Library Online Resource (with a focus on the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas) had a post to indicate that the Met Museum joins ArtShare on Facebook

Having launched in early November, we now have just over 1000 people using ArtShare on Facebook. I’m happy to say we’ve been joined by five other institutions (IMA, Met, Powerhouse, V&A, Walters) with a few more on the way soon. 174 artists are using ArtShare to share their own works. To date, institutions have uploaded 438 works from their collections and artists have uploaded 754.
Brooklyn Museum: ArtShare on Facebook: A Progress Report

• I'm personally not at all convinced by the metrics associated with the people who opine about the top 100 or top 20 art blogs. If they'd just remember to stick to saying "this is my personal opinion of the top 20" I'd be much happier! Here's another recent one (which is an opinion even if it doesn't say so clearly) Top 20 (or so) Art Blogs from All Things Visual, the blog forthe Visual Resources Collection, Department of Art History, The University of Chicago

Art Blogs - and their birthdays

• Vartanian (Hrag Vartanian) has a really interesting post on What I love and hate about art blogging. Like Sharon B (Mindtracks) who highlighted this post, I agree with a lot of it but also don't think there is any need for more flaming. Personally I don't find being 'nice to one another' and constructive and civilised debate to be incompatible! ;)
• Charley Parker (Lines and Colors) recently highlighted Simon Otto's blog (Simon Otto). Simon uses white ink/paint to good effect when doing his line drawings.
  
• Shirley (Paper and Threads), who lives in the central New York, has been visiting museums and drawing.
  
• Art Blog birthdays:
• I suddenly remembered that Postcard from Provence had its third birthday last weekend until just after I published my post last Sunday! So I added it in as an 'afterword'
• Which prompted Laura to highlight that Laurelines will also be three years old on 26th February.
• If you're having a blog birthday, or know somebody who is, just leave a comment and tell me when it is and I'll be happy to highlight them in this weekly blog post. It's always good to celebrate the art blogs that keep going year after year!
  

Art Business and Marketing

• Deborah at Sellout is having some problems with the level of responses she's getting to her blog and has decided to impose a blogging hiatus. I hope she gets her problems resolved soon as it has become a very popular blog in a very short space of time. Earlier in the month she had an interesting post about The Problem With Personal Finance Advice For Artists and behaviours associated with financial dependencies.
  

Art - open exhibitions and competitions

Two opportunities for portrait artists:

• The Royal Society of Portrait Painters is accepting entries for its Annual Exhibition at the Mall Galleries at the FBA Offices in Carlton House Terrace on Friday 29th February & Saturday 1st March 2008 between 10-5. The exhibition runs from 24th April - 11 th May with a Private View on the 23rd and has some significant prizes.
  
• American Artist Magazine have constructed a wonderful page of inspiration from self-portraits by the old and modern masters- one to bookmark! This is associated with their self portrait competition. You can see the latest entries here.
  

Websites and blogging

• Smashing Magazine has 10 principles of effective web design - some good screen shots to illustrate the points made
  
• Fadtastic has 25 Ways To Improve Your Site In 5 Minutes (Thanks to Sharon B again for both this and the above link!)
• Turbomilk has produced a very clear and well illustrated article about 10 mistakes with icon design. (Note the theme - good illustrations to support learning?)
  
• How many Blogger people have noticed that Google has enabled GrandCentral so you can receive calls and post voicemail with your blog? GrandCentral provides an innovative web-based voice communications platform that gives you One Number...for Life^TM - a number that's not tied to a phone or a location - but tied to you. This is the FAQs page. re. the Google takeover. I'm assuming that they're saying this is not tied to a location that it's not just a USA only service - anybody know anything more?

and finally.......

This is a little bit different this week.

Talking to a singer about her website in my drawing class on Thursday got me to thinking about all those other independent artists who are now making it big because they found their 'voice' and got online.

One such - in the music field - is Adele. For those of you outside the UK who have not heard of Adele take a look at her website and/or her My Space page (c.1.9 million views of her profile) and hear some tracks (my favourite is 'Chasing Pavements') from her new album which I bought yesterday. It's called 19 - because that's her age. She writes all her own material and last week she won the very first Critic's Choice award at the Brits - for artists yet to release an album. This is what the BBC had to say about her. My bet is she'll be winning Grammys within the next two years. You can read more about her here - she's a genuine original who's been influenced by some of the 'greats' but who got noticed and got her break by being online.