6th April 2008: Who's made a mark this week?

It's April - so it's snowing - but of course! This (on the right) is what it looks like if I turn my head left while sat here typing this post.

Now I need you to understand that we don't tend to get snow in London. This is about as much as I ever see - so this is a big deal! I can't remember the last time we had proper snow.

I wonder who had the best snow photo of the winter? Because it's been Spring for more than two weeks and around where I live we've now got swathes of daffodils which are officially 'past it'!

Publishing your work - books and podcasts

A little feature this week on publishing and publicising your work in order to 'make your mark' on the internet art world.

Tina Mammoser (The Cycling Artist) is well and truly getting into using internet media beyond blogging to highlight her work - and is now using both Blurb and podcasts - more details below the pics of her brand new publications which I had the pleasure of seeing and looking through last Saturday.

The English Coast - The Paintings (Set I: Southeast England)
The English Coast - The Photographs
Tina Mammoser - Blurb Store

• First a preamble - Tina is engaged in cycling the British coast and creating large and small scale abstract paintings of specific places from the journey - these creations then become her English Coast series. You can more Tina's work on her website or on Flickr.
  
• Tina has used Blurb to publish two small books - of her paintings and her photographs of The English Coast (which she uses as source materal for paintings). She's done them in a 7"x7" square format which particularly suits her work as this also tends to be square.
  
• Blurb is a web-based self-publication operation - these are the Blurb FAQs. Blurb also has a blog called Blurberati Blog.
  
• Tina has also created a brand new 'studio' space called StudioWaves for her podcasts - see StudioWaves, joining the revolution. She's going to be chatting periodically about paintings, waves and artistic debate. Plus you get to hear Tina speak - which always adds a new dimension to your appreciation of a person. Now I'm not an MP3 or ipod person so mentioned to Tina I wasn't quite sure what I was supposed to do with the podcast. Even if I did get it to work I wasn't quite sure how! So she's now written Flick o' paint: How to listen to a podcast - so now I know!
• Vivien Blackburn (Paintings Prints and Stuff) was so impressed with Tina's books last week when we met up that she's downloaded the software and has created her own book (although not without a few problems).

Travels with a sketchbook......all over the world...but mostly in China and Italy

• China: Geneva-based Felicity Grace (Felicity's Philosophies) has been on a trip to China and has been posting wonderful sketches including ones of Beijing - the Great Wall at Mutianyu and fabulous photos of Beijing - Food and the night(mare) market on her blog - this latter one being one which is not for the squeamish or those eating breakfast! ;). This is the post about the sketching kit which she took with her.
  

International Sketchcrawl 18 - the locations where people sketched
Sketchcrawl Forum - Sketchcrawl 18

• The 18th Worldwide Sketchcrawl was last Saturday and you can read about what happened on the Sketchcrawl Forum. Here also are some of the blog posts about it - the location comes first then name and blog. Other than Enrico - who's THE prime mover behind it - I'm trying to feature some places and people who haven't previously been mentioned when I've covered the sketchcrawls. Italy seems to have really taken off this time around! You can see lots more sketches here.
  
• San Francisco: Enrico Caruso (Sketchcrawl Blog) - What a Crawl !! has some great sketches
• Florence - Rowland (Really Accessible Memory) is a sketchcrawl newbie - has a great photo of sketchers on a bridge over the Arno in World Wide Sketchcrawl Florence 29th March 2008. You can see the route they all took in Florence in a great sketchbook map in Roberto Malfatti's post in the Florence Results thread
• Cerriano, Italy - Matt Jones (MattJonezAnimation) found an old hill town above San Remo to sketch in Sketchcrawl 18. Great sketches!

The end of the Sketchcrawl in Torino
copyright Flaviano Armentaro

• Torino, Italy - Flaviano Armentaro (On the Couch) - has some really great sketches in Sketchcrawl! I especially loved the one of the sketchbook being held while sketching the feet in the bidet at the end of the sketchcrawl! It is, of course, a well known use of bidets!
  
• Phoenix, Arizona - Fran Saperstein (artsyfran) posted her sketches in Saturday art. Nice blog / website Fran!
  

Art Blogs

• Tracey Helgeson (Works by Tracy Helgeson) went to New York to see the art fairs - and her post about the experience What I Learned This Weekend is probably the most sane thing I've read about them!
  
• Zig Zag anybody? Thanks to Yellow (A Roker Artist) for alerting me to the Moleskine exchanges which I'd heard about but not found before now. This is Moly_x_12.
• Charley Parker (Lines and Colors) had a couple of posts which really interested me last week
  
• George Gardner Symons is an American Impressionist who I've not come across before - but will be following up.
  
• plus speculation about whether this is really The Face of Leonardo?
  
• Nicole Caulfield (Nicole Caulfield Art Journal) has an interesting post about how people can go about buying art on a budget.
  
• Maggie Stiefvater (Greywaren Art) is really getting into the swing of thematic series posts. This week she's been writing about Getting an Art Education Online - here and here. The latter features an alien baby and Maggie's latest portrait - to illustrate that studying online can make a difference!
  

Art business and marketing

• The Times Online had a piece about Microtrends: Geek oil paintings - this is people painting oil paintings of images found on their computer screens - like logos! Duh!
  
• Karin Jurick (A Painting Today) got a mention in South West Art Magazine as being an artist to watch. Well done Karin!
  
• I can't recall whether I've posted about this blog before. The Artmatters! Blog is another blog focused on the art business end of being an artist. However, it's not generating posts very often - which always makes me think people are just converting articles into blog posts (as opposed to the other way round) and I'm not sure I have a view about it. What do you think?
  

Art Journals

• Jeannette Jobson (Illustrated Life) in Newfoundland alerted me inExposure to the new Antidull Art Magazine - Jeanette is featured in the second edition. (BTW, this is Spring Newfoundland style)
• American Artist has announced its cover finalists

Art Materials and Supplies

• Felicity Grace (Felicity's Philosophies) also has two superduper new pencil sharpeners - see Much ado about nothing - which should be read even if you aren't interested in pencil sharpeners as it's a totally brilliant post! I've left a comment and hope Felicity will tell us all who makes the pencil sharpeners!
• Nita Leland (Exploring Color and Creativity) wrote about a CD she'd watched about Painting on Yupo
• Nicole Caulfield - again - has commented about about using watercolor pencils and neocolor II's for underpainting on Pastelbord in Some trouble with watercolor pencil/crayon underpaintings
• For all Derwent afficionados - From tomorrow (ie Monday 7th April) Derwent's new address will be:- The Cumberland Pencil Company, Derwent House, Jubilee Road, Lillyhall Business Park, Workington, Cumbria CA14 4HA Tel: 01900 609590 Fax: 01900 602489. Those of us who have ever struggled with accounting for our assets over two tax years, will just be looking at the date of the move and nodding sagely! (For everybody else - the UK tax year for some %^&&* reason starts on the 6th April each year - and the move will occur at the weekend!) I do hope they aren't having to do it in the snow!
  

Blogging and Website matters

• I think I'll probably do a whole post about Blogger in Draft - mainly because I've only just discovered it! (You can tell how much I'm truly riveted by Blogger Buzz!) They propose scheduled publishing - ie their notions about what you need to do have a post published at a set time. There's also a Blogger in Draft blog. Frankly I can't think of anything worse than setting up a blog post ahead of time and it being automatically published. I've got a lot of mine set up as drafts with future publication dates - and lots of those change between initial draft and final published version. Such as getting a set of grammatical sentences around a set of links which helps to make sense of them!
• While we're at it - what is Google Blogs all about? It doesn't matter what you publish your good stuff is always on top? Reading about the features makes it look like total automated blogging for spammers to me - just fine and dandy for making money out of Google Ad Sense! You may think I'm coming across as very negative - but you haven't seen how many times the content of this blog has been ripped off by splogs! IMO Google should be spending more of its time and attention on more appropriate matters - see next item
  
• Protecting children using the internet: The Byron Review is an independent review in the UK looking at the risks to children from exposure to potentially harmful or inappropriate material on the internet and in video games. Nice therefore to see a child-centred approach and children's art on the front cover of the report of the Byron Review (by child psychologist Dr Tania Byron). These are the key points from the executive summary ....and about time too! As somebody who is very supportive of the Internet's capacity to support learning and education while at the same time being horrified by the lack of rigour of some leading sites (eg see this item) I'm pleased to see that we might be getting a change of emphasis. Here's some more comment
  
• Guardian - This review builds consensus - now let's act
  
• Times Online - Google and You Tube will be targeted
• Should you moderate your comments or not? The Times Online comments on the moderation of forums - Can online forums police themselves?
• Bloglines Beta now has what they are calling an 'art and design' pack. What a pity that they chose to make one of the three blogs that they are listing one which switched away from that site in October 2007!

Technology stuff - FOR MAC USERS!!!

• Adobe says next Photoshop will be 64-bit native on Windows only - as in there won't be a Photoshop for Macs. (I thought bolding that bit probably wasn't overdoing the impact of that bit of news!) See Photoshop, Lightroom, and Adobe's 64-bit roadmap on the blog of John Nack, the senior product manager for Adope Photoshop (John Nack on Adobe). They're also thinking about 'going green'............