5th April 2009 - Who's made a mark this week?

Hot Spot - a finalist in Wildlife Artist of the Year 2009

8" x 20", coloured pencils on Arches HP
copyright Gayle Mason

It's always really nice to be able to feature the artwork of a friend. This week the feature image is by my CP buddy and friend Gayle Mason of Fur in the Paint and West Yorkshire. It's also a very special drawing as Gayle is one of three UKCPS members who have had their work accepted for the Wildlife Artist of the Year 2009 exhibition to be held at the Mall Galleries, London from 1st-6th June 2009.

The two other UKCPS members are Jonathan Newey and Margaret Edwards. You can read more about this in Three UKCPS members to exhibit in "Wildlife Artist of the Year 2009"
on the UKCPS News blog

You can see Gayle's devlopment of Hot Spot - which rejoiced for a while in the name "Steasle" while we voted on whether we thought it was Stoat or a Weasel - on her blog in these posts:

• Goldcrest and Stoat in Coloured Pencil
• Stoat in Coloured Pencil
• Coloured Pencil Stoat Finished

When I was watching the stoat on the Loch side running in and out of the huge boulders I couldn't help comparing its brief lifespan to the endless eons the rocks had been in existence. That was my concept behind the painting, a tiny bright spark in a large monochrome landscape.

Gayle says she got through an awful lot of French Grey coloured pencils while doing all those rocks! This drawing is a development of a particular style that Gayle has developed for some of her work. It involves the drawings being largely monochrome with a splash of colour. It's a style which has proved very successful in relation to her feline art and which can be seen in "Cats with a Splash". She even managed to sell one of new drawings in this style twice at the Society of Feline Artist's exhibition in 2007! The second purchaser got the same cat drawn again but with a different eye colour! Gayle has also exhibited her wildlife art with the National Exhibition of Wildlife Art in Cheshire and the Marwell International Wildlife Art Society at Marwell in Hampshire. You can see more of her wildlife art on her website.

Update on the awful computer problems!

Now - the rest of this post is going to be somewhat shorter than usual due to the dire problems I've had this week with my computers. Thanks to those who left kind comment and/or notes of sympathy.

On Monday I learned how to do a system restore - and resurrected my laptop from the dead! It took a little time - see Hello Computer! On Thursday it died again. I've now learned from the web that Sony Vaio owners have been experiencing the problem I'm having (refusal to boot when switched on) on a range of Vaio models since 2003 - check out thse two very long thread in Hardware Analysis - Sony Vaio laptop wont boot? (99 PAGES!!) and Sony VAIO Notebook won't start ... often. The solution for me has been to: take out the mains lead to run on battery and then to drain the battery. The computer then starts up saying it can't come out of hibernation mode but there are no files lost since it wasn't started in the first place. I've then done a system restore - and then everything works. Only takes however long it takes for the battery to drain while in hibernation. In the meantime, the big desktop has decided to only work for about an hour before a new registry corruption comes out to play - and it freezes solid.

Enough of boring computers!

Art Blogs

Drawing and Sketching

I adore Shirley's response to EDM Challenge #216: My Inner Critic on her blog Paper and Threads and her description and sketch of her right brain "bag lady"! Recommended reading!

Shirley's Inner Critic
Paper and Threads

Journal Blogs

• Roz Stendhal of Roz Wound Up and Minneapolis - who describes herself as a life-long journal keeper - has set up The Official International Fake Journal Month Blog for guess what? She orginally founded this activity in 2001. Check out What Is International Fake Journal Month? and Tips on Having a Successful International Fake Journal Month

Painting

Guerra Acrylics - paint chart
photo Caro R (Flickr)

• Caroline Roberts (From the Studio) an acrylics artist living in Houston highlighted Guerra acrylics - a fantastic paint store I discovered (plus pic) in New York. Caroline told me

I just ordered my first batch of paints from Guerra - I can't wait to try them out and I think they may work out cheaper as well. The hardest part was choosing from that vast palette of colours!

• Tracy Helgeson (Works by Tracy Helgeson) wrote about how she deals with the painted sides of her box canvases in Painting Cradles. Check out the images now the gallery for her next solo show here
• Jo Castillo (Jo Castillo Art Blog) has been Oil Paintings with the New Paints which are Winsor - Newton Artisan Oil Paints. Always nice to see a review of art materials used.
  
• On Thursday I posted about Sydney Parkinson and the Endeavour botanical illustrations. I still can't quite get my head round the fact that this artist died age 26 having worked as a botanical artist at the Royal Botanical Gardens in Kew, before travelling around the world with Captain Cook to become the first non-indigenous artist to record Australia's landscape, people and plants - and then had his work published 300+ years later.

Printmaking

• Amie Roman (Burnishings) has been getting into Wacom tablets and digital print-making - she has a very interesting post with lots of images at Graphics Tablet Coolness

Art business and blogging

• For all those with Etsy Accounts - and anybody interested in Google Analytics check out Etsy Web Analytics: Get It Straight from Google on Etsy's The Storque blog.
  
• Charley Parker (Lines and Colors) has a very helpful post about the Freelancers Union which I'll be adding to my Art Business site.

The Freelancers Union offers access to group health, dental, term life and disability insurance, and in the state of new York is acting as it’s own insurance provider.

• Seth Godin (Seth's Blog) has pronounced on The power of a tiny picture (how to improve your social network brand) - some great tips about taking photosgraphs of yourself for marketing purposes
  
• Facebook is due to get its 200 millionth user this week. New York Times commented Is Facebook Growing Up Too Fast? Apparently the fastest growing population segment on FB is between 40-65 (this will cause a chuckle in some quarters!) Linda Blondheim is trying a Facebook Adert - check out Musing on Marketing
  
• Jeanette Jobson (Illustrated Life) had a brilliant post about her email inbox and newsletters - see The newsletter dating game. Recommended reading!
  
• Empty Easel had a couple of useful posts
  
• Summer Art Fairs 2009: Should I Stay Or Should I Go? by Karen Cooper
  
• DailyOriginal.com: Just One Artwork for Sale, Every Day by Dan
• I came across the weirdest thing - a subscription (paper) magazine about art blogging. It costs upwards of $60 pa to receive it and it doesn't even bestow links to the sites on its featured contributors. Lots of HUGE pics and not a lot of text (sound like anything else produced by publishers?) I just have one question. Haven't they heard of blogging? I was going to include a link to them - and then I thought that's just silly............... ;)

Art Competitions

• Nina Leland (Exploring Color and Creativity) has been highlighting the Paint the Parks competition. I can think of someone who should be entering that! (not me!)

You can use any medium and paint any subject, as long as it's found in a national park. Paint America

Art Exhibitions

• The Annual Exhibition of the Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolours opened at the Mall Galleries on Thursday and I was supposed to be seeing it yesterday - but the leg is still elevated with movement restricted! The Exhibition closes on Sunday 19th April. (I should do a drawing of what I look like sat at my desk/laptop with elevated leg - it's very funny! I might add one later..........).

American Art: Art-Students and Copyists in the Louvre Gallery, Paris
Winslow Homer, American, 1836-1910
9 3/16 x 13 7/8 in, wood engraving,
Brooklyn Museum

• I'm so jealous there are two exhibitions which have just opened in the USA which I'd really like to see in the USA. They are:
  
• Portraits of a Simpler, Gentler Time is a New York Times review - with excellent illustrations of the “Winslow Homer: Illustrating America,” touring exhibition organized by the Brooklyn Museum from its collection and now showing at Nassau County Museum of Art, Roslyn Harbor, New York, until May 3, 2009 before moving to the Jersey City Museum, New Jersey, September 17– December 21, 2009. A lot of the illustrations are woodcut engravings.
  
• Gustave Caillebotte: Impressionist Paintings from Paris to the Sea - the first major exhibition of his work in new York for over 30 years. It opened at the Brooklyn Museum on March 27 and continues until July 5, 2009. (Morris A. and Meyer Schapiro Wing, 5th Floor)
• Here's a review by Charley Parker (Lines and Colors) Gustave Caillebotte: Impressionist Painting from Paris to the Sea
  

Art History

• A very interesting article in the New York Times about Keeping Art, and Climate, Controlled - and the importance of moving with the times and getting your priorities right!
  

Art Videos

• Marion Boddy Evans of Painting.about.com had me intrigued with her Tidying Up Art Video

Making a Mark Polls - March and April

• On Tuesday I posted the results of the March Making A Mark Opinion Poll Results of "How do you price your art?" together with a commentary
  
• Then on Wednesday I introduced the MAM Poll April: What's your favourite subject matter? It's had a very high response in just a few days - 76 votes so far - so if you've not checked it out yet why not read the comments (very interesting!) and then vote! What's been very rewarding is seeing people get new insight into their own art just from having to think about what would their answer be and reading other people's comments.

Tips and techniques

• TIP: Be Good To Yourself comes from the Art Studio Secrets Blog which is written by Lisa Gloria (Painter on painting ) and Cindy Procious . There's one thing about this blog which I'm very curious about - and that's that I look at the names and the photos and wonder about how and when Julia Roberts and Meg Ryan got into painting! OK girls 'fess up - what are the real names and what do you really look like? ;)
  
• Plus here's tips about COMPOSITION - Arranging flowers for still life painting from the same blog.

Websites and Blogging

• Google's got its internal communications in a twist this week! Blogger and Feedburner (both owned by google) haven't been talking properly to each other this week - see Reduced subscribers reported by Google Feedfetcher and FeedBurner feeds based on Blogger content slow to update; resolution from Blogger forthcoming. My subscribers have reduced from very nearly 1,500 to 700+ on Friday to 900+ today so it looks like the situation is not yet resolved.
  
• There have been a number of improvements over at Technorati;
  
• The Technorati Blog announced early in March that it's been migrating blogs, posts and links from an old infrastructure to a new systems architecture which apparently is focused on providing much better quality data.
  
• They've also been purging spam blogs from its index (and about time too!) and now say that the Technorati Index is much cleaner and more reliable (see Better Data and Shifts in Technorati Authority ) - which pleases me as the authority of Making A Mark has increased to 214!
  
• Plus there have been see Some Major Enhancements: Blurbs On Post Pages, User Blog Reviews, and Auto-Tweeting. Basically this means you can contribute blurbs on article pages and reviews of your favorite blog as well as other things I don't understand as yet!

and finally.......

This week I've got a non-art one. The Guardian always has some stunning April 1st articles - one day somebody will produce a book about them. This one actually had me fooled for all of five seconds while I looked at the headline at the same time as my jaw gaped open! Smart marketing though - just imagine the hits their website got as a result - before you realise the real subtlety of the message!

Twitter switch for Guardian, after 188 years of ink

• Newspaper to be available only on messaging service
• Experts say any story can be told in 140 characters