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Sunday, January 04, 2015

Who's made a mark in 2014?

In this post you'll find links to some of the most popular blog posts on this blog this last year.

Apparently rather a lot of people took a look at a fair few posts on this blog in 2014. Over half a million people paid unique visits and created 0.75 million page views in 2014.

That's not to say the posts with the most views are intrinsically better than any of the rest - but it's always interesting to see what peaks interest!

Please note I've left out the normal art competitions and art society exhibitions as I'll be doing updates on those this week and will highlight past posts when I do.

Practical Tips for Artists


  • 10 Golden Rules For Every Busy Artist - my version is based on the 10 golden rules for every busy woman.
  • Top 10 tips for being an artist highlights the tips offered by Suzanne du Toit in a BBC article. Suzanne won the BP Portrait award in 2013 and I had the delightful experience of sketching with her in November. She's a very fast sketcher!
  • While writing my book I couldn't maintain my normal output re blog posts - so took to creating some compendiums of past posts on a topic. This is A Compendium of Colour
  • another one of my compendium posts was How to design a stand for an art fair. This is technical stuff folk!
  • The very popular post which isn't here is "How to hold a pencil". I really wanted to write a post about it as soon as I'd written that section of the book - mainly because of the contortions involved in actually producing the images! In the end I decided that you'll have to read my book for that - but I will show one of the images.... and later on I'll tell you the story of how that section was produced.
this is the basic grip for drawing and is one of four drawings for different options in the book!

Art books


Books by other artists



Books by Katherine Tyrrell


My book is published on 8 January 2015 in the UK! It was also published on 1 January in the USA. Here are my posts about it - so you know what to watch out for.

Please let me know when you see it in bookshops and if you take a photo I'll post it on www.facebook.com/DrawingSketching365 :)

Very many thanks to those who
I also wrote two blog posts about preparing images for a book - it seemed like a good idea to record the lessons learned (while I could still remember them) for anybody else who does down this route and writes an art instruction book at some point in the future!
#1 top tip is "assume all art you produce will be needed for a publication"

Art Business & Marketing


Marketing art



Managing the money


Art and the Internet


This is the section which generated the most visited blog post in 2014! It covers websites, internet marketing, blogging and Facebook. In 2014 I started to deliver workshops for art societies and art venues on artists and social media - and I continued to write about issues relevant to artists on my blog.

Blogging and social media


  • Why social media matters in 2014 highlights the major changes people need to be aware of - in particular the impact of mobile devices
  • 10 top tips for art blogs arose out of some advice I gave to a prominent art blog. It contains 10 things you can do to improve your art blog using Blogger.
  • Tips for repelling plagiarist bloggers is what I do when somebody steals content from my blog - this one is worth bookmarking.  See also the post about how to report scraping to Google below.
After 9+ years of repelling plagiarist bloggers and websites I now get straight to the point. It's the only way to get the message across.

Facebook



It appears there are major changes planned for marketing on Facebook in 2015

Google



Websites



Art Exhibitions



RHS Botanical Art Show, Spring 2014
Best Botanical Painting - by Işık Güner

Botanical Art - my special interest


Every year I do a series of posts which I know are keenly awaited by botanical artists around the globe - mainly because I'm recording who won the gold medals at the RHS shows in London.

Art Materials



Art on Television

  • Like many others I was intrigued by The Great British Paint-Off: BBC1 searches for best amateur artists. I've searched high and low on the BBC Media website and I can find no further mention of it - other than that it's supposed to air in Spring 2015. I'll guess we'll find out at some point in 2015 what transpired - and whether they selected people "with an interesting back story" or amateur artists who could actually paint! Daphne Todd and Lachlan Goudie may be sworn to secrecy as judges or there again they might not be....
  • I started to find archive films which have been digitised on the web in 2014. One which proved very popular was a British Pathé film of Stanley Spencer which relates to his return to exhibiting at the RA after he had resigned.

Art History


You may recall the beginning of 2014 was rather wet in the UK(!) By February I'd got round to revisiting Art recording 'The Deluge of 1607' and 'Winter Storms in 2014' which I'd originally posted on my Art of the Landscape blog. What I found very weird in exhibitions later in the year was how so little artwork actually recorded what had been pretty momentous events in 2014.  Do landscape artists not see themselves as artists who record what's important in the present day?

and finally.....what's in store for 2015?


This week I'm going to be aiming to do my compendium blog posts about art exhibitions, art competitions and open exhibitions by art societies in 2015.  

However I'm currently suffering from acute bronchitis (week 3!) so am not going to be pushing myself - but they will appear soon!

2 comments:

  1. Hi Katherine,
    Nice wrap up of 2014. It shows that the most popular posts have been the ones closely related to the business of art.

    Although I did find it via the search box upper left the link for your post "How can an artist find out who bought their painting?" does not work when I click on it.
    Happy New Year!
    And Thank you for another year of really great posts, your hard work on the behalf of all of us and the art world in general, especially in light of medical issues and your book.

    ReplyDelete
  2. ... oh, and I meant to ask.
    What ever happened to the answer to "Who painted this #62" ? Was it ever revealed? I could not find it.
    Thanks,
    David

    ReplyDelete

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