more art is more love

Posts Tagged ‘flickr’

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an artist’s digital life in review: or exactly how much time i spend online

In Uncategorized on August 20, 2011 at 4:54 pm

One of the creators of the Brave Girls Club recently wrote a post about the life she wanted for her sons; an existence she came to view anew after taking a self-imposed sabbatical from digital life.  As I continue to read more about indigenous cultures and how art played a role in communication, prayer, and healing, I am often brought back to the theme of the path, the journey, and the doorway.  How the doorway passes as a portal through which we travel on whatever road we may be on (especially as artists) led me to take a critical look at my own digital life and question just exactly how much time am I spending online?

Well, here is an overview of some of the good, bad, and ugly.  Flickr continues to be a critical tool in my artist’s toolbox with 3,372 photographs posted and 16,262 all time views, I have actually received licensing offers from images loaded there.  My email (Gmail) is currently 39% full and I have honed my “starred to do list” down to 14 items. I have several friends on Gmail chat, but only “talk” to three of them.  I used to think Google would one day rule the world, now I believe Facebook will (if they can sort out the privacy issues).

Linked-in I have not fully embraced in pursuing professional networking leads, I currently have 880 trusted friends and probably only really “know” ten to twenty percent of them.  Others are industry contacts from which I have received no real useful leads or information.  My dynamic and highly skilled Creative Art Consultants group is now up to 2,580 active members, in part due to a sister group’s recent closure (I had 61 requests to join this morning).  Creative Art Consultants is a vibrant art resource, what do you MEAN you haven’t heard of it yet?  You should jump aboard because we’re considering forming an international association in 2012.

One of my heart’s secret loves which I will never give up is my blog chronicling my son’s life since the day he was miraculously born.  Over the past four years, I’ve loaded 578 photographs of him with over 1500 views and it NEVER gets old.  Here’s a photo of him at the barbershop today getting a chair massage – see what I mean?  The online life HAS changed my whole world, I have an adult daughter who only has hard copy photographs (and in no recognizable order, may I add?) of her gloriously happy years with me.  (Ahem!)  It makes me sad that I have to rely on memory for one child, and on storage continuity for the other.

My Facebook account is a major source of conflict in my major relationship, but I chalk that up to generational differences and the fact that I will NEVER have any interest in ESPN, ESPN2, or ESPN whatever!  FB helps me stay connected, learn what’s going on, encourage my artists friends, and post my 2,675 friends and neighbors with whatever rambling thought I have at the moment.  I do have to say, I’ve been diligently weeding out people who are in communities I no longer reside or who I haven’t heard from in ages (Troy Arthur, you’re next….to be followed by Lauren Turnbull).  I jokingly said a few months ago that what I do is to check each day’s birthdays list, I visit that friend’s page, and if it’s time to defriend or unlike, zap! Delete they go. It’s the gift that keeps giving, and I do believe it should be adopted as a Facebook best practice, Mark Zuckerberg. (By the way, love your new house – and best to your sister on her new ventures, why SURE we can be friends, too!)

My WordPress website and blog which I have put countless hours to, has undergone many revisions, and continues to serve as an online journal of various art shows, art lectures, art competitions, reviews of artist tools, art book reads, and really everything and anything having to do with artistic expression.  It has had over 1,304 posts since 2007 and I am happy to announce 10,196 people have found something I’ve written about worthy of a read.  I don’t know what the planetary alignment was on July 15, 2011, but 167 people visited me that day.  167 people!  That’s huge!!  I’ve almost reached the magic “sphere of influence” number – 250!  Well, gives you something to work towards, no?  Oh, and if you’re an artist out there who hasn’t started your own digital presence, shame.  shame.  shame.  The WordPress team has the exact right mix of support, information, development, and overall culture.  I love it!

The smartest thing I ever did was to delete my online presence in Second Life and to disable any games on Facebook.  I also routinely reject any invitations to view someone’s portfolio on a competing and new social media site, and I limit my online auction shopping to eBay and Etsy.  You’ll notice I don’t even MENTION Twitter, it’s a long story and I am still very much on the fence about it.  I read only one or two news media sites a day, but several (probably too many) arts related “news” updates, because a) I SHOULD know given the line of work I pursue and b) I am compulsively obsessed.  I really should start a new 12-step recovery group called Artoholic, but that would probably mean yet MORE time connecting, networking, learning, developing, entering calls, posting artworks, and everything else I do during my much expanded workday.

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salvation for generations

In Uncategorized on March 6, 2011 at 2:28 pm

For the moth shall eat them up like a garment, and the worm shall eat them like wool: but my righteousness shall be for ever, and my salvation from generation to generation.  Isaiah 51:8

Like most people, we have a bunch of those plastic storage bins.  As I was cleaning through some of them last night, I came upon a CD by Reinhard Bonnke of Christ For All Nations.  So we popped it in the player and sat back in total amazement as we watched the waves of salvation sweep Africa. This is evangelism (50 plus years in the making from very humble beginnings) in a magnitude you simply cannot fathom.  I mean, I have been on the Nation’s Capitol in a gathering of more than one million souls at a time, but Reinhard is holding outdoor events to audiences of 1.6 million or more in the very remotest regions of Africa. You just have to see all these beautiful brown faces drinking in the Lord.  The CFAN organization has recorded more than 55 million positive decisions for Christ in the last ten years alone.  So as I was watching that, I began to work on the faith art piece above, it was late, and I had earlier in the day been observing some of the lettering work that I really like in other art journalists’ themes.

Salvation for Generations is inspired by Isaiah 51:8 and some calligraphy works I’ve been viewing on Flickr.  The first, and it’s lovely in its charming detail, is by lejardindumixedmedia located here.  The second is a highly detailed calligraphy piece by typeoff and is located here.  I can’t tell you how important it is to me to regularly review and view others’ works.  It gives me something to strive for and it helps me define my own style as I continue experimenting and just really trying to get a wrangle on the discipline of journaling and drawing each day.  The work I did feels a little incomplete, so I may add to it later and all together, it took me about an hour while watching the CD to finish (I wanted to close it up this morning while I was watching children in church day care, but was unable and it was nagging at me!).  The strangest thing happened though, in this gel penned lettering, I had no blotting or smudging even though I went back over the ink to erase stray pencil lines.  In another work I previously shared, the same make of gel pen (Sakura Souffle made in Japan) really made an unexpected mess – maybe that’s the difference in letting works completely dry or not.

Sometimes rearranging things or the way one approaches things is really helpful in breaking through a challenging barrier.  Here in Key West, furniture is at a premium and sometimes difficult to come by – there are only a handful of furniture stores and what’s available in stock is less than optimal, especially if you love interesting old antique-y pieces meant for a woman’s art studio.  I recently also re-worked my studio space and took this huge china buffet to store a lot of books and binders behind closed doors.  I’m also still hunting for the ideal way to store my pens, markers, watercolor pencils – which as you’ll see are currently all lying down horizontally in flat open bins.

My pastels chalks are in the small, unfinished wood three-drawer case at the top of the photograph and all my stamping supplies are in the turquoise child’s three-drawer dresser.  Some books are to the right of my current organization system, I tend to stick to Dover for illustration additions.  As my friends will attest to, I gave away nearly all my journaling books recently to people I know will honor, use and treasure them.  So here’s a sneak peek at one little corner of my studio workspace where all this wonderful thinking occurs on a daily basis. If what I’m doing today impacts generations to come, if ONE person is inspired by my continued demonstrations of faith, then I don’t only have to have an eye to my own salvation, but to that of those yet to come.  And maybe, if Reinhard Bonnke (through the will of Jesus) continues his monumental work, there won’t be anyone left to save – wouldn’t that be something?

 

 

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water vista pen & ink

In Uncategorized on January 30, 2011 at 5:57 pm

Some of the most talented illustrators regularly post their works on Flickr and of that group, there’s a special heaven for those that depict landscape scenes or architectural scenes.  A couple of my favorites, and this is just a sampling, are the works of Martin Beek; Sharon Frost; Wil_Freeborn; and Paul Heaston.  I mean you have to SEE Heaston’s buildings to believe them – the line, the detail, the exactness, they’re all really something spectacular.

So I’ve been sharing with you that I’m working on finding what I want to concentrate on for thematic material in specialization and one of the ways to do that is to know what it is that you DON’T want to do.  I love landscapes, but I love detail more and I actually learned that through experimentation in photography.  Anyway, today I gave a waterscape a try and it was difficult because I am not a naturalist illustrator and I don’t have a botanical background for flora and fauna.  Also, I was unsure how to handle grass which sits just below the palm tree to the left, or the rippling of the water scene.  Not a bad first attempt, but certainly not something I see myself doing long-term.

Oh yeah, and I had originally intended to go back over the drawing with watercolors but guess who used non-permanent ink?  What I do really like in this is the adapted compass rose on the left and my not so bad handling of the background city skyline with telephone poles and wires.  Here’s the real life scene.

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international sketchbook project – en route to stop #2

In Uncategorized on April 17, 2009 at 9:28 pm

We’re so thrilled to be the first artist to have completed our initial portion for the International Sketchbook Project as conceived and designed by Kenya Bevans.  You can learn more about the ISP by visiting Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Flickr, or the ISP website, or Kenya’s blog.  Kenya did a fabulous job collecting sketchbook artists from around the world to participate.  Representatives from Israel, Turkey, Croatia, Germany, France, Portugal, the UK, Scotland and many others have signed up!

Each artist has four pages with which to communciate about their world.  The first is a page about themselves and the remainder can be about anything the artist chooses as long as it remains true to the theme of location.  Our collage pages (made from re-used and re-cycled luxury magazines) concentrate on the USA and President Obama’s recent win, the green spring of the Commonwealth of Virginia, and the inspiring art community of Old Town Alexandria.  We’ve posted them here.  Look for more information about The International Sketchbook Project in the days to come.  

For paper and book arts enthusiasts everywhere, not to mention collage artists, we want to give a very special endorsement to Winsor & Newton’s All Purpose Varnish For General Purpose Arts & Crafts.  A beautiful clear gloss varnish which provides permanent non-removable protection of craftwork is ideal for a variety of surfaces including wood, metal, paper and modelling materials.  What I first thought was going to be a DISASTER when initially sprayed, turned out more beautifully then I could have ever imagined when dried.  I am completely SOLD on this product.  (Thank you for the recommendation, Alex!)

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lange participates in international sketchbook project

In Uncategorized on April 2, 2009 at 9:09 am
http://indiefixx.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/sketchbooks.jpg

http://indiefixx.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/sketchbooks.jpg

We are thrilled that the International Sketchbook Project is launching April 2, 2009.  The brainchild of Kenya Bevans of the B Side Design firm, the International Sketchbook Project identifies 50 artists who will be asked to prepare for publication original and creative sketches which are pertinent to their home country or locale.  Learn more at http://isketchbookproject.com/ and the blog http://thebsidedesign.wordpress.com/.

Lange raised her hand early on in the project’s development and even contributed to publicizing it within various sketchbook groups in www.flickr.com.  Lange is an entirely self-taught and late-emergent artist specializing in sketchbooks, visual diaries, artist journals and paper and book arts.  She also runs a full-service art advisory and design studio in the Washington DC area and is helping her commercial and private clients gain ground within the art world. 

Participating artists are also being asked to design some sort of postage stamp on the outside of the book.  Each artist will be given 4 pages in the book (2 pages, front and back). The first page being a hand-written introduction, the second, third and fourth pages will be used for the composition. 

      

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urban sketchers group @ Flickr

In Uncategorized on November 17, 2008 at 7:05 pm

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Urban Sketchers is a loosely knit band of Flickr bravehearts who spend their days sketching urban vistas, landscapes, and city-based reality.  The group recently expanded out to a blog. I’ve attached two recent examples from Atlanta’s Ester Wilson.

Group Administrator Gabi Campanario says, “This is a group for all sketchers out there who love to draw the cities they live in or visit, from the window of their homes, from a cafe, at a park, standing by a street corner… always on location, not from photos or memory.”

Here are the rules:

1. You did the drawing on location, not from photos or memory. Adding color or a few details later is fine. On site doesn’t necessarily mean outdoors, you can draw from a coffee shop, pub or grocery store or any other city building. Just make sure the subject is urban. Computer manipulated images are not acceptable.

2. The subject of the drawing has to be primarily urban. The word urban comes from the latin urbs, which means city. So drawings here must have city elements: streets, buildings, houses, traffic, city parks, shops, stores, churches… you get the idea.

3. Drawings of people are okay as long as they are in an urban setting: walking on a street, at a coffee shop, on the bus, subway or other way of public transportation.

4. You should state in what city you did the drawing. Even better, place the drawing on the map. That would be helpful for other sketchers who may want to draw from the same location when they’re in your city.

Campanario writes: It’s been a while since the group started and I thought it’s time to have an ‘official’ welcome. Thanks to everyone who has joined and contributed so many wonderful city drawings!  As for myself, I live in Seattle but I’m originally from Spain. My first memory of sketching out and about is from 1986, when I was a teenager. If only Flickr had been around then I wouldn’t have lost so much time when I could have been drawing more often. But it’s never too late and in the recent years I have gradually become more confident and now I draw in the city any chance I have.