Tag Archives: comfortableshoes

art journaling progress and an update.

Its been a quiet but beautiful couple of days here. Warm and windy perfect Halloween weather. Also great art journaling weather. I had hoped to get out yesterday and draw at the park or beach but it ended up being far too windy for that. Instead I sat at home and made 2 technique videos and a possible video for materials. I thin that the art journal materials video would be better as a page on this blog than a video.

The second new video isup on youtube and I'll put it at the end of this entry behind a cut for faster loading. I'm still getting used to the camera but so far so good.  It can only get better from here.

If you haven't heard about the storm taking over the art/ visual journaling world here it is NaNoJouMo! Head on over to d'Blogola to get more info and the daily one word prompts. The idea is to work in your art journal everyday, which is a goal I can get behind. You don't have to finish a page every day just put something into your journal everyday. I'm not sure I'll be able to do it everyday, considering what is going on for me from the 18th to the 30th of November. I 'll be in Maine then while my Mom has open heart surgery and then I'll be getting her settled back home and cooking Thanksgiving dinner. The surgery has already made its way into my journal in the form of lots of anatomical hearts and rib cages.

Over the next week I'm going to be shooting videos for the rules of art journaling- I've posted about them here before, so we'll see how that translates to the tiny screen.

I've been working on some transfer techniques in my journal. Years ago when I was working for a crazy company that had taken over a building that had previously housed a rug store and previous to that an audio visual sales warehouse we founds several boxes of inkjet transparency film.* I should have snagged it all but convinced myself I shouldn't DOH! Sadly I've only got 50 sheets left but oh what a blast it's been. First thing I learned- print on the right side of the film. If I accidentally print on the wrong side of the film the images are a total bitch to get off the plastic sheet. Oh and let me tell  you how awful it is. I'm surprised the neighbors didn't call the cops due to my cursing. I prevailed and I have several nice transfers in my journal. The other thing I learned? Don't use too much matte medium. Yup. Need to find just the right amount. Liberal spreading of the medium and moderate bone folder pressure and not allowing it to dry completely is best. I may do a video on it. It could be a fun thing to try with my own drawings as well as the fun anatomical clip art I found on line here. It says it's for educational use, but I recognize many of the images from a giant clip art book I bought in college that was copyright free.

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Facebook Me

I've set up a page on Facebook, you can find it here. I link to my new items and put up some pictures. All good stuff. I also have been experimenting with some online contests. Follow me on Facebook to find out more.

What I really want to write about today is Etsy's new Facebook feature in which when you heart an item a link pops up under the "heart this link" that says "facebook this item." Very, very cool.You have a chance at link an item for your friends to see, it could be a neat way of telling friends "hint hint I'd like this in large for my birthday" or it could just be a fantastic way of linking to an item so lots of people can see it.

I read on the forum (I know I know, I hate taht plce but can't resist  a link to it from twitter) that a lot of people were looking at this as spam for their facebook account. In a way I suppose if you abuse it, it is, BUT I look at it form a customer's perspective and not a seller's perspective, as in "How cool is it that I can link to all these awesome items?" Etsy should have rolled this out to  buyers and not so much sellers. It hink that etsy sellers are an easy sold to target. Let's face it the buyers spend less time on the site than we do, they might spend hours browsing the items but they aren't listing items and don't have the same involvement on a day to day basis that sellers do.

What I'm saying is this: wicked cool feature but not so much for sellers, email that stuff out to the buyers etsy and yo've got something cool on your hands. It would b nice if you set it up so we could send a link to Twitter in the same breath. I tweet way more than I facebook.*

SO if you are a buyer on etsy or even a seller, go on there and heart a few items today and put them up on your facebook for the world to see. Sellers get your friends to SIGN UP for etsy today and start linking to items!

*artfire has a tweet this item link on the left side of each items page, pops up with a micro url and some text already in it, I'd love it if they did a facebook link too. It's super easy to use.