new developments with the blog

I have been thinking about what to do with this blog for some time. I would like to be able to show my collage work, my paintings, photography and other aspects of my creative side - and not forgetting my song writing. I am in two minds how to proceed. I could of course have a blog for each subject, or subject group; but this is likely to prove too difficult to maintain posts with any sort of regularity. I have seen people with several blogs and invariably one or two become dormant after a while. A real danger therefore! I could also mix and match all sorts of posts but this means that readers may not be interested in many of the posts - will they keep coming back? So I feel that there must be a happy medium.

I have explored many internet sites/applications with a view to earning a little cash to fund my hobby ( at least to pay some of the broadband fees - I have no illusions of riches coming my way) and have succeeded in making small, very small, amounts from several different sources.

A new experiment is by becoming an Amazon Associate and providing links and search boxes which potentially earn a small subscription if a sale for Amazon results. Is this selling out? Will this turn readers off? I feel it is worth experimenting.

I shall not be inserting lots of them, but the advert on the left is an example of what it is all about, anad you may have noticed the Amazon search box on the right hand margin.

I have to admit the largest slice of cash earned over the web has come from Ebay. I have not been selling for a couple of years, rather getting involved with trading ATC cards, I always used to buy as many aceo's as I sold. Not a great way to earn money and Ebay of course did very nicely thank you. There are of course many competitors to Ebay now, and a lot of these are specifically for selling art/craft/hand-made goods. Lots of scope for experimentation.

I have several articles on Squidoo, and have received money based on the number of readers - this could be a central plank of my plans for the future. Other sites do exist which provide opportunity for selling articles.

Selling images rather than the art itself is also a possibility, I have just made my first sale ( on a greeting card) via Zazzle ( Cafe Press is another option) and many sites exist to sell the rights to use your photographs.


Last but not least for now is the Google Adsense route, do you ever click on adverts when you are reading a web page? Siome people do and it earns money for the page author. Slowly but surely, however a large footfall is required to make any reasonable amount here.

I am sure that I have not mentioed all the different ways of picking up a few pence via the internet, the book here will no doubt offer many more opportunities. Just a last little plug, LOL.

I would be interested in your comments about this subject, hope I haven't bored you and thanks for reading.


Addendum: I wrote this post last night and saved it as a draft, unsure of wether to actually use it. Sleeping on it I have decided that I will definitely start a couple more blogs; the first to accomodate posts specifically about my painting and to involve my art group. This will have a different audience I feel. I will still post images of some of my paintings here butthe blog will be more true to the original aims of this blog - a history of the trials and tribulations of a leisure artist.

The second new blog will feature more photography, and I will consider two others. One about my music, basically my songwriting and the other about my experiments in generating a little cash from the internet. These last blogs will be something I shall post to from time to time. I know that the concept of a blog is that it should be regular to attract readers but I am more concerned with publishing material that I feel will be available from my main blog as a "see it if you want" basis. The main blogs will then be uninterupted for my art/craft readers.

I will also be making much fewer and smaller comments on the posts to my Flickr photosteam, a link to my blog will exist for those who want to read about my artworks

pastel landscape painting - a failure

I did originally say that this blog was about the trials and tribulations I encountere in my art work. I do show a few failures but generally try to keep the real no-nos to myself. This was a special case. I had selected a reference to paint because it had such a wonderfully coloured sky. I spent the best part of my art group meeting this past week layering several colours into the sky

before adding a distant line of hills and the yellow on red middle distance. The final touch would have been the dark ( black) foreground and the trees and foliage, bringing the foreground and the sky together. But before I got to that last part, I began to have doubts about the sky. I do wish that I had taken a photo of it to illustrate the point, but it looked ( not to put too fine a point on it) rubbish.

Now I have to admit that I use fixative .....shock, horror... I build up my pastels with several layers of colours often stating with a contrasting or even complementary colour. The first layers are fixed and then The top layers can be left fresh, and there is little danger of mixing the colours as the later pastels are added - no smudging. You can see an example of this in the yellow on red middle ground. I developed this technique from painting pastel abstact paintings where the possible texture/granulation was a large part of my style. BTW my fixative of choice is the cheapest hair-spray I can find in the local supermarket.

In this case, it may just have added a bonus. Because the innitial result was so awful, I decided to use a kitchen tissue to rub off all the sky and start again. The fixative does stop accidental smudging but cannot cope with a determined effort. Of course the board was stained with the colours and the rubbing provided a high degree of mixing. BUT I was amazed, not what I had set out to do however there was a very useful looking sky. I added the purple clouds, keeping them low key, and was very pleased with the outcome. A happy accident you could say. I then finished off the foreground and showed the piece to my colleagues who seemed to agree with me.

the painting is approximately 14x10 inches

I hope you find it to your liking and would love to hear your comments. Just shows that sometimes a little luck is all it takes. Thanks for looking.

Artistic Alphas challenge- April

Finding lots of inspiration on Kim Newberg's PDA. The Artistic Alphas group is about creating art with a running theme of "the alphabet". It has only recently got underway and with April we have reached "H" and "I". For this I wanted to do something a little different to my usual ATC, so decided on a tag for one of the pieces and only one ATC for the other.

H is for.... Horse

I took an ordinary parcel tag and layered it with a dark brown craft paper, wrapping this around the edges of the tag for neatness. I then layered a complimentary coloured craft paper on the back ( no photo) to leave a couple of mm of the brown showing around the edge. I then qadded the image of the girl and the horse, and a border at the bottom. I embossed a card bookplate and added this to the tag, and added what I thought would be suitable text. The "H" and the threads were added to complete the piece.

ATC: I for musical Instument ( alt: It Takes Two)

Fell back into an atc for this second piece, I found (?) this image on a collage sheet from Kim Newberg and decided to use it for this atc. It was a very simple image in B&W so I decided to create a slightly more complex background using several craft papers / downloaded images. Again the "I" is because it is one of the Artistic Alphas entries.

As usual, larger images may be seen on my Flickr photostream, thanks for looking.

Pink ATC's for PDA

Gosh ( or words to that effect), I feel like I am on a roll with my output this week. Actually, I had a couple of days of work. Being MIL's 99th birthday, we took her out for the day as I mentioned in a previous post. Lovely weather, by the way! I had such a lot to do around the house that instead of the one day I had planned to take off work I decided, "what the heck? why not have three days off! It has certainly helped with my to-do list and also allowed me a few free evenings to catch up on some challenges I like to do.

These are for a challenge on PDA known as Pocket Packet Friday. Originally Kim sent the winner of the challenge a pocketful of ephemera for use in art/craftwork. My first pocket was cut from a pair of denim jeans. The beauty of this challenge is that it is not retricted to a particular format, as long as the work complies with the current theme the artist can submit anything at all. Any conceptual artists out in there with time on their hands, looking for a challenge?

Anyway, I have entered two atc's for this weeks challenge with a theme of PINK. Full credits for the images are given on my Flickr photostream. Here are the photos:-

the wink said it all

ooohhh! is that for me?

thanks again for looking, hope to have more "stuff" for publication soon.

more atc's just to prove I am still doing them

Ok, not too many atc's recently but am just catching up on a couple of swaps with these.

The first is called, "something fishy". created for a swap on the Flickr group, "artful ideas" with a theme of under the sea. The background is a layered tissue paper to give a feeling of the sea bed / waves ( underneath the sea?) and I have added images of fish from a collage sheet by Kim Newberg and seaweed cut from an image from a gardening mag. They were garden plants but serve my purpose here - you wouldn't know would you? The smaller fish are swimming in and out of the weeds.

I made this for a swap on PDA with a theme of "floral". I call it, " who's a pretty boy then". My grandfather used to breed budgies and when I was a nipper, we had a succession of budgies as pets. Of course they all had mirror's in their cages and would be taught to repeat the phrase, "who's a pretty boy then". And yes I know these birds are not budgies, LOL. The sunflower image is actually cut from a greeting card sent with a previous swap ( sorry forgotten who sent it to me) and the mirror with the wire frame seemed to fit so perfectly. Had to resort to a hot glue gun to fix it down tho. Browsing thru my stash, flowers were significantly absent but seemed to be lots of birds, so they were made use of. Thanks to Jean Roman for the felt flower. The button was an afterthought to add a little contrast/balance. Larger images can be seen on my Flickr photostream

Thanks for looking, more to come soon.

Little Row House bonanza

The latest challenge in the Row House group on PDA ( paper digital art and images by Kim) was to complete at least one set of ten ( yes ten) row houses on "proformers" sent out by Kim. The theme was, " in a colourful neighbourhood".

Got mine late thanks to the Post Office, well all the US based members seemed to receive theirs well before the UK based members. And then force majeur seemed to prevent me from early completion of my entries. I was installing a new kitchen (still got a long way to go!) birthdays ( my DW and MIL who is now 99 years old) and the first bit of sun in ages meant that the garden needed tidying, at least my wife thouht so. But have finally got them in the post when the airlines in the UK and most of northern europe were grounded by this blastedIcelandic volcano, flights have now resumed but delays will have caused huge backlogs for commercial organisations as well as holiday makers.

Anyway, here they are; BTW these images are 96dpi and have been copied from 300 dpi scanned images on my flickr photostream. I know the screen resolution is the former but they look so much better on Flickr.

"He saw her face everywhere"



"The morning after the night before"



"Peace"



"The Master"



"Warning Signs"



" Madame Butterfly"



"The Optimist"



"Party"



"Love"



" The Key To Happiness"

-a little money and a great sense of humour!

they are all simple collages and the houses are 2 inch ( 50 mm) wide, so a little smaller than an atc. I have used a pastel pencil to touch up small areas of colour where I needed to match elements and I painted the key, above, with a watery acrylic gold paint to allow the text to show thru.

Here's hoping they are not delayed for too long or worse yet lost in the ether ( aka PO wharehouseing system). Thanks for looking.

A new pastel painting - african sunset

Wow, another post already; things may be looking up. On the other habd I did not want to leave the decorated egg as my top post, LOL. this is a piece i did at my weekly art group last Tuesday. I am still concentrating on pastel and particularly on limited palette works. This was one of the african sunset atc's ( watercolour) which you may remember I did recently. I have enlarged the format, this is now an A4 painting and used a very much stonger colour set. One of the things I love about pastel is the quality of the colours it is possible to achieve. I think this can be misinterpreted as I have used such a luscious purple for the cloud top. It looks like an horizon and even could be seen as the sea but it is definitely not either and the setting sun should give the clue here. The source image for this painting did show the sun as an almost complete circle broken only by the foliage. I am not a meteorologist so cannot explain why the sun appears to be in front of the cloud bank. Anyway I am very pleased with the piece if I do not stop to try and explain it all.

It is simply an image of the sky as the sun sets seen over a drift of trees. The trees were painted firstly in the lighter green seen at the top level and then overlayed with a dark olive green and lastly with black to get the right depth of colour.

A larger image can be seen on my Flickr photostream. Well that feels better, hope you like it and thanks for looking.