Embroidered Collage

Some months ago I switched from blogarithm to Google's RSS feeder.  I love it!  And when I scroll down the list of updates, these are the three I always look for first, before I click on anything else.

In a Minute Ago Blog - The best fiber blog ever.  Sharon Boggon pulls together an amazing amount of stuff from all over the web as well as showing her own work.  She's been at it long enough that she has archives full of information and all her posts are tagged, making surfing within them very easy.  Yes, this is the same Sharon teaching the Library of Stitches class.  She is also interested in the nature of blogging.

Luann Udell's Blog - Luann writes about her artistic and business development.  She passes on her experiences in setting up a successful business as a fiber and jewelry artist, her trials and her triumphs and what she thinks about the whole process.  I have found her articles to be very meaningful and inspiring as I move forward on my own journey.

Making a Mark - Katherine Tyrrell seems to be an unending font of information on all things drawing, with some touches of professional development thrown in.  She shares her drawings and pastel paintings and pulls in additional  interesting material from across the web.

Raven Hanna designs jewelry featuring molecular patterns.  It's a really nifty idea and I found out about it from reading the July 17 issue of Chemical and Engineering News.  Raven's official page is at www.madewithmolecules.com .  She has a PhD in Biophysics and Biochemistry and currently creates works in all sorts of areas connecting art to science, not just jewelry, including film-making and writing articles.  The whole concept appeals to me and tempts me to take up science related themes in my future visual explorations.   I'd already played with the idea off and on in the past, though I don't think it ever made the blog.

While I'm thinking about things that I read I thought I'd mention these two online sources, in case you haven't found them yet and one paper source.

Luann Udell, a fiber artist, writes a wonderful blog, primarily focused on philosophies and thoughts behind the making and marketing of art.  It is in regards to her personal journey, but she writes knowing that others will read for inspiration.  Recently she did a couple neat series on Exercises and Habits of Thin People in which she related losing weight to making art.  It's a little hard to work backwards with her entries, but I found it worth the effort.  If you look in the navigation bar you can see the dates - try typing in some earlier ones, up to about 18 months ago and then working your way forward.  She does revisit many topics along the way. 

Robert Genn, a painter, sends out a twice weekly letter and also publishes it to the archives on his website including "clickbacks" which are responses his readers send to him.  Sometimes the responses strike a chord even more than the letter itself.  He covers everything from other artists, to inspirational places he's visiting, to ways to think about art, to marketing the art.  He has a distinct point of view, but always an interesting one.

Both are worth it if you never want to sell a thing, but if you do, then I've also really enjoyed Art Calendar a magazine by and for artists.  A chunk of it is exhibition calls for entry, but an even larger chunk of it is articles that cover all sorts of aspects you might run across in pursuing art as a business.  I picked up about five months from the newsstand, then signed up for an online subscription, which was a pretty good price, and now get an email each month letting me know where the link to the pdf file of the next month's magazine, about two weeks before publication.  I just finished reading June's issue this morning and enjoyed every article.

Hugh Macleod wrote this really cool article on "How to be creative" and draws nifty cartoons and doodles on the backs of business cards.  Go down past the list at the top and start reading the text.  Some pieces I liked, some confused me, but it is definitely worth the read, although it might take more than one sitting.  Someone posted the link in the etsy forums today and after reading it I had to share immediately.

I liked #5 in which he points out there's no glorious swelling of triumph when you come up with perfect idea.  Instead it's the one that you just can't get out of your head even though you think it's stupid so you do it anway.

I liked the thread that ran through a number of the tips, which was about passion.  Yeah, you still have to market the passion, but it's that desire that pulls you through the hours doing the work in which you are creating something that is just yours that is what will bring success.  He referred to it most pointedly in #25 and #26.

I went and looked around www.etsy.com for the first time today.  It was soooo much FUN.  All those funky graphical search methods, the way the pictures and objects would pop up, the way the general categories were set up.  I looked around for a while and almost bought a couple different things.  Basically it's a site for selling all sorts of hand-crafted objects, of which art is a subset.  It's not an auction site but a collection of stores.  And it was a great deal of fun.  Go look if you never have.

I googled myself under ("Beth Robinson" art) a couple weeks ago and actually found myself on the first page!  It's dropped to the second now, but it's still pretty cool.  It was one of the listings I had had at Art By Us.  I need to post more auctions.  It's nice to know the search engines find that site.  And if anyone had been interested that link would have taken them to my profile which would have brought them here.  As expected I wasn't the only artist with my rather common name. 

I found Strange Dolls created by Beth Robinson.  She does some interesting work with wierd little dolls that somehow remind me of Tim Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas.  They have tons of personality and are often more than a little goth.  She also paints in assorted media.  Some of her two-dimensional work is similar to the dolls, some is not.  This work is at a different website which links to the doll site.

I also found Glan y Mor Gallery in Pembrokeshire which is run by the artists Beth Robinson and Margaret Jones.  She creates some truly luscious landscapes of the surrounding area with fantastic use of color, which you can see if you go a little deeper into the site.

That was fun.  I'm looking to get my own domain name and, after some advice on Wetcanvas, I do intend to base it on my real name, perhaps "bethrobinsonart.com".  Originally I was going to base it only on Pumpkin12pm, but as I get ready to enter an exhibit I realize that many people would never see that version of my name.  So I'll keep it for my sigil, and maybe for the title, but not the actual domain name.