Category // art

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Keep Pinning

Filed under art, marketing

Yesterday I read an article – from someone whose work I admire – that was adamantly against Pinterest. I read her post, then the articles she linked to and Pinterest’s Terms of Use. Then I saw several tweets linking to “Why I tearfully deleted my Pinterest inspiration boards” by Kirsten of DDK Portraits, who happens to also be a lawyer. Uh oh.

I was worried for a little bit until I remembered why I started putting my work online in the first place. I do it for people to see, hopefully enjoy or at least find useful, and if I’m lucky enough they’ll share it within their own little network or community. Over the last few months Pinterest has referred four times as much traffic to my website than any other. That’s a whole lot of people that wouldn’t have seen my work otherwise. I understand the concern, especially from photographers. Pinterest’s Terms of Use are definitely sketchy. I might be eating my words one day, but for now I trust Pinterest – they haven’t done anything wrong as far as I can tell. And as an artist, I welcome you to pin my work – I would think that a lot of other artists feel the same way.

If you don’t want your images shared, Pinterest has made it easy to disable pinning from your site by adding meta name="pinterest" content="nopin" to your header. You can also go into Flickr and turn off sharing easily.

Most importantly – before I repin I always click through to learn more about an artist, find more information and make sure it’s linked correctly – what about you?

When done right, with the proper source link, Pinterest is an amazing tool and sharing platform. I’ve found great tutorials, discovered new artists and photographers and your pins keep me constantly inspired.

Some interesting reading on the subject:
- Pinterest, Inspiration, Copying and the Whole Ethics Thing on Craftypod
- Prying Control from Your Cold, Cramped Hands by Kim Werker

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Spinning

Filed under art

Drawing… what’s that?

I think I’ve drawn a total of three things this whole year. How awful is that?
Did a quick collage today and it felt great. Happy 11.11.11!

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Tissue Paper Painting Tutorial

Filed under art, tutorials

Had so much fun during the process of making this painting, thought I’d share!

Preparing the Surface

  • Start with a DIY Masonite Panel (or any hard surface) & stack of old leftover book pages (or any paper good for collaging).
  • Mod Podge pages to the board – in a pattern or not, just cover the whole thing. Use the mod podge as a glue, putting it directly on the board then smoothing the pages over the top.
  • Paint the board with white acrylic – use a big brush and not a lot of paint. You don’t want to cover the whole thing so the texture and color of the book pages come through.
  • Once the paint is dry use your handy putty knife to scrape at it a while to give it a warn look. Don’t be afraid to dig into the pages and tear up small edges and corners.
  • Paint over it again with the white acrylic if you’d like.
  • Then you have a wonderful texture-y surface to draw or paint on!

Painting with Tissue Paper

  • Sketch out the elephant or whatever shape/animal you’d like.
  • Find a sheet of tissue paper that will cover the whole shape you want to fill in.
  • Fill in the shape with a gluestick, it doesn’t have to be exact but it’s better to be a little out of the lines than inside.
  • Carefully smooth the tissue paper over the glue’d areas – using a tissue works well for smoothing.
  • Once it’s all covered and dry cut around the shape with an exacto and remove the extra tissue.
  • At that point I drew over the elephant again with a dark pencil line but do whatchya want!

I made a smaller version on paper with a cute little elephant stamp I found at Jo-Ann’s too!

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