I've been experimenting with Spin Art and Percolator. The updates to Percolator have made it so much more versatile than it was in the beginning and it's worth checking out not just for it's strong graphic quality but also as a means of adding texture to your digital art.
I'm terribly forgetful when it comes to resizing and watermarking images before upload, but these two apps make it much easier;
iWatermark
iResize - this lets you change the dpi too, and do batch edits. Can't believe I only just found it... I need to try to spend more time at iPA...
Much to my surprise I've ended up with a series of Percolated spin art. If you're curious to see the series so far in it's raw state - sign up for my newsletter and I'll send you the password to my online sketchbook.
(What I need to do is add it to the confirmation email you get when you sign up - that way you don't have to wait for me to check my mailing list. Just email me if I'm being tardy...it's a spoon shortage rather than a lack of interest.)
Happy Sunday (or whatever day you're reading this.)
Sx
These were created before the recent update.
I first dipped my toes into the online art world via Zazzle back in February, purely because I'd created something and sent it via MMS to a friend and her reply was that she & her students wanted it on a badge. This in turn led me back to being regularly creative...and the initial catalyst was the Pollock app on my iPhone. (Is it possible to love a gadget too much??)
The wonderful @artbymimulux forwarded a
Zazzle mail to me yesterday. For some bizarre reason it appears to be the one mailing list I'm not on...
I've signed up to what feels like an overwhelming number of sites that all promise to help you optimise everything you could possibly think of, (with regard to online art marketing) many have conflicting advice and many seem to take an awful lot of words to tell you very little.
But this wonderful little mail, which was part two, contained most of what I've read all in one place AND had a few things I'd not heard of.
To read the whole Zazzle checklist click here.
Briefly -
- snag user names on the various blogging sites and blog your links.This is one of the main reasons I like Posterous, because you can autopost to almost everywhere and thus theoretically reach more people. BUT I do vaguely recollect someone saying that you can have too many sites with identical content and this is penalised by the search engines. Anyone know anything about this?
- Social networking. Set up a facebook page (check) and a Twitter account just for your Zazzle store. Now this is where my opinion is undecided. I have a Twitter account, but it's for everything. Sand625 has been my online identity for ages and as my mobility and world has shrunk the net is helping me to cope. I joined Twitter and fell in love with it mostly due to the wonderful and supportive Fibro tweeps, (and yes, there is a certain amount of celeb curiosity. I'm a geek.) But it's also an amazingly inspirational place creatively, so I follow art tweeps too. Does this annoy? Should I have two different accounts? I'm not sure I have the spoons to keep on top of it frankly... They mention LinkedIn, Squidoo, and Kaboodle.too.
- Link to others with similar content.
- "Be sure to use good keywords in your blog post titles, and keep your keyword phrases closer to the beginning of your tweets. (That means put the @myfriend tags at the end of the tweet instead of the beginning.)" And of course, your content needs to be good as keywords will only get you so far...
- "use Pingler, to "ping" your blog posts" Now this is new to me, so I don't know how well it works. Search engines love fresh content apparently, so try to update at least three times a week.
And lastly
automate as much as possible, I'm just going to include a whole chunk of a quote here;
"Use Twitterfeed to automatically update your Twitter and Facebook whenever you update your blogs or your store. Set up Facebook Notes to include your store or blog RSS feed. On your Facebook Fan Page, scroll down to "Notes", select "Edit", then click "Import a Blog". Use the Wordpress App on LinkedIn to sync your Wordpress blog posts with your LinkedIn profile. You can even filter your posts with a special LinkedIn tag. Schedule your blog posts. Some blog sites like Wordpress and Posterous allow you to save blog posts to be automatically posted in the future. This is great if you don't have a lot of time during the week to update. Simply write all of your posts on the weekend, and then just set it and forget it!"My first non art including post...or should I have done this at Wordpress?? ;)
I am a disabled artist & designer based in Liverpool, a coastal city in the North West of England.