September 2007

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Driving traffic to your site?

September 21, 2007 in Blogging | No comments

Can you play tricks to drive traffic to your site? I saw a site that extensively used the words “blue panties” to drive traffic. She seemed to believe that it did drive traffic to her site. So what? Does that turn in to marketable traffic? Do those people searching for “blue panties” stick around once they (quickly) realize they’ve been duped?

But it got me thinking: should I dupe some people just to get the Google crowd exposed to my site? Do I have enough content? Would they click on my Adsense ads? I dunno. What I do know is this: white panties, pink panties, black lace panties (thank you, Kiss, for that song, Let’s Put the X in Sex), and panty fetish dominatrix sex in panties stories of fetish unfold. Did that do the trick? Time will tell…

Finding time and learning about art: chronicles of life with a 2 year old

September 20, 2007 in Uncategorized | No comments

Yes, it can be done! I don’t really like watercolors much but I have managed to get a decent Crayola set and some better (but still not very good) brushes and some low-grade watercolor paper. I’m able to paint with my 2 year old around. Hallelujah!

Okay, so what I’m able to make between my 2 year old wanting to “erase daddy’s picture” is not really museum-quality stuff, but hey, I’m still making art and I’m also learning something. My biggest “aha!” is that the art is BETTER when we collaborate. My 2-year-old son and I, that is. I’m not sure why – maybe it’s that he forces me to work quickly and impulsively where I would normally think too much. He’s also not afraid to mix whichever-the-hell colors together that suite him at the moment, and to discard convention (being alien to him) and do things like water down the blue like crazy and then mash his brush into the paper until it’s almost completely dry. He’ll then come back later and wet it down as he’s noodling about. He’s made some surprisingly good pieces, actually. Better than some “professional” abstract artists I’ve seen, actually.

Meanwhile, I’m frantically trying to clean the green goo on top of the yellow paint and trying to keep that blue out of the red paint. Alas, as fast as I clean, he destroys (okay, FASTER).

I show him how to wet down a spot, drop in some color, and blow on it to spread the color; he’s immediately excited and sets about blowing on the paint in his own devil-may-care manner (usually involving a healthy amount of spit). Nevertheless, the results are fairly impressive and I’m proud of my budding artist – and, more importantly, he’s proud of himself. He runs off to show Mama what he’s made, grinning from ear to ear.

Steve’s watercolor

Atheism and art

September 19, 2007 in Creativity, Editorials | No comments

Unrelated to this blog topic but important: a lot of artists say they find inspiration in God or they Thank God for their successes or whatever. Yeah, whatever. You can still make good art and you can still be inspired if you are an atheist. Just because you’re smart and don’t give in to a magical “old white dude” with a beard in the sky watching over you doesn’t mean that you’re devoid of inspiration. The world is beautiful. Go see it and capture it in your art. No, it didn’t need a creator to be beautiful. Put down the pencil, stop typing, and go take a midnight stroll around your neighborhood. See all that stuff? It’s there because MAN created it (the architecture, the landscape design, the park design, etc.), not some magical Zulu dude in the sky (which is really silly – why don’t planes and/or astronauts fly into heaven?). The flora and fauna survived because they adapted over millions of years.

Have you drawn today? Have you painted today? If you have, thank yourself, not the magical Jeebus in the sky. (kudos if you got the Homer Simpson reference)

Heinlein on success

September 14, 2007 in Business, Editorials | No comments

Robert A. Heinlein, one of my favorite authors, has 5 rules that he gave at the Navel Academy to the midshipmen way back in the 1960s. I’d like to share that with you because it totally applies to artists of all sorts.

First,  you must create art. This eliminates 50% of people that want to be artists – most dream but don’t act. Action is the way to success. If 100 people want to be an artist, 50 will be left because they’ll actually create salable art.

Second, you must FINISH a piece of art.  You can’t just have stuff started and sitting around your studio. You must actually produce a finished piece. Drop another 50% – only 25 people will actually finish a piece of art.

Third, you must eventually call it “done.” You can’t tweak forever, you can’t have excuse after excuse why you’re not better than <insert famous artist here>. Drop yet another 50% – only about 12 people will actually stop giving excuses and call their masterpiece “done.”

Fourth, you must bring your work to the public – submit to a gallery, create a website, sell on eBay, whatever. You have to get it out there.  If you don’t put it up for sale, you won’t sell it. We’re down to 6 of the original 100 now.

Fifth, you must persist. Your first piece of art might not be very good, but you must persist. It has been said that your first 1000 pieces of art will just plain stink. So what? Hurry up and get your first 1000 out of the way! This leaves 3 people that might actually have some tenacity.

Sixth (and this is my addition), you must try AGAIN. You must produce more art. This will leave about 1 person that gets this far. So we have 1/100, or 1% of people, that will get this far.  1% of people! So next time you’re rationalizing why you can’t make it out to your studio, think of this – if you don’t, you’re part of the 99% of people that will never succeed as an artist! Dont’ do it to yourself – get out and start pumping out the paintings!