New Year and the blogosphere

The phenomenon of blogging… it’s like Facebook, but with strangers, and it’s not your social life, it’s your interests. Free websites such as Tumblr, Blogger, and WordPress have become the new platform for amateur artists to display their work freely without any dictation or restriction from higher authority. The varieties of talent levels available on such platforms are exhilarating. From newly starting artists who simply fancy getting ideas out there and some advice, to professionals selling their work on posters and mugs, blogging can serve as inspiration to anyone.

 

Photo by David Berkowitz on Flickr

From a viewer’s point of view, the website provides a new, fresh, and abundant database of art like never before. If you are yourself an artist, it is much easier to find artists that are similar to your work and that you could draw personal inspiration from on Tumblr, for example, than in a gallery. This does have its disadvantages as in a gallery everything is pre-selected for you to be guaranteed good quality, whereas on blogging websites, by typing ‘collage art’ into the search, there will be much sifting to do before finding something that works for you. But the advantage of this is that such works exists and are readily available for you to use. The diversity is exciting and it is amazing how many artists you can explore in little time. It is also easy to print anything of anyone else’s and experiment with it instantaneously, and make some of your own art based on other people just like you.

 

As a user, blogging is very much like personal advertising of your own work, except that you can’t just put it out there and expect people to ‘discover’ you. It is an interaction. You follow and comment on other people’s blog to then receive follows and comments on your own work. It is dedication. In this sense it is truly fantastic the support system you can get from people you don’t know. Blogs will also have the tendency to push an artist to keep creating. If you want to keep your viewers viewing, you need to keep posting and creating. Blogging also provides the possibility of increasing any part-time job you may want as an artist. Many artists use blogs as a more casual surface, with sometimes less professional pieces, to grow a fan base and community and then link this blog to their website.

 

So overall, social media is making art more accessible and is making it easier to self-promote online. Having only recently joined the blogging world I have to say I was surprised at how encouraging it is to see other people at similar levels doing the same things as me. It does serve as a pushing force to keep creating very often, and to keep posting. Blogging with art is something I recommend, if not for the long term, for a month or so.

 

By Naomi Pacific

Website of the week- official idiocy

Picture credits to Boodoo

There is nothing more delightful (or worrying, depending on which way you look at it), than hearing someone important saying something, well, unimportant. George W. Bush was a prime example of this. He was in one of the world’s most powerful positions but one might argue that his words did not really reflect this.

When he spoke of education, he made his point of view very clear to his nation: “You teach a child to read, and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test.” -Townsend, Tenn., Feb. 21, 2001.

If for one moment we can ignore the inclination to be angered by the, how shall we put this, wise words of those running our world, we may find light amusement in what officials have to say for themselves. If anything, it makes us feel a bit better about ourselves.

There are hundreds of websites dedicated to people who are prone to a few slip-ups, even though most of them will happily do the job for themselves on Twitter. One such website that is worth a visit however, is a tumblr blog- Officials Say the Darndest Things.

Kate Townend

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