Showing posts with label animal portrait. Show all posts
Showing posts with label animal portrait. Show all posts

Sunday, May 1, 2011

Recent Activity

It has been an interesting week as I've been getting familiar with the redbubble.com arts community. Of the three sites I joined when starting this blog, it is the one that sees the most activity - at least in my experience so far.

I don't know how that translates into sales for the artists, but the atmosphere is a very supportive and inspiring community of so many talented artists from all around the globe. I've been blown away by the fantastic art and photography I've seen there. If you visit my profile at http://www.redbubble.com/people/janicedunbar, you can view my 'favorites' tab to get a glimpse of some of the amazing artwork on the site.

It is really cool to be featured and that helps a lot to get your art seen since there is so much really fine stuff being submitted all the time into the groups. Some of the groups change featured work frequently, others not as often.  Since being on the site, my drawing of Bono has been featured a total of five times now and has had the most views, 'Cereal In Spoon With Milk' and 'Tillie' have both been featured twice and I uploaded this oil painting of John Lennon on Friday which got it's first feature today in this group:  http://www.redbubble.com/groups/art-and-ink-so-free

John Lennon painting artwork

Or link to the painting: http://www.redbubble.com/john-lennon

It has taken a lot of time setting accounts up for all three sites and I have found my focus to be mostly on Red Bubble after the initial set up on each.  As only a free member at Fine Art America and Image Kind, my submitted art gets buried under so much other artwork that unless I upgrade my accounts, it doesn't get preferred listing in the internal search engines so it is much harder to get views.  I may upgrade my accounts as I move forward, but I am still in the process of getting organized and managing what I need to take care of first in order to do so.  I'm just about ready to start creating new... yeah! :)

Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Welcome to my Artist Blog!

After some time away from drawing and painting, distracted by technology and other pursuits, this past Christmas I painted a portrait of my sister's dog 'Tillie' as a gift for her and her husband.

Original pet portrait acrylic painting
 
It was such a good feeling to paint again, I had forgotten how much I enjoy it and it awoke in me the desire to get back to the basics of art with a pencil and a paint brush again. 

I began researching online artist communities and considering which ones I might want to join to see if I could sell 'prints on demand' and original artwork, when I realized I needed to get a little more organized and start at the beginning. So I've spent the past few weeks scanning older photos of my artwork, preparing them for the web and designing my online portfolio http://www.onlinebydesign.ca as the first step in this process and the second step has been setting up this blog.

I'm sure it will go through a lot of changes over the next few weeks and months as I decide upon the look and feel I want for it.  Now that both my site and blog are online however, I will begin signing up for the various artist community sites and places to sell art online that have caught my attention and will post links to those when they are ready to share.

My goal in starting this blog is to encourage new inspiration and motivation to continue to grow in me as an artist and to keep learning and doing!