Sometimes I doodle just for the hell of it, and there are a lot of times that I produce things that are kind of cool that I could never sell as prints. For example: lately I have taken to defacing my magazines – it’s a way to reuse paper, and often the paper stock is quite lovely to draw on (Frankie in particular!)

Enjoy :D


This was from a Frankie magazine, no. 20 to be exact.


Obviously, a Calvin Klein ad from Vogue.

A few of my pens have run out of ink, time to buy some more! Horah pen shopping!

Lately I have been pretty busy and preoccupied with other things, and I feel bad that I have neglected my bloggerly duties. Sometimes, you get into funks and just don't know what to write about! I am a very visual person, and often I feel like I could just communicate via images but for some reason I don't think that's good enough for this blog.

I'm dragging myself out of this blogging rut, and posting my latest creation: peanut butter frosted cupcakes. They're delicious!



And also this - a very tongue in cheek stab at indie poseurs :)
You can buy it on a t-shirt or as a print!

Adobe are conducting free eSeminars for Australian and New Zealand designers in July - you can register for quite a variety of online seminars catering to web and mobile developers, video and print designers and photographers. I've signed up for all the design seminars already, as well as the Creative Fesival which is kicking off the month on July 1.

Sorry I haven't been regularly posting lately - I've had computer dramas and a bit of work on my plate!

Secret Anatomy of a Young Girl by Elsa Mora

Elsa Mora's work just continues to astound me. She is an artist whose work I can fall into for days, and I would never come out except for coffee and biscuits (Scotch Finger, yum). She has just issued a new series of prints based on her delicious paper cuts in her etsy store.

Further to her awesome talent - she just seems like such a beautiful person just going on what I've gathered from reading her blog! You should add her if you like beautiful paper crafts - she doesn't just create amazing cuts, some of her work is incredibly sculptural too. You just want to touch it. And maybe play with it a little.

I'm seriously toying with the idea of pulling out the credit card... I wonder what Nick would say (eep!)

Dripbook just sent an email announcing that they are coming out of beta!

I've blogged about Dripbook in earlier entries but for the uninitiated, Dripbook is a beautiful little site offering a really compact and portable portfolio facility. They offer creatives a simple way to package their works on site in the form of flash books and also the ability to export your portfolio to your own site with minimal fuss. The diversity of creative workers using Dripbook is quite staggering - I have come across stylists, fashion designers, industrial designers, illustrators, photographers, make up artists and more. I'm a big fan of Dripbook, I even have bumper stickers (no really!)

On July 1 they will be launching version 1 after being in beta testing mode for the past year. Basically, what it means is you will no longer be able to register a free account, and the cost of a Premium account will double - however current Premium account plans and fees will be frozen. They have announced that they'd prefer to focus on providing even more services to creatives, which is exciting to see but sad at the same time.

I have a number of Dripbook invites if you're curious about signing up to use either the free service or one of the premium plans at the current prices that will be frozen after July 1. If you would like an invite, please leave me a comment and be sure to pop in the form your email address and a website (like flickr) where I can see a little bit of your work. I will be the only person who can see your email address, and I promise not to sign you up for spam galore :D

Want a Dripbook account? Go!

Today is Download Day!

From my stats I know that half of you already use Firefox, you guys get cupcakes. Before I'll even consider cracking open my second Tupperware full of cupcakes, the rest of you need to download Firefox.

Why do I use Firefox?

• Firefox renders websites correctly, IE masks coding errors.


• By using Firefox you're helping web developers look to the future, rather than spend so much time on backwards compatibility.


• Add-ons! I have a boat load of add-ons, from StumbleUpon to Firebug. Handiest things EVER.


• It makes you cool. No word of a lie.

Why do you use Firefox?

Admcom have heralded 2008 as the Year of Creativity and I've taken up their invitation to be someone else. Of course, I needed new business cards to complement my new career, and AdmCom delivered with their hilarious business card creator.

No more minding my Ps and Qs! I'm removing any guise of censorship on definatalie.com! Go sod yourselves and take one of my cards on the way out!

The typography on the card was kind of bollocks so I, erm, fixed it.

[via the awesome Brandflakes for Breakfast]
(I secretly want to work for them. Shhh!)

FUNK'D have posted in the Red Bubble forums (and I suspect a few others) about their label competition. Please consider absolutely all the entry conditions before entering a design contest like this.

From their website's FAQ:

Do you offer a cash prize?
We do not offer a cash prize. The winner will have their design printed on a min. of 10,000 bottles (along with their myspace or website URL) that will be distributed throughout Australia or Internationally.

Will my entries be returned?
No. Each entry will become the sole property of FUNK'D™.

COMPETITION RULES:
By participating in this competition, you hereby release all rights to the submitted art work final to FUNK'D™. You must be the legal copywrite owner of the said artwork (design entry). Every design entry submitted becomes the exclusive property of FUNK'D™. By submitting a design, the designer thereby grants FUNK'D™ perpetual license to use the design on its press releases, advertising, and any other way it sees fit worldwide to promote the FUNK'D™ or GO GET FUNK'D™ brand.

In conclusion: You will not get your original artwork back, nor do you retain copyright and there is no cash prize. Basically they're inviting potentially thousands of artists and designers to submit potentially thousands of entries, and will not pay them for their time, expertise or work.

If you want to find out more about why this kind of competition is bad news for the design industry and the people who work in it, check out No!Spec.

This is just a note to let you all know that I'm going to be participating in the Thirty Day Challenge this year. If you are keen to track my progress, please feel free to check out my team's blog - "Blogging the Thirty Day Challenge" and to subscribe to it in your favourite RSS reader. The reasoning behind setting up the blog was to be as transparent as possible about the techniques behind 30DC, and to open up an honest dialogue about social media and marketing.

The 30DC is a free exercise in internet marketing which starts in August. At the moment we're in pre-season training, which is a series of blog and video posts about the free applications and programs you need to install to participate. Not all of the programs/ apps are essential but they make life easier. A big part of the challenge is using the Flock browser, which is a pretty easy transition for me as it's based on Firefox but has bonus social media stuff included.

Disclaimer: All my links to the Thirty Day Challenge use my member referral link and every time one of you lovely people signs up using my member link I get points. Apparently there's going to be a prize for the person with the most points, so if you're happy to support me please feel free to use my links - but if you want to join up, and don’t want to give me a point for doing so, you can click this link.

Also - I'm going to try to restrict my 30DC activity to our team's blog, but I think at some stage I will probably be using 30DC tips and tricks for my online presence. If you think I'm getting spammy, or if it's making you uncomfortable, please let me know. I don't want to damage whatever reputation I may have, and I feel it's important not to get spammy and to maintain trust between the people I associate with and myself!

I just came to the Creature Comforts blog not 15 minutes ago via My Folk Lover (aka the gorgeously talented Catherine Campbell). Ez is celebrating the first year anniversary of the Creature Comforts blog with a huge give-away from contributors like Catherine, Holly Becker of decor8, Lab Partners and oodles more wonderful creative people.

If you like lovely things, pop on over to check out Creature Comforts and enter the give-away!

If you've got a Twitter account you might have experienced the really irritating outages that have been happening of late, but never fear! Plurk is here to save you from your dawdling moments on the internet! I got an account a few days ago, and I've been addicted ever since.

Reasons why you should stop Tweeting and start Plurking:

• The interface - it's a gantt chart! Some say it's tricky to get a hang of, but I thought it was pretty easy: new plurks appear on the left, old plurks disappear to the right.


• Karma! Karma is like crack. You will find yourself plurking, re-plurking, sharing and commenting to increase your stats and get more emoticons and other easter eggs.


• It's like a social micro-blogging IM system - you can have conversations in response to your friends' plurks. New responses appear in real time.


• Everyone is really friendly. The userbase is reportedly around 8000, which isn't much, so everyone seems really friendly. I find Twitter to be very impersonal, and find it hard to really connect with people there, even people I know in real life!


• This is real networking. You can share links, images and videos with your friends and then discuss them!


• Permalinked plurks. You can @message other users like on Twitter, but Plurk has permalinks for all plurks and responses, so you can refer to them forever! Check out one of my plurk permalinks.


• Plurk has its own language.

So, if you're interested in jumping ship or if you've never tried micro-blogging before - why not have a look? I have linked to my referral page, so when you sign up you'll instantly be my friend and start following my plurks. It also means I get points that go towards earning stars!

Of course, you don't have to use the referral link but stars are nice, aren't they? :P

Resulting Palette/Patterns:





I came across pfennigdreadful's rather pretty colour palette today which was inspired by John McCain's face, and I laughed for about 15 minutes! It's true, you can find beauty in everything!

Your name in lights by cheechman via flickr.

Tracy over on Red Bubble asked in the forums:

A little while ago I set myself up with a free website to display some of my stuff, but I really would like to have a swish bang site like some of the ones i have seen from other bubblers.

Where do you go to find cool looking websites to make your own? and at what cost?
If paying for a site, does everything come with it like a template thingy for you to add your own stuff or is there different fees for different things?

I thought this was an awesome question and one that warrants further exploration, so after dashing off my quick answer to her I thought I'd sit down and write a more comprehensive guide to getting your portfolio on the web. You might be a photographer, print maker, painter, illustrator, sculptor, jeweller, cake maker or stylist - but unless you're a web designer there's no insta-magical way to showcase your portfolio on the net. (Even if you're a web designer it's not insta-magical!)

Your name, in lights

The first thing people usually think of when they are pondering a web presence is registering a domain name and setting up a site on their own hosting. This is the most expensive option, and also a road paved with tears, late nights and caffeine. Buying a domain and hosting will set you back financially within minutes, and if you haven't got html and css coding skills it'll mean you're out of pocket before your jpgs even hit the server. Don't get me wrong, this is the most professional route to take but you must consider all the pros and cons before you get out your credit card.

If you don't have web site building skills, please do yourself a favour and pay someone with those skills to build you a beautiful site. Sure, you can buy a template site out of the box or find a free one - but do consider the following:

• How many other people are using that template?


• Will you be able to grow your website with a bog standard template?


• How much time and patience are you willing to invest in googling when something goes wrong?


• Does a template present you and your portfolio at their best?

Finding a CMS to call your own

Don't think that TLAs like CMS are just for big business. Content Management Systems are good for creatives too.

There are few free CMS (Content Management Systems) that are specifically engineered with artists in mind. The best one I've seen by far is Indexhibit. Red Bubble user mimobase has used this application to build his personal website mimobase.com with fabulous results, in my ever so humble opinion.

Little known fact: You can use most blog platforms as CMS for portfolio sites. Wordpress and Serendipity in particular are reportedly very good. I use Serendipity for this here blog, and I enjoy it very much but I haven't put much thought towards using it for managing portfolio content to be honest.

Keep in mind - even if you use an open source or free CMS, you'll still need a domain and hosting.

Free stuff makes the internet turn 'round

In this day and age you've got so many free options with regard to establishing an internet presence that you'd be silly not to explore them before shelling out your hard earned cash money.

If you want to start a zero-outlay site to display a schmick looking portfolio fairly easily, I highly recommend tumblr. Tumblr doesn't have a categorising system, but tagging is available so you can do some quasi-categorising if you tinker with your theme.

There are a number of templates that would be rather becoming of a portfolio:
Screenshot
Box Factory
Museum

There are lots of free portfolio communities out there. You don't have to purchase a domain or hosting, however the trade off is that you don't have very much flexibility when it comes to customising your page.

Dripbook
Coroflot
Behance

Whatever you decide to do, keep in mind that if you can't code it - hire someone who can to do it. All too often I come across poorly designed and/ or coded portfolio sites that don't reflect very well on the creatives they are representing. Don't be afraid to get in contact with a web designer to discuss a portfolio design that can be customised to suit your specific needs - after all, creatives like us need to support other creatives too!

Drawing Day was FUN on Red Bubble! thickblackoutline and Natalie Tyler graciously hosted the Drawing Day group, and even had a mini-challenge to draw a new avatar in the forums.


Drawing Day Aftermath by Mui-Ling Teh

I am a member of BlogRush, a network that syndicates blog posts throughout the blogging community. This evening I signed my tumblr blog up to become a part of the network, because I thought it'd be an interesting exercise to see if a largely image based blog would get much of a reaction. Unfortunately, the reaction was not what I had expected - BlogRush put a damper on my plans by rejecting my tumblr blog from the network on the basis of nudity/ pornography!!

I'm guessing the offending article was this series of posts that log the process of painting "Doily Girl" (warning, boobs). I have no idea why tasteful and totally unrealistic nudity is lumped in with pornography, but I'm pissed off.

The blog's content (or advertising) should not contain any of the following types of content: hate, anti-racial, terrorism, drug-related, hacking, phishing, fraud, pornographic, nudity, warez, gambling, copyright infringement, obscene or disgusting material of any kind, or anything considered illegal.
BlogRush Terms of Service

How is nudity, depicted in a highly unrealistic painting style, illegal or anywhere near as bad as any of the other things listed in that paragraph!? Are there any other artists who object to this? Speak up!