Wednesday 30 June 2010

New email web icons - Simpsons and email me icons

Simpson E Mail Icons

Contains 7 512x512 icons in PNG format.
Download
mail web icons

E mail Me Icon/Image set
Contains 11 128x128 icons in PNG format.
Download
new email icons

Monday 28 June 2010

BAMBOO


Corel Painter X art software simulates a Bamboo Pen... without the drawbacks of traditional pens, which can clog, spatter, or run dry.

Young Ronald Searle and his friends enlisted in the British Royal Engineers at age 19 during World War II. They were stationed in Singapore when the city was captured by the Japanese in February 1942.

Searle and his friends were taken prisoner and shipped to a dense tropical jungle to build the Burma-Siam railroad. They worked at forced labor in sweltering heat, chopping through miles of dense bamboo forests and hacking a path through granite mountains. On a starvation diet of less than 400 calories per day, plagued by insects and disease, victimized by brutal guards, the prisoners began dying like flies. The guards quickly killed any member of the ragtag group who fell behind. Searle recalled:
My friends and I, we all signed up together. We had grown up together, we went to school together and they all died like that. So few of us came out of it. Basically, all the people we loved and knew and grew up with simply became fertiliser for the nearest bamboo....
Cholera also took a terrible toll on the men, including Searle:
Between bouts of fever I came round one morning to find that the men on each side of me were dead, and as I tried to prop myself up to get away from them, I saw that there was a snake coiled under the bundle on which I had been resting my head.
His captors enforced a harsh discipline. The slightest infraction
meant a thrashing for someone with the ubiquitous bamboo stick - and being beaten with bamboo is like being beaten with an iron bar.
One such beating left Searle temporarily paralyzed. But there were even more insidious uses for bamboo:
Some of our overseers had an extremely primitive sense of humour. During the noon break on the cuttings, they would frequently relieve their boredom by calling us into line before we had barely gobbled down our rice, to watch the torture of one of us picked at random. The unlucky one might be made to hold a heavy rock above his head in the full sun, with a sharpened bamboo stick propped against his back. If he wavered, which he inevitably did, the bamboo spear pierced his skin.

Searle resolved that he was going to draw a record of his ordeal. He obssessively began drawing every day on smuggled scraps of paper.



He later described his sketches as "the graffiti of a condemned man, intending to leave a rough witness of his passing through, but who found himself - to his surprise and delight - among the reprieved." Searle could have been severely punished by the guards for his drawings. He sometimes concealed them by rolling them up inside the ubiquitous bamboo and burying them in the ground.

When the railroad was completed, Searle was among the small percentage of prisoners who survived the jungle. He was shipped back to Changi, a horrifically squalid and overcrowded jail in Singapore.

There, the men continued to starve. Searle was especially taken by a pair of baby kittens at the jail:



Searle fattened them up and on Christmas day, 1944, cooked and ate them.

In August 1945, Searle was released after the war ended and went on to a long, passionate career as a brilliant artist. Thinking back, he said, "Everything goes back to being a prisoner. When I think how fortunate I was to survive that, to lose all one's friends at 19 years old - every day is a treasure. I decided when the war ended that I was going to do something interesting."

Searle, now 90, drew distinctive pictures using an old fashioned bamboo pen.




Corel Painter X art software conveniently provides you with art and passion with none of the mess or drawbacks of a traditional Bamboo Pen... which can clog, spatter, or run dry.


Flutter

Butterflies
Happy Monday to all! And thank you so much for the Fimo birdie love :)
Congratulations to Allyson Haskell for winning the giveaway at my Facebook page!

B tube video blogspot template (Blogger)

If you are searching for a video blogger template then i recomment you to this template (Btube video blogspot template).Image shown below may be blurr but you can check the live demo of this blog.For download and demo of this blog wait till the end of the post.
If you are looking for more advanced video blog templates then check simplex video blogspot template.
Need a photogalery blogspot template ,make sure to check 27 photography blogger template for your photoblog
 video blogger template

Information :

1 - when adding text to the following sequence must be followed. Image code, video codes and text.
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5 -Page navigation widget style pagination
6 -To change the logo should replace the link below.
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 Designer       Web Bilgi

Sunday 27 June 2010

Three little fimo birds

Three little fimo birds
From above
Mobile
1
2
3
4
All done! I painted them with acrylic & a coat of matte varnish.
It's Daniel's now because he asked me for it...how could I say no to Daniel :)
He wants to put it on the window above his desk in the new house.

Saturday 26 June 2010

Clay Birdies WIP

Polymer Clay Birds wip
I cooked these little polymer clay birds this morning to be made into a mobile after I've painted them with acrylics. I'll show you the end result tomorrow.
The biggest one is 3 1/2 inches long from beak to tail.

Friday 25 June 2010

10 free webdesigner's art blogger template


[1]. Infinity blogger template

Infinity is simply gorgeous Blogger-Blogspot template. It was also released by Smashing Magazine  as a free Wordpress theme The theme is a creation of Vikiwords Studio from China.art blogger template.Converted from PSD to blogger template
[2]Water Color blogspot templates

Water Color is colorful and vibrant Blogger-Blogspot template with bright and grungy background. It was converted to Blogger-Blogspot by Alvaris Falcon and deigned by TemplateLite.
[3] Kids Style blogger templates

Kids Style is a very cute Blogger-Blogspot template. It was originally designed by EZwpthemes and converted to Blogger-Blogspot by Klodian.
[4]Art blogger Template 
Art Template is a very beautiful Blogger-Blogspot template created by EZwpthemes(psd) and converted to Blogger-Blogspot by Gosu. The template features a stylish background and widgets.

[5] Night Sky blogger templates
 Night Sky is an original Blogger-Blogspot template. It is created by an Indian web design agency Ray Creations. They have also released Night Sky 2.0, make sure to check that out too.

 [6] Creative Art

Creative Art is also converted to Blogger-Blogspot by Gosu. It has amazing combination of grunge and notepaper design which makes it an eye candy. It was designed by FTL and released by Smashing Magazine as a free Wordpress theme.
[7] Craftwork blogger template

Craftwork was originally released as a free Wordpress theme by EZwpthemes.  It is the most viewed, downloaded and commented template on Beta Templates(vector blogger template)

[8] Notepad Chaos blogger template
Notepad Chaos was originally designed by Evan Eckard and released by Smashing Magazine as a free Wordpress theme. A Turkish blogger, Gosu, converted it to Blogger-Blogspot. Notepad Chaos theme has a vibrant & colorful background which makes it a master piece.
[9]vector Art blogger template

    2 Columns, Adapted from Wordpress, Brown, Fixed width, Grunge, Right sidebar,
vector blogger template
[10]Cute Outfit blogger template


This is nice template with top navigation menu, Search box, Feed icon, vector header image..

Thursday 24 June 2010

Facebook giveaway!

20 cent Bird
I'm giving away this 4" x 6" original watercolor & collage at my Facebook page.
If you have a Facebook account you'll need to click on the "Like" button before leaving a comment on the photo. Head on over there if you'd like to participate :)

Two cultural china blogger templates

Ink and Wash Blogger Template

Link and Wash is a beautiful Blogger template with a taste of Chinese culture and characters.

Features: 2 columns Blogger templates, china style templates, personal Blogspot template, travel Blogger templates, nature Blogger templates, floral Blogger layout

DemoDownload



Simple China Blogger Template

Simple China is a very beautiful theme by Alexander Tumanov. You can customize all fonts and colors by just going to "Fonts & Colors" tab.

Features: 2 columns, travel, china, rss, top menu, xml, blogspot. 

Wednesday 23 June 2010

Yellow Bird

Yellow Bird
Trying out something a bit different today.
Mixed media & digital collage. 9 x 12 inches.

Travellers blogger templates with google maps as header

Nice two column simple blogger template
With Live Google maps as a header.
This is one of a kind blogger template I suggest you to must look at the demo .
I am sure you will realy love it.
This is a modified minima template with google maps gadget at the top.
If you a have a travel blog then this is must for you.

Monday 21 June 2010

New Rocks

New rocks
I was immediately inspired to make some new hand painted stones
after I read my friend Margie's beautiful guest post at Indie Fixx.
The round stone is 6 inches in diameter, the biggest one I've painted yet!
These will all be companions to my succulent and cactus collection,
Manolo made a really nice place for them in the new house.
Hand painted with white acrylic ink & a very fine (No.1 or 2) round brush.
***The little white pebble vase is from my favorite ceramist:
Paula Valentim of Otchipotchi.


Sunday 20 June 2010

ARTISTS IN LOVE, part 16

In 1863, artist Albert Bierstadt and writer Fitz Hugh Ludlow left New York on an expedition into the great American wilderness. Bierstadt dreamed of painting spectacular western landscapes while Ludlow planned to write about them.

The two men also had something to work out between them: Bierstadt was in love with Ludlow's wife, Rosalie.



The men traveled together for nearly nine months. They picked up fresh supplies in Kansas and followed the Overland Trail, working their way through Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada and into what would one day become Yosemite National Park.

Nobody knows for sure what the two men discussed around the campfire at night, but things must have gotten a little testy in Colorado when they discovered a beautiful 14,000 foot mountain and Bierstadt named it after Ludlow's wife.

Bierstadt is reputed to be the first man ever to climb Mount Rosalie.

The travelers reached the west coast before winter. They found a steamer ship in San Francisco that returned them to New York, where Rosalie waited apprehensively.

Both men returned home steadfastly in love with Rosalie. Unfortunately for Ludlow, he also loved hashish (his most famous book was the classic account, The Hasheesh Eater). As drugs took an increasing toll on Ludlow's life, Rosalie turned to Bierstadt for comfort. Ludlow's cousin wrote at the time,

[Ludlow] is a pretty fellow to be cursing poor Rose. Whatever she may have done is no excuse for him and if he had done as he should she never would have been so fond of the attentions of other men. I don't entirely excuse her, but I will stand up for her against him. I have no patience with him.
Ludlow continued to work on his book about their expedition while Bierstadt worked on immense paintings of the landscapes he had witnessed. His masterpiece was, "Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mount Rosalie."



In 1866, the year that Bierstadt unveiled his painting of her mountain, Rosalie divorced Ludlow and married Bierstadt. The embittered Ludlow removed every reference to Bierstadt's name from the manuscript of his book.

Bierstadt and Rosalie went on to lead a happy life together. They traveled the world and the successful painter opened studios in London, Paris and Rome. Years later, Bierstadt took Rosalie back to California on the newly built railroad, returning over some of the same ground he had traversed on horseback and by foot as a young artist.

If you look for Mount Rosalie today, you won't find anything resembling Bierstadt's painting. For one thing, after Rosalie died the Colorado state legislature renamed the mountain for the governor of Colorado, John Evans. (As surely as rain erodes mountains, bureaucrats and politicians follow in the wake of lovers and pioneers, eroding all romantic gestures and leveling all artistic achievements).

But apart from that, you won't find the mountain because Bierstadt's landscape was largely imagined. He painted accurate studies on site, but then exaggerated and romanticized them back in his studio. He combined waterfalls from one location with cliffs from a second and mountains from a third. For added drama he sometimes inserted fog, mist or dark storm clouds.

In Bierstadt's famous painting, you can see that he envisioned Mount Rosalie as a radiant heaven beckoning from beyond the clouds in the the upper left hand corner of the picture:



But a photograph of Mt. Evans today conveys a different feeling:



Geologists could tell that Bierstadt's paintings were composites, and art critics faulted him for concocting landscapes in his studio rather than capturing reality on the trail.

It's true that the farther an artist gets from his subject (whether the subject is a mountain or a girl) the harder it becomes to retain all the raw data about the subject. Factual details begin to drop out, to be replaced by imagination and thoughts and feelings. This digestive process is what helps us find the larger poetry around us. It's what makes relationships a shared reality.

After the first three or four months on the trail thinking about Rosalie (imagine-- no letters, no skype, no sexting!) it's not surprising that Bierstadt began to see her in the mountains, or in the wildflowers or in the moon. I'd wager that both Bierstadt and Ludlow were baying at that moon before their trip was through.

How important are the factual details about the artist's subject? Bierstadt painted Mt. Rosalie more with his heart than his eyes, but that doesn't mean the result was less accurate than the photographs of Rosalie or Mount Evans. Bierstadt's idealized image of Rosalie as a pristine white land of flowing waterfalls may have been more real than the mundane facts about her that have dropped away with time. It may have been more more true than Rosalie's own memory of her mistakes and sins.

Contrary to the art critics who faulted Bierstadt for painting landscapes back in his studio, I think Bierstadt did create the most important part of his Mt. Rosalie painting-- the part that he painted with his heart-- during those long, thoughtful nights on the trail.

Saturday 19 June 2010

The Orchids

The orchids are thriving
They are thriving. This is the third time they bloomed since we moved here.
But the stems are getting a bit shorter each time. Who knows why.

Thursday 17 June 2010

Pressed plants

Pressed plants
Little bits I've been collecting on our walks.
There has been a lot of football watching & not a lot of art making these past few days.

Wednesday 16 June 2010

They Draw & Cook

theydrawandcook.com
I was so happy & honored when Nate Padavick invited me to play at his wonderful site :)
Andale, ándale, ándale!!! Gracias Nate! Go see it full size at theydrawandcook.com

Tuesday 15 June 2010

Funday - Fun blogger template

DescriptionFunday blogger template, is a fun, bright, colorful template. 2 columns and 3 columns at lower section, maximize your widget placement. Featured with twitter, rss, and email button, ease to share your blog post.
Designerdynamicwp
Authorbesttheme


Monday 14 June 2010

Sneak Peek Casa 5

Sneak Peek Casa 5
1- Bare concrete wall in the living room that still needs to be buffed and sealed.
2- Unfinished bare concrete wall.
3- Dining room window.
4- Left side of the Kitchen. The door you see leads to the laundry room.
5- Private patio view from the dining room.
6- Right side of the kitchen are.
7- Part of our suite.
8- Our studio/school.
9- The view from every room in the house.

I've been meaning to post these since I took them a couple of weeks ago.
The house is starting to take shape and I'm getting more & more excited to move in.
There is still lots of work to be done but it's looking great!
Manolo outdid himself with this one!

Rain, not words

N. Raghavan, Rain V (2009)

One reason I like zapping through artist's pages instead of always looking carefuly at their artist's statements and curator's notes is that I don't need to undo the damage of their own thoughts about their work.
The latter often makes the experience of the work dull, as if our aesthetic wings were cut by the discursive blade. It is not that it isn't informative, which it often is. It's that it is rarely inspiring.
(Then again, this very blog may also be seen at such an angle).

Saturday 12 June 2010

Ma chère Jeanette

Ma chère Jeanette
Watercolor & acrylic ink on handmade Twinrocker paper. 4" x 6".
Painted while watching (well, mostly hearing) the first half of the USA vs. England soccer game :)

Friday 11 June 2010

THE NEXT GREAT ARTIST

Anyone curious about the identity of the next great artist will surely want to tune in to the new TV reality series, Work of Art: The Next Great Artist.

In last night's debut, host and judge China Chow (ranked #54 on the Maxim list of the Hot 100 Women of 2001) welcomed a gaggle of artists who will be pitted against each other as they claw for celebrityhood. In the first phase of the competition, Chow told the artists how to create "a successful portrait."


"Chow: show the inner essence of the subject"

Art lover Sarah Jessica Parker (Sex in the City) then exhorted the competitors to "be brave."



But nothing quite compared to the the moment when the oleaginous, double breasted Simon de Pury, described as a "leader in the international art world," purred inappropriately over a nude portrait of a contestant half his age ("I seenk eet loooks vehreee appeeling").

The cumulative effect reminded me of Ambrose Bierce's observation,"So scurvy a crew I do not remember to have discerned in vermiculose conspiracy outside the carcass of a dead horse."

It's not like we didn't smell this state of affairs coming. Mid-way through the 20th century, artist Raphael Soyer looked ruefully over his shoulder at the path fine art had recently taken:
The art world of the 1920s and 1930s was different from today's art world. Art was not the big business it has become today. It did not have the air of glitter and commercialism. Art was less sensational, reputations were not so rapidly made and lost. There were about 15 or so modest art galleries in New York, several of them filled with paintings by Eakins, Homer and Ryder. The well known, in fact, famous artists of that time-- Bellows, Sloan, Hopper-- were not celebrities.
Saul Bellow had a similar view of the way a foolish prosperity had undermined potentially serious writers:
Nowadays when a young man thinks of becoming a writer, first he thinks of his hairstyle and then what clothes he should wear and then what whiskey he's going to endorse.... The depression bred compassion and solidarity between people instead of breeding crime and antagonism. They were much less harsh or severe than in time of prosperity.
Even Soyer and Bellows didn't anticipate the path art would take. One of the contestants on Work of Art: The Next Great Artist created performance art where white males in her audience were invited to apologize for oppressing indigenous people by biting a burrito attached to her substantial hip.

Decadent, superfluous art seems especially difficult to tolerate because of what art has the potential to be. As Shakespeare noted, "Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds."

But the purpose of this week's post is not to shoot fish in a barrel. There is actually an interesting point here. It is worth considering why illustration has largely escaped this type of putrefaction. Illustration admittedly has many limitations, but it also seems to contain antibodies that protect it from the decadence and self-indulgence which have infected much of the fine art field in recent decades.

The relentless efficiency of the marketplace strips illustration of a lot of potential qualities, but at the same time it seems to scrub away a lot of pretensions and illusions. Art in the service of robust commerce doesn't have as much latitude for the vices that we see on display in so many of today's temples of fine art.

Bird Banner

Bird banner
I made a little banner to put up over our bed with some fabric scraps from Repeat, green linen fabric in different hues and Japanese double gauze cotton
that I love and wanted to be able to look at everyday.
Bedroom banner
I recycled an old linen shirt that I dyed with coffee & applied some of my birdies
with iron-on transfer paper that I bought at an office supply shop.
Banner
I bet one with kids artwork would also look great.
Hope you have a fun filled weekend :) I'll be watching a lot of soccer with Manolo.