Shop Update!

I finally had time to update ye ole shop with ten new & not so new (new format) prints.

Click here to go and have a peek :)

Contact Me widget -Add it to your sidebar

Widgetbox provides us with a free widget contact Emailer version 4 through which your visitors can send email without publishing your email.
This contact widget can be placed in the sidebar (column of the blog), or in the post if you like
The widget is under widgetbox.com , but before you copy the code you can modify the text and colors of the widget.

[1] To embed Contact EMailer form into your web page, blog etc. follow these steps Click here and go to widgetbox.com
[2] Provide Widget Settings

•      Your Email address
•      Web page in which Contact EMailer form Widget is to be displayed
•      Title,Subtitle,Field captions etc
•      Foreground and Background Colors
•      Right to left support, if needed
•      Image CAPTCHA suppport
•      width and hieght of form

[3] The widget appearance will change when you are making changes to the settings4 Click on Get Widget button
[5] If you want to embed the widget in a web page, choose the embed Code option and copy the code

     You can also click on the buttons for Facebook,Blogger,Twitter,iGoogle,WordPress,my Yearbook,TypePad,Blogger Post,Netvibes,Webs,Pageflakes,Piczo,Ning,Confluence according to your requirements
[6] Paste the HTML into your webpage
[7] Test your web page with the Contact EMailer form
[8] If you are a Pro account holder in widgetbox.com, your widget will not display the about link

The Elephant in the Room

I wanted to get away from the birds this morning but one managed to sneak in ;)
Watercolor on paper. 6" x 8"

11 Clean White XML blogger templates

 There are tonnes of Blogger templates out there, but we all know it’s hard (or perhaps take times) to find the really nice and high quality ones. So for those who are bored with their current Blogger template and intend to change, we thought your time can be spent better on browsing only the best and nicest among the free Blogger themes.

Here i have collected white color blogger template in no particular order,please drop comments if you like it.You can view my previous posts free blogger templates

For Download and demo Option Click on the images

[1] White space blogger templates

Features: Three columns with left and right sidebar Google Adsense ready (468×60 banner, 160×600 skyscraper, 200×200 square)  No image  Built-in search box Built-in navigation tab Customized comment style

[2] Evidens White

Features: Three columns Adapted from Wordpress Black, Blue, Elegant, Right sidebar Web 2.0, Fluid width

[3] Black And white blogger templates

[4] Mosaicus blogger gallery templates

Features: Minimalistic White, Clean jQuery Premium Features Easy to customize Gallery Style

[5] Wire News templates

Features: Three columns Adapted from Wordpress Black, Ted, Elegant, Right sidebars Web 2.0, Fluid width

[6] Apartus blogger templates

Features: Two column Adopted from wordpress  Fixed width,grey red Right sidebar White,Twitter widget

[7] Fauna Frost blogger templates

Features: Two columns with  right sidebar Adopted from wordpress theme  Fixed width Blue, grey , white Blogger Xml

[8] Bughaw blogger template

Features: 2 column , 125*125 boxes  Custom footers  Blue and white blogger template Clean and customizable

[9] Headline News blogger template

Features: Three columns With left and right sidebar  Fixed width Built-in navigation tab White and clean

[10] Digital statement blogger template

Features: Two columns Clean and elegant Tabbed sidebar Right sidebar Fixed width Magazine style

[11] Game Zine white blogger template

Features: Three columns Magazine style Special for gaming blogs Two inline minipost Easily Customizable

Relics

Belsay Hall, Newcastle

The above image is one of 12 that are part of a new show that opens Saturday 1st May at Belsay Hall, Northumberland, UK. The show is titled Extraordinary Measures and features work by Ron Mueck, Tessa Farmer, Mat Collishaw and many others - all scattered around the gardens and buildings of Belsay, an English Heritage property.
My installations were placed around Belsay last summer and photographed for the show - visitors can now track down all the images around the grounds, placed where the installations once were. This is my first work outside of an urban area and takes on the theme of tourism and the joys of the day trip - so expect to find images of dodgy ice cream vans, alternative 'donkey' rides, toilet queues, depressing picnics, bored school kids and gift shop dramas. The show runs until 26th September 2010.

----------------------

I finally have some new 25mm badge sets available - as well as an Inner City Snail 38mm badge. Clickety-click below for more details!

Cosmos revisited

I had to revisit these cosmos from my journal this morning for a project I'm working on.
I can't tell you what it is right now but I can share
it's the best & most dreamy project I've been asked to collaborate with EVER!
And I can't wait to tell you! "It" will be available in the spring of 2011 :)

Mexican poppies

Spent the afternoon with this little birdie,
listening to Guitar Genius channel at gotradio.com
Watercolor on Twinrocker paper. 6" x 8"

Reverse the order of your posts-blogger hack

Is there a way to make my posts show up in reverse order??

Newest to oldest posts.. can we change that order?

Put posts into chronological order??

How To Reverse The Order In Which Posts Are Listed On Your Blog??

IF you are a blogspot user and looking for solution to this problem then you are at the right place.
I have been a regular Visitor on Blogger help forums i found so many people asking this question ,even i want some handy solution for  my Guitar blog.
Until now in order to reverse the order you needed to play around with the dates (change the date of every post )which is not possible if the number of posts are large.
So here is a handy Blogger hack that can automatically reverse your post in chronological order.
This hack was first posted by David Merriman on The Merriman Family Blog.

Reverse the Order of your posts-blogger hack


Go to your blog's Layout tab and click Edit HTML
and find where it says </body>

Copy the following code and paste it Directly Above </body>

<!-- Start post reversal code --><script type='text/javascript'> var Blog1 = document.getElementById('Blog1'); var postContainer = Blog1.childNodes[1]; var first = postContainer.firstChild; var child = first.nextSibling; var childNext = null; var classes = ''; var dateHeaders = false; while (child != null) { if (child.className == 'date-header') { dateHeaders = true; break; } child = child.nextSibling; } child = first.nextSibling; while (child != null) { if (child.className != null) { if (child.className.match('date-header') != null) { childNext = child.nextSibling; postContainer.insertBefore(child, first); first = child; child = childNext; } else if (child.className.match('post hentry') != null) { childNext = child.nextSibling; if (!dateHeaders) { postContainer.insertBefore(child, first); first = child; } else { postContainer.insertBefore(child, first.nextSibling); } child = childNext; } else { child = child.nextSibling; } } else { child = child.nextSibling; } }</script><!-- End post reversal code -->

Save Template 


 See a Demo Test blog And tell me if it works for you because i have not tried it yet.

Previous post->Generate 300+ backlinks in 1 minutes

WORKING DRAWINGS

Watch the great Dean Cornwell collect the information he will need for a painting.



Cornwell has drawn thousands of hands in thousands of pictures, yet look how hard he still works to get the facts right:



The information in this drawing is different from the type of information that could be collected by a camera. Here is where Cornwell starts to select and digest certain facts to assimiliate them in his own personal style. Here is where he finds the contours of his future design. Here is where he establishes priorities.



Fritz Eichenberg once said, "what makes an artist create in his own particular style is an indefinable gift, almost a state of grace."

Maybe so, but I especially like preliminary sketches where you can see honest artists put that "state of grace" to practical use constructing a picture the way a carpenter might use tools to build a house. I love the candor and unpretentiousness of working drawings. Here is a nice selection by some extremely talented artists:


Frank Frazetta tries out two different positions for the leg of this rider. Yet, his attention always seems to stray back to the same thing...


In the final version of this image, Bernie Fuchs' lines will seem very spontaneus and natural. But here you see him explore, at a slower pace, how the width and variety of lines might work out.


Here, William A. Smith was not content with the break in the crease on that pants leg, so he went back and did it again. Below, we see him going back with white paint to reshape the lights and shadows in a dynamic fight scene.





This is a preliminary study by Oberhardt for an ad for Fatima cigarettes. Despite the briskness of the drawing, he manages to capture a surprising amount of the subtlety of the form. But he is clearly not collecting information the way Cornwell was (note the difference in the treatment of the hand). Instead, Oberhardt's primary interest is in the overall shape of the lights and darks.


Like many artists, Oberhardt apparently continued to work on images in the back of his mind even while he was reading the newspaper.

This concept sketch by Rockwell may be tiny, but he meticulously plans all of the ingredients of a Post cover, including his signature and the trademark Post bars.

I love the vigor of this sketch of Katie Couric by Thomas Fluharty. It may seem as if he drew it at 90 miles an hour, but look at how he slammed on the brakes to capture the information he wanted about those teeth.

Another terrific example from Fluharty, cut and pasted with no pretensions. Look at the bold use of that soft charcoal to take chances with the shape of Obama's cheeks or ears. Yet, observe how he came back with a computer to test color and add such insightful expression to those eyes.

There are many interesting stopping points on the road to a completed picture. In recent posts, we have spent a lot of time discussing critics, curators and gallery owners who project their fanciful notions of what the artist had in mind. As far as I am concerned, the most reliable way to discern the inner thoughts of an artist is to spend some time with the working drawings that led up to the final product.

In living color

Watercolor on handmade cotton Twinrocker paper. 6" x 8"

Thorns

...what I'll be painting tonight while listening to Glaciation by Patrick O'Hearn.
But before that we're going downtown for a bowl of pozole :)

Generate 300+ backlinks in 1 minutes

Backlinks are the backbone of every successful site ,A blog with large number of backlinks is generaaly at the top of the search engines.Backlinks are links on one website that lead back to another website.

I was Searching google inside out to find some tricks to get free and easy backlinks And suddenly i come across this website  called backlinkgenerator

How this generate backlinks??

You may have heard about websiteoutlook It provides some handy information about your blog like your Alexa rank??Your approximate ads revenue??.............In return provides you free backlink.
What this backlink generator does is it has a collection of 344 such websites which it automatically pings these sites with your blog address  instead of you doing manually.
I strongly recommend you to do this for your blog .

Follow easy steps and Get free backlinks

[1] Go to backlinkgenerator
[2] Enter your blog address like shown in figure above
[3] Click Generate

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Giveaway winner...

Congratulations Katie!!!
Please email me your address so I can send you the prizes :)
Thank you so much for participating, but most of all for your sweet comments.
I wish I could send all of you a little something!

Make Images open in a popup window

All you bloggers on blogspot ,you must have noticed that when you upload any image to blogger,blogger gives you three sizes (small ,medium ,large)and the original sized image is accessible to uses when they click on the image but the image opens in same window thus navigates your readers away from your blog.


One Nice way to avoid this is to use target="_blank" within your images anchor tag so that your images open in new window.But why not add a little frill and make the image open in a popup window.

Here,s an Example HTML code for any image

<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_nqp-0VCwy0c/S8rLH4xYSsI/AAAAAAAABEU/HjOWMTr_Y0Y/s1600/blogger_logo.gif""><img alt="Blogger Logo Grey" border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_nqp-0VCwy0c/S8rLH4xYSsI/AAAAAAAABEU/HjOWMTr_Y0Y/s320/blogger_logo.gif" title="Blogger Logo Grey " /></a>
What you have to do is ADD :

target="_blank" onclick="window.open(this.href, 'popupwindow', 'width=420, height=350, resizable=no, scrollbars=yes, menubar=no, toolbar=no, status=no'); return false;

after the closing double quotes enclosing the url of the original image, but before the > tag.So that result will be like this-

<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_nqp-0VCwy0c/S8rLH4xYSsI/AAAAAAAABEU/HjOWMTr_Y0Y/s1600/blogger_logo.gif target="_blank" onclick="window.open(this.href, 'popupwindow', 'width=420, height=350, resizable=no, scrollbars=yes, menubar=no, toolbar=no, status=no'); return false;"><img alt="Blogger Logo Grey" border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_nqp-0VCwy0c/S8rLH4xYSsI/AAAAAAAABEU/HjOWMTr_Y0Y/s320/blogger_logo.gif" title="Blogger Logo Grey " /></a>

Let me Explain all the elements one by one.

width=520, height=520 Defines the size of the popup window

resizable=no, scrollbars=yes, menubar=no, toolbar=no, status=no are optional attributes, you can change their values to yes or no according to your needs

For demo click on the grey blogger logo (above) accompanying this post.

the target="_blank"  makes the link open in a new window

you can add the attributes top= and left= to define the position of the pop-up window

Here's an example:

    target="_blank" onclick="window.open(this.href, 'popupwindow', 'width=420, height=350, resizable=no, scrollbars=yes, menubar=no, toolbar=no, status=no, top=20, left=20,'); return false;"

This would make the window open with a displacement of 20 pixels from the top and left of the screen.
Values can be adjusted according to the requirement and will.

Like this article -you can view more of my posts on Images 

Previous post- Use Jquery to style your external Links
                        Image hovering by changing opacity

A HAND, AN EYE AND A PIECE OF CHARCOAL

Last week we enjoyed the work of glitzy art superstar Jeff Koons, who employs a factory of artists to create his supersized art. Koons is famous not for his personal hand or eye, but for his "enigmatic otherness" which conceives wry social statements (which others then execute in the form of giant balloon animals).

This week, for a change of pace, we leave Koons and look instead at a talented artist.

This lovely drawing is by the illustrator William Oberhardt.



Oberhardt did not specialize in wry social statements. He did not write the specifications for teams of workers to produce huge ironic paintings. Instead, he specialized in taking a single piece of charcoal in his own hand and drawing portraits which combined sensitivity with boldness and vitality.



After my last post about Oberhardt, I was fortunate to be contacted by his family. Today's images are from their personal collection.



To get a sense for the strength of this drawing, take a closer look at some of the details:




You can't achieve this kind of power if you stop to draw the eyelashes.

In the next picture, note how Oberhardt's hand floated above the picture, alighting from time to time apply darks for emphasis. These strange jottings are the language of visual abstraction:



It's a language I like.

So much of contemporary art is dependent on concepts and ideas for its validity. Armies of critics, pedants and grad students armed with thesauruses compete to explain the meaning of such art (and thereby demonstrate their own sensitivity). If you linger too long in front of their carnival booth, they will trap you into endless discussions of why an object is different, or more complex, or better than it looks.

I confess I like some of that art, and have even written some of that pedantic persiflage myself. But when I step back, no matter how immense or shiny or expensive it is, art that must be propped up with words seems etiolated in comparison to what an artist can achieve with just a hand, an eye and a piece of charcoal.

The great Walt Whitman put verbal rationalizations in perspective:

I swear I begin to see little or nothing in audible words,
All merges toward the presentation of the unspoken meanings of the earth,
Toward him who sings the songs of the body and of the truths of the earth.

Jubal's Kin

I had the privilege of working with my friends Gailanne, Roger & Jeffrey Amundsen
in the design of their debut CD album "Jubal's Kin".

Working with them on the design was dream and I am SO excited for them.

To learn more about them visit their website and be sure to listen to some audio clips of some of their songs. I just love their music & I know you will too!

Their album will be available on iTunes and Amazon in the next few days.

We used a lot the artwork I already had so you might recognize a lot of it.

I learned so much from this project
and had so much fun playing around with all the elements we used.

To celebrate the recent release of their CD I'm having a little giveaway today!

Please leave your name and where you're from on the comments section of this post

to win a "Jubal's Kin" cd & a signed print of my original illustration
"Forever" that we used for the cover.

This is a poster I designed for them with a space for their gig info.

I will announce a winner next Monday morning!
Hope you have a great weekend friends!

Update: *Comments are now closed. I will announce a winner later today :)