Thursday, September 27, 2007

Saturday, September 15, 2007

Ron Mueck

I've recently become slightly obsessed with Ron Mueck's just amazing lifelike sculpture. To make me an even bigger fan of his I found out on the wikipedia page about him that he used to work with Jim Henson and was one of the performers of Ludo in Labyrinth! I love that movie so much, I can practically recite every line.

If you aren't familiar with his work here are a few links:
Ron Mueck on Wikipedia

Images of his work

Video about his sculpting process
(150mb so slow connections be warned, however it's totally worth it)

One thing that has irritated me reading article about him is the big deal made about his lack of formal art training. As if working in the special effects field didn't give him loads of training? Since I also have virtually no art training it really annoys me the emphasis that is put on attending art school by many people. Now I'm sure art school is a great experience and students learn a lot (and if I could I'd love to take a few classes). However I feel like art is a field where there are so many possible paths you can take to become an artist that one of those paths shouldn't be given all the emphasis as the "right" way to do it.

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Playing with Squidoo

I discovered Squidoo a few months ago and I figured it would be a nice option to help drive a little more traffic to my website and this blog and it has.

However when I signed up and created my first lens I didn't really pay attention to the fact that you get paid based on the ads on your lens. Imagine my surprise when suddenly I log on one day and find out I had earned about a dollar. Now this isn't much I admit but if you think about it over time and if you have multiple lenses that money can add up. So I've started creating more lenses. Now being the type of person I am, I couldn't create anything spammy so aside from lenses displaying my artwork I've used it to create lenses that are sort of mini-tutorials with links to further help. I also used on one of them Squidoo's Amazon module to focus on books and DVDs on sculpting and found out that if someone buys from amazon going through your lens that you get a referral fee too. I'm a nearly starving artist, this is just a lot of fun to me.

So here are my lenses so far:

Polymer Clay Sculpting Tips and Techniques
Displaying your Artwork on YouTube
Photographing your Artwork
Fantasy Sculpture - Noadi's Art
Noadi's Art Fantasy Jewelry Designs
I Love Cephalopods

So if you need a little traffic boost to your website or blog you should definitely consider setting up a lens or two on Squidoo to help you out a little bit and maybe make a few bucks in the process.

Wednesday, September 05, 2007

Self-Portrait Video

So I had a little fun with my self portrait sculpt tonight. I took a new photo of it along with a photo of myself and used a nifty program called Morpheus to morph from my photo into my self-portrait. It's pretty cool.