On December 10, 2007 I published the first post on my new blog. Since then, except when I’ve been traveling, and sometimes even then, I’ve posted once a week and, for a year or two, twice a week. In the last few years, however, the way people get their information online has changed. Instead of sitting at a desktop or laptop computer they’re now mobile on smart phones and tablets. And they aren’t reading blogs much, as least as compared to the past. Long form is out, Tweets and Instagrams are in. My stats from the past few years show a steady drop in views. Super popular bloggers like John Scalzi have seen this happen too. So it’s time for a change. But….
One of the valuable things about my blog is the body of information that has accumulated about me, my art, my travels and whatever else has caught my fancy. I link people to various posts for a variety of reasons and for that it’s a resource that I will continue to use.
But it’s time to tweak my choices of the social media platforms I plan to use most in the coming years. My blog is now a “Journal”. I’ll post when I have information to communicate that requires the long form that a blogging platform is so great for. I plan to still post multi-part series on my travels, especially Mongolia, and I have some very interesting things in the works for 2018 that I’ll be announcing and discussing on my Journal.
I’m becoming much more active on Twitter (s_fox), Instagram (foxartist), LinkedIn (Susan Fox), along with my new Facebook group, FoxStudio, which you can find here. I’ll be closing down my public FB page on Dec. 31. You can also stay in touch with me through my quarterly newsletter “Fox Tales”. If you’d like to subscribe, just message me through my Contact page. Look for the announcement of the launch of my Patreon site in January!
Thank you to all my followers who have welcomed me into your inbox all these years! You’ll still hear from me, just not as often. I wish everyone the best in 2018!
Drawing media and watercolor brushes stored in a variety of containers and organized in one unit of a stackable inbox
I don’t necessarily consider myself a neat and tidy person. But when it comes to my work, I’ve gotten borderline fanatical about having everything sorted and organized. I don’t want an idea to strike or find I need to have “x” right now for whatever I’m working on and have to break concentration and hunt around for it.
I’ve been in my current studio space at our home for over ten years now, using a couple of IKEA cupboards for supplies and some thin plywood boxes with dowel dividers my husband made for me years before that for canvas and painting storage. The IKEA units are doing great, the old canvas “racks” were well past their sell-by date. So a few years ago we were able to hire a contractor who was also a cabinet maker to build new storage units from birch plywood to my specifications. What a luxury! But also practical and financially sensible because properly stored paintings and canvases (I use RayMar geesoed cotton canvas boards almost exclusively) are less likely to get damaged. Plus we live in earthquake country. Every cupboard, cabinet and bookcase is attached to studs in the walls.
Come take a tour of how I store my art supplies and equipment…
These units are in the northwest corner of the studio. On the left is an IKEA cupboard which contains all my supplies that aren’t in use. The top shelf holds greeting and notecard inventory in, yes, IKEA boxes. Next is a variety of containers. The next three shelves are drawing media, brushes, varnishes, odds and ends. Second from the bottom is paper for printing. And at the bottom are old sketchbooks. All the way on top is a speaker.
On the right is one of the custom storage units, designed to hold paintings up to 5×5′. The top two shelves have miscellaneous things that don’t fit anywhere else. The bottom holds all my oversize paintings and canvasboards. The curtain, just an old one I had around, is to minimize dust.
On the south wall of my studio are four units ranged next to each other:
These are two side-by-side IKEA cupboards. The one on the right, starting at the top, is blank sketchbooks, then small canvasboards and some stretched canvases with a gallery wrap so I don’t have to frame them. Second from the bottom are canvas pads and oil paper pads, a few small toned canvases and my watercolor papers. On the bottom is my plein air carry-all, a plein air panel box and some large size drawing pads.
The left cabinet holds my old paintbox I’ve had since I was a kid, a pochade box from the Sennilier art supply shop in Paris, more plein air carriers, then various paper towels and brush holders, finished small works (see detail below). Next, drawings to be framed or referred to, below them a black plastic file organizer and binders for location watercolors and at the bottom old work framed and unframed. The two stacked boxes hold plein air oils.
This is the middle shelf of the cabinet on the left. I’ve used cardboard drawing pad backing for dividers, labeling them with a Sharpie, to separate and organize old paintings from workshops, projects, preliminary studies, in-progress repaints, available for sale, etc.
And here are the closed cupboards above on the left, next to my frame and painting storage units on the right. Of those, the one on the left mostly has the frames. It was designed to fit over my steel flat files. The one to the right of it is pretty much all paintings except for some big manila folders at the top right which hold working and finished drawings and next to them about a half dozen framed giclees. All the shelves are adjustable.
Finally, here’s my painting table set up and ready to go. I clean the palette off on Friday afternoons and put the paint into one of those paper-lined round storage containers. My current palette is a leftover piece of Swanstone countertop. I got the idea from the Underpaintings online magazine some years ago. I like it because it’s a neutral color, it’s not reflective and once a film builds up on to a certain point, my husband is kind enough to sand it off for me. It’s the same color all the way through. As you can see I have an eclectic collection of containers for brushes, pencils, etc. Some are souvenirs of our travels, like the fish pitcher, which I got at a Debenham’s department store in London, England. I also like interesting coffee mugs with or without broken handles.
So there you have it, how one artist organizes her work life. If you have any ideas or want to share what you do, please leave a comment!
I’m interrupting my series on the 2015 WildArt Mongolia Expedition to share some special news!
First up, my painting “Morning Drink” of a takhi/Przewalski’s horse mare that I saw at Hustai National Park in Mongolia has been accepted for the Salmagundi Art Club’s Fall Auction! This will be the first appearance of my Mongolia paintings in The Big Apple and I, of course, hope it won’t be the last. You don’t have to be at the auction to bid. More information here.
Next, an excellent writer, Bob Bahr, has posted two articles about me and my travels to Mongolia from phone interviews we did a couple of weeks ago. One, which emphasizes the land, is now on the Outdoor Painters blog. It’s called “Further Afield: Painting Mongolia”. The second is about the wildlife, particularly argali sheep, and is on the News page of the Susan K. Blackman Foundation website. “SKB” as it is affectionately called, holds a terrific art workshop/conference every year in Dubois, Wyoming. I went in the early years, but hadn’t been able to attend again until last year. The warm welcome I got and the support and interest during the years in between have been very gratifying and greatly appreciated. The SKC article is called “Susan Fox and the “Last Great Undiscovered Art Destination”, which is what I told Bob I believe Mongolia to be.
Sketching near our campsite on Jargalant Hairkhan Uul in Khar Us Nuur National Park
Lastly, there’s still time to register and attend Plein Air at the Lost Coast from September 30 to October 4 in Shelter Cove, California. I’m one of the Featured Artists this year! I’ll be giving a presentation about working on location in Mongolia, with some stories about my adventures over the last ten years in the Land of Blue Skies, and doing a demo.
I’ve decided to consolidate my blog and my website into one here on WordPress. I’ve started the transition by creating a gallery page with my Mongolia paintings and also one with the pieces for the Sea of Cortez show. And I’ve created a gallery for the journal sketches that I did on my last trip to Mongolia in August and September of 2012. You can find all of them in the navigation bar.
The WordPress Gallery feature is, finally, everything I’ve been searching for and not finding for years and years as a way to present my art. I’m not impressed by what’s out there for artists and sites like Flickr and Google photos (which I also still use) are visually very cluttered. It’s super easy and fast to create a gallery, upload multiple images, add captions, add to the gallery, arrange the images in whatever order I want, delete anything I decide I don’t want and publish it when I’m ready. The thumbnails are nicely presented with a thin line around them and the slide show background is plain, uncluttered black, just what I wanted.
Over the next month I’ll be adding pages here with content from my website. Once I’m done, we’ll re-point the url so that it will bring you here, but to a new, static home page from which you’ll be able come to the blog or any other page.
I wasn’t unhappy with Sandvox, the app on which I built the current site. But the trend is towards using a platform like WordPress for both and these days there’s no reason not to. Now I will only have to update one location instead of two and I can certainly use the time saved for other things….like painting.
I was at 30,000 ft when the global economy melted down. I don’t think there’s a connection, but the truth is that everything was fine when I left for my late summer/early fall 2008 trip to Mongolia and by the time I landed about five weeks later in San Francisco everything, well, wasn’t. With a vengeance.
My plan had been to send out packets to galleries over the winter but, knowing there was likely to be a shakeout with some to many going out of business, that didn’t seem like a smart move. What to do? What to do? I needed to keep some career momentum going without spending a lot (read “any, if possible”) money.
Social media to the rescue. I had already started this blog, but decided to join Facebook and Twitter, then also added LinkedIn. I wasn’t sure how beneficial any or all of this would be, but they existed, they were free and it seemed to be a direction the online world was heading.
It’s been four years now. All the original sites are still going strong and others have come along, some of which I’ve tried and dropped, some of which I’ve added to the mix.
‘Shrooms- iPhone photo processed with Camera Awesome using FX and a frame
I’ve been reviewing my social media choices in light of Instagram’s Terms of Service face plant earlier this week. I had downloaded the app some time ago, did one photo, Facebook bought them and I quit using it. Then I recently connected with a young journalist, Faine Greenwood, who works for the GlobalPost news site. They pay her to post photos and she uses Instagram to give them a little special visual omph. Hum, I thought. Maybe I ought to take another look, so I did. And was impressed by the social media aspect they had evolved while I was away.
I reinstalled the app and started to post some images and familiarize myself with how to best use them. Then came the announcement a few days ago of their new Terms of Service (TOS). Suffice to say they were completely unacceptable and outrageous. Life is too short to worry about what idiotic thing they/Facebook will do to try to monetize the site. They could just try charging their users and providing value, but that option seems to have completely escaped Zuckerberg. There’s plenty out there about it on the web, so a google of “Instagram TOS” will probably unearth far more links than you have any interest in reading. But do check it out. And see the note and link below.
Upshot was that I deleted my account and the apps. Now I wanted to find another photo tweaking app and also a way to use them on some kind of social media platform. This led me to….taking a look all the social media I use and what kind of synergy I can create between them because that is one of the truly powerful changes in the off-line vs. the online world- the connections that can be made (there’s a reason why it’s called the “web”).
I ended up downloading a photo effects app called Camera Awesome to both my iPad and iPhone. I love it, but it doesn’t have a social component. I had been hearing some good things about Flickr, which I’d also quit over a year ago because I was suspicious of how difficult they made it to delete an image. But I heard that it had been greatly improved across the board. And, of course, they are already owned by a mega tech company, Yahoo who has, so far, never stumbled into any of the mallet-headed mistakes that some of the others have. And they really can’t afford to make anyone unhappy at this point.
So I looked at Flickr and saw that they’ve added all kinds of image controls. I found that, in fact, my images from before had been “archived” not deleted. Argh. But this time when I deleted one, I got a message in red saying that it was truly gone. So clearly they made a needed change from the sneaky thing they were doing before.
Then I took another look at Tumblr, which had fallen by the blogging wayside for me due to time and not being really sure what benefit I was getting. Now, since it’s an image-centric platform with a lot of creative people using it, it’s the perfect place to post my Camera Awesome enhanced images, which currently includes both actual photos and images of my iPad art.
Note (12pm, Dec. 21): it appears that Instagram has gone back to its previous Terms of Service with all kinds of statements about how the new one didn’t really say what it clearly did and some other “dog ate my homework” excuses. I don’t regret deleting my account because I wanted them to know there was a consequence, even though I wasn’t even a minnow in their quite large pond. I might start there again. Stay tuned.
Mongol Horse- iPad drawing processed with Camera Awesome using a filter and frame
So here’s my current list of the social media sites I use, along with the benefits I feel I get from them.
1. WordPress blog– I chose WP over Google’s Blogger because it was much more sophisticated in how it does things, at least at the time, and I didn’t really want to be more involved with a big company like Google than necessary. Their support is quite good, both written and through email. I’ve been able to customize my choice of theme to my liking and the new media uploading and display function is a big improvement over what they had before. I faithfully blog twice a week, unless I simply cannot due to travel or illness. That frequency feels about right to me for what I blog about: Mongolia on Mondays and everything else on Fridays. It has become invaluable to me as a repository to link to for all kinds of content about what I do. Write it once, link to it forever. What’s not to like? https://foxstudio.wordpress.com/
2. Facebook– What can I say? It’s a love-hate relationship shared by tens of millions. I have valuable and valued connections that I wouldn’t have any other way, but the stuff they do behind the scenes drives me crazy. I’m hanging in for now, but if they really start to insert video ads with sound into my newsfeed and I can’t block them, then I’ll be open to picking up my toys and moving to another sandbox. In the meantime, Christine Lin, a writer for The Epoch Times, left a message through my public page a few weeks ago, requesting an interview. We spoke on the phone for an hour, which resulted in a 1500 word story, “American Artist Susan Fox Paints Genghis Khan’s Mongolia” that appeared in all their English language editions in both print and online versions. The latter included six images of my paintings.
This is the link to my public page. I reserve my private page for family and close friends. Please “Like” this page for all my art news: https://www.facebook.com/SusanFoxArt
3. Twitter– Clearly valuable. Clearly and equally has serious time-suck potential, but cannot be ignored if one is serious about social media. Answer? Auto-post from other sites I use and check in at least once a week to see what’s up. It’s the site that is most connected to all my other sites. I should probably look into one of the utilities that lets one queue up and schedule tweets. Ah, something to add on the app that is my bonus item below. https://twitter.com/s_fox
4. LinkedIn– Focused on professional networking, but has a lot of artists and other art professionals on it. Hadn’t been using it or going to it much except to post the latest book I was reading. Entries with links to my blog posts show up there automatically, so there is always fresh content, which is important on any social media site. I recently started to go through the suggested connection list and found an American journalist who had written part of her information in Mongolian cyrilic, which got my attention. Within a day or so after connecting, Allyson Seaborn, who is an editor for the UB Post, wrote to me asking if she could interview me for a feature, which we did via email. You must have an account to view my profile, but here’s the link to the LinkedIn home page. http://www.linkedin.com/home?trk=hb_tab_home_top
5. Pinterest– This was 2012’s social media darling and as a visual artist I had to check out a social media platform that was all about…images. I like it although I’m not sure what its best use will be for me yet. It’s definitely eye candy to visit and there are a lot of artists using it. It is also possible and quite easy to offer things for sale, like paintings and prints. This is the one that seems to be the most demanding as far as keeping the new content coming due to the high volume of pins. http://pinterest.com/foxstudio/
6. Tumblr– It’s a quick and easy to use blogging platform, much simpler than say, WordPress. It’s also very image-centric, but in a different way than Pinterest. I’ve seen very little of this kind of longer post. It could be a perfect way for someone to try out blogging since it’s very simple and straightforward to post text, images and video. There are a wide range of bloggers from artists like me to institutions like the American Museum of Natural History to typographers, photographers, book sellers, musicians and writers. As I said above, it’s the perfect platform for my “enhanced” images. http://www.tumblr.com/blog/beyondtheredwoodcurtain
7. Flickr– I’m back on the site after a long hiatus. I like what they’ve done about protecting user’s rights. You can reserve all rights or post under a Creative Commons license. They also have an agreement with Getty Images, under which Getty can invite you to sell image rights to them, so there is a potential, and attractive, revenue stream there. I will definitely be hoping to take advantage of that with some of the 60,000 images I’ve shot in seven trips to Mongolia, plus two trips to Kenya and some to Yellowstone. Heck, I’ve got great shots from right here in Humboldt County. http://www.flickr.com/photos/susanfoxart/
8. YouTube– I’m personally just not that into video, except for Mongol music videos and Henri, Le Chat Noir, but that clearly puts me in a minority position. I’ve got a lot of great footage from my last trip to Mongolia and would also like to post painting demos. All I need is that eighth day the Beatles sang about. But, like Twitter, YouTube is too popular to ignore and I don’t intend to. http://www.youtube.com/user/MsReynard?feature=mhee
9. Constant Contact– The days of mailing out “real” newsletters are over. Sites like Constant Contact are a BIG improvement. While not strictly “social media’, you can’t beat being able to send news directly to people who you know are interested in what you’re doing. And you know that because they choose to continue to get your newsletter. Opting out is only a click away. With snail mail, you never knew for sure if you were wasting time and postage. This one I do pay for since my newsletters are image-intensive, requiring me to pay for the necessary storage capacity. There are other good options out there like Mail Chimp, but Constant Contact was the first out the gate and they have given me no reason to go elsewhere. http://www.constantcontact.com/index.jsp
UPDATE 1-15-13: 10. Google+- As you can see below, when I originally wrote this post, I wasn’t using Google+, but that has changed. It dawned on me that, having acquired over 1000 people who had liked what I had posted enough to put me in their circles, that Google+ isn’t about socializing for me, it’s feeding content about me and my work to all those people who have indicated an interest. So I don’t really look at the news feed much, if at all, but I post all my blog links and anything else I’ve been putting on other sites.
Some of you may have noticed that Google+ is missing. I have a presence there, but I find it pretty useless and only check it once or twice a month. I really dislike the interface, hardly anyone I know is on it and there seem to be a lot of people, including artists, who are using it purely for marketing, which is a bore. Google+ is not a threat to Facebook at this point.
So now having looked all these sites over, I’m going to make a graph of which ones are connected and which aren’t and see how best to create the optimum synergy between them. Then I can just kick back and, as the spider-in-chief, survey my wonderful web.
BONUS APP!- Priorities, the best organizing, list-making app for the Apple world that I’ve found. Good user interface, pretty colors, highly customizable, connects to iCal, the Apple calendar app. I plan to start using it to track my social media “schedule”. It syncs on all my devices…iPhone, iPad, MacBook Pro and iMac through their website. http://handcarvedcode.com/apps/priorities/
In one of those little incidents of sychronicity that come along every once in awhile, I’ve just had three articles about me, my art and Mongolia appear in three publications in less than a week.
It started with a Facebook message on November 3 from a editor for The Epoch Times, a Chinese-American news website and print publication which is published in 35 countries and 18 languages and is dedicated to providing uncensored news to the Chinese people. The editor, Christine Lin, found me through my Facebook public page after she had a problem using the contact form on my website (which is now working fine as far as I know). One lesson from this is that it pays to have multiple ways for people to contact you if you are an artist. We did a one hour phone interview which resulted in a 1500 word article that included six images of my art. You can read “American Artist Susan Fox Paints Genghis Khan’s Mongola”here.
The next contact came through LInkedIn. I was looking through the list of possible contacts the site provides based on who your current connections are. One of them was Allyson Seaborn, who writes for the UB Post, the leading English-language newspaper in Mongolia. What caught my eye at first, though, was that some of her page was in Mongolian cyrillic. I sent her a connect invitation, she accepted and then a day or so later sent me a message asking if I’d be willing to be the subject of one of her regular expat (expatriate) columns. I told her that I don’t live in Mongolia, but she felt that I have traveled there extensively enough (7 trips so far) and that being an artist would be interesting to their readers. In this case, she sent me a short list of questions about me, my work and my activities in Mongolia. There was also a list of set questions that every subject of the series answers. You can read “Susan Fox- There is no other place like the Land of Blue Skies” here.
The third article, for our local newspaper the Times-Standard, had been on my To Do list since I had come home from Mongolia in late September. In this case it was something I wrote myself, which was mildly edited, and submitted with a zip file of images, but I had no idea that it would appear yesterday. You can read “Local painter takes art expedition to Mongolia”here.
Checking You Out 12x12" - Now, really. How could they resist this face?
Rejection hurts, no doubt about it. You slave away and do the best piece of art you can and, clunk, it doesn’t get in. I’ve certainly gotten my share of rejection letters since I first started to enter juried shows in 2002. There are two shows that I’ve entered at least six or seven times each and still have not gotten in.
But I don’t make excuses. I don’t blame the judges. I don’t tell myself “It’s all subjective”. And I don’t scream and throw things (although that might be kind of fun). Until recently I assumed that my work simply wasn’t good enough yet. That still may be true, but I work hard to view my paintings objectively and at this point I feel that I know when I’ve nailed it. Only so many pieces will be accepted and only so many in a given genre, media and size. Sometimes your piece is just the odd one out.
So, if I don’t get in, it means that….I didn’t get in.
Which brings us to my latest rejection. I entered Salon International, the top-notch Greenhouse Gallery of Fine Art show, for the first time last year and had two of my three entries accepted! What a rush! And they were animal subjects (against which there can be definite bias in the mainstream art world) and both Mongolia subjects. So I got in on my terms with my subject matter of choice.
Guess what? I won’t have anything in the show this year. Bummer. But wait, here’s relevant excerpts from the rejection letter that went out to all of us. I was so impressed by it that I wrote to the gallery owner thanking him and asking if I could use it for a blog post, for which he graciously gave permission.
This is a perfect primer for any artist who wants to enter the juried show arena. Notice that it’s not about you personally, it’s the merit of your work only that is being judged. Read carefully how they define “artistic excellence”. There’s your checklist.
Dear Artist,
We congratulate you for having the courage to “throw your hat in the ring” of competition and for submitting one or more entries to Salon International 2012!
Salon International 2012 will be a spectacular exhibit of 434 paintings selected from 1,112 entries representing 44 states plus DC in the USA and 18 additional countries. As this event is open to all oil painters of traditional representational subject matter worldwide, the entries represent an extremely wide range of artistic skill and ability. In selecting paintings for the exhibit the jury was looking for over-all artistic excellence. In determining the presence of artistic excellence the following components were considered heavily: composition / design, focal point, use of color, paint manipulation, unification, originality, creativity, feeling, and choice of subject matter. When a painting is not selected for exhibit it does not necessarily mean that the jury does not like or respect it. As with any competition, a line has to be drawn. Where that line falls is always, at least partially, determined by space limitations.
The 1,112 total entries this year reflect a 9 1/2% decrease from last year. The over-all strength of the entries was greatly increased, resulting in more paintings being included in the exhibit than ever before, with a grand total of 434. Obviously, we can’t continue to increase the size of the exhibit every year. This means that we will have to become even more selective in the jury process. It means that wonderful paintings will be competing with other wonderful paintings. What does this mean for you? It means that each year the bar of artistic excellence is raised higher, the competition among artists becomes even greater, the awards are more meaningful and Salon International becomes more prestigious and more respected!
The major goal of Salon International is to both encourage and challenge artists worldwide to continuously strive for artistic excellence. If your entry was not accepted for this exhibit it should not be taken as a defeat but should be considered simply as a challenge to continue that constant stretch for a higher level of artistic skill and excellence. We encourage each one of you to continue to accept the challenges along the path which leads to the rewards of excellence and to continue to “throw your hat in the ring” of competition. Competitions are a healthy component of the growth process, creating opportunities to set and achieve goals, setting forth examples to follow, and rewarding excellence.
A list of accepted artist names and images for the Salon International 2012 exhibit can be viewed online at http://si.greenhousegallery.com. The entire Salon International 2012 exhibit can be viewed on line at http://www.greenhousegallery.com beginning on or possibly before April 14th. The awards will also be posted on this web site beginning April 14th .
We appreciate your participation in Salon International 2012 and your part in helping to make it a success. We have every intention to continue to build this event into one of the most prestigious and highly respected juried exhibits in the world. We welcome you to continue to participate in this exciting journey!
Pinterest is the newest social media service hit and one that has the potential to be very useful to visual artists. It’s currently available by invitation only, but you can request one at their homepage, or this article on Mashable offers a few other suggestions.
They’ve gone from 1.2 million users in August to over 4 million at this point. And that’s without being open to the public.
It’s a virtual “pin board” to which images are posted. You can create “boards” on any topic you wish, such as “Susan Fox’s Paintings” or “Outrageous Desserts” or whatever. Other members can comment on your pins and (and this is part of what makes it intriguing as an art marketing option) “re-pin” your image to one of their own boards, from which their followers can re-pin it and…..
It’s totally visual. It’s easy and non-technical to use, at least I think so. You can post prices, so it has potential as a selling site for art. (How to do so is included in a bonus feature that is part of the Mashable article linked to above). It could almost be a substitute for a website if all an artist wanted was a place to display lots of their work.
The interface is clean and attractive and shows off art nicely. Pins can also be re-posted on Twitter and Facebook. There’s a line of icons under your profile information that includes links to your website, Twitter, Facebook and an RSS feed.
It’s easy to pin to with a “Pin It” bookmarklet that sits in your browser Toolbar. It’s easy to upload images from one’s computer. It’s easy for people to “re-pin” or share what you’ve posted. My Mongolian bactrian camel painting was re-pinned within minutes after I posted it, so there’s potential for lots of eyeballs and for an image to go viral.
Here’s my “pin” page: http://pinterest.com/foxstudio/pins/ and here are my “boards”: http://pinterest.com/foxstudio/. I’m trying a variety of boards, hoping that if I have interesting images in a number of categories, it will draw people in to check out my art, too, and also become a follower. It was really easy to add new boards, rearrange their order and move images between them.
On the main site, there is already an “Art” category, also “Photography” and “Film, Music and Books” categories. You assign your boards to one of these pre-existing categories, but can easily change which one at any time.
If you want to find out more about how to use Pinterest and to see if it would be useful to you as an artist, Mashable has a handy beginner’s guide.
This is still a really new option and early artist adopters are going to have to feel their way to see how it can best be used. If you’re already on Pinterest, let me know what you think of it!
I’ve been a member of the California Art Clubfor almost ten years, but since it’s based in Pasadena and I’m in northern California I haven’t been able to go to any events till now. So I’m really looking forward to this weekend at Fort Mason, which is located right on San Francisco Bay.
There will be a panel discussion, demos and lots of opportunities to meet and network fellow CAC members. I plan to do a little live blogging if possible, so stay tuned!
Susan Fox, American Artist 