New Premium Resources
2 Responses
Posted 19th of June 2012 — Blog News: resources.
This morning I launch my new project, my premium resource shop.
I want to stress this isn’t going to replace my free resources! The shop isn’t a money making project – the plan is to upgrade to a paid hosting plan from my host Misaki because the amount of bandwidth I use for free really isn’t fair. Her plans are really fairly priced so hopefully I’ll be able to make my online projects self sufficient.
Here’s what’s currently in the shop:
Watercolour Forest is a set of ten illustrated patterns in two different sizes. I actually designed these as fabrics but then decided to release them as backgrounds. I know they’re very niche but they’re my first experience in designing a coherent set. The individual drawings and water colours where created by hand then pieced together in PhotoShop. If you look closely you’ll find some of the elements in this blogs current theme!
Hand Drawn Wreath is a 24 icon set in 3 different styles. If you look to my sidebar I’m currently using some of them! The individual elements are hand drawn and thus perfect for arts and craft style blogs or blogs with a vintage theme.
Finally there’s Hand Drawn Lines – a set of patterns consisting of hand drawn lines (aren’t I creative with names?). The set comes in 15 different colour ways and 2 sizes. They could be used as backgrounds or as patterns in your graphics.
I have a few more ideas but next on the agenda are more free resources for this place! If you happen to buy anything from the shop let me know and I’ll add a page of websites using the resources.
How to be Happy with Your Art
6 Responses
Posted 16th of June 2012 — Inspiration: Lists, quick tips.
Looking through my keywords some-one recently ended up here by searching “not happy with my art”. This made me sad for you, anonymous stranger! If it makes you feel better, I think most artists feel the same the majority of the times. Here’s some of my tips for dealing with it.
- Look at your old work. Have you improved? If so pat yourself on the back for sticking at it! Do you think you’ve worsened? Pin your old work up where you can see it as proof that you can do it!
- Remember why you first got into art.
- Figure out if you being unhappy with your work could be affected by the people your comparing it to. Odds are you’re no Da Vinci so don’t compare yourself to him. Try to stop measuring your art on technical merit and more on the emotion and message it conveys.
- Remember the compliments you have received. If needs be write them down in a notebook that you can carry with you and peek at when you need cheering up. Tape a few photos of your favourite work in there too.
- Browse a few tutorial websites and check off the things you know you can do without a tutorial.
- Work through it. Use this self doubt as motivation to create something brilliant. Personally I think every artist needs a small amount of self doubt or how else would you be motivated to improve?
- Show a kindly friend/family member your work. They’ll rave about it.
- And if all else fails – eat a pint of ice-cream.
A new lease of life
7 Responses
Posted 12th of June 2012 — Blog News
I find it funny that this theme is quite graphically reliant whilst I tried to keep the last theme really simple. I’m going to take that as either a sign of finding direction or a sign of over compensating. You may notice space for one more link next to the button advertising my portfolio. Hopefully that space won’t be empty by the end of this fortnight 
Here’s some very general things I learnt (or already knew and took more notice of) during this redesign:
- Whilst the focus should be on the content that doesn’t mean the design has to be plain – I think my collection of patterns in particular would look a bit odd on a minimal, bare-bones style theme. What I hoped to achieve with this redesign was a subtle yet distinctive and visually exciting design.
- That a blog is useless without it’s audience – I’ve finally(!) implemented a search feature which I hope will make browsing the blog easier. I also feel the categories and resource archives are now more succinct and easier to navigate. Hopefully. Shamefully visitor needs are not something I understand well enough, and I aim to keep on adapting.
- A blog is also nothing without a network, hence my more extensive blog roll. I hope to expand my blog horizons further so please, share with me!
- That inspiration comes in all forms – I already tend to visual and audio stimulation, but what about stimulation for your mind? Hence, here’s now a random art quote at the bottom of the page. There’s only about eight quotes at the moment but eh, we’re getting there.
All in all this redesign is indicative of a new lease of life. I know I keep saying that but that is what’s happening, honest! As mentioned in the previous post I’ve emailed an handful of artists and designers with the hope of featuring them here. Saying that, this blog will not turn into endless round ups of excellent design – not that there’s anything wrong with keeping tabs on your inspiration, but very slowly curation seems to be taken over creation. If we all start keeping purely “inspiration” blogs who are we going to feature on them?
I’d still very much like to move to a domain, for the reasons explained on this post, but the general feed back I’ve received from others says that if I do I need to pick a domain name as close as possible. Which, of course, makes sense. I don’t want to send my visitors on a wild goose chase. The problem is, whilst I wouldn’t necessarily call “Animus” a generic name it is a single word, which is of course already registered. As I’m getting more invested in this place I would like to fix the SEO nightmare that is my URL, but all the versions I can think of (“animusresources”, animusgraphics”, etc) are awfully limiting and slightly tacky. So what you should have gathered from that wall of text is that I wont be moving URLs soon but would like to.
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