After the journey of self discovery of the last month or so…. Of finally realizing that I just love textures and abstract…. I decided to start a new website that is part gallery for all the fun textures I come up with & part freebies site.

I have received a lot of inspiration and advice over the years from various sources on the internet, and this is partly a chance to give something back…. I love creating textures, but half of the time I don’t have anything to actually do with them once they are made. So www.ScrabooliTextures will be a place to put them so that others can get a little use out of my homeless daydreams.

They will be free for use in Graphic design projects and personal non-commercial projects (eg. scrapbooking)… So go check them out and have some fun!!

The last couple of days I have been trying to figure out what to focus on next. How to find a focus?

I have mentioned before that I have had trouble focusing on any one thing because there are so many different things that catch my attention…

well there has been more to it than that….

a lot of it is wrapped up in fear. Fear that if I take a part of my art and try to make a ‘business’ out of it, that it will become work and eventually boring…. and that it will make all things creative seem like work. Somehow, in my head, work=nasty/boring. However, my current day job is far from nasty/boring. I am still loving it after more than a year and a half. So why should art+work=nasty/boring? At risk of sounding Vulcan, its just not logical.

The other roadblock has been too many ideas and a general lack of focus. New ideas have displaced the last idea and then the next soon comes along…  and any focus I had is all washed away in the flood of ideas and  focusing only on the now and the new and the intensely immediate. Balancing against this has been the idea that lack of a signeture ’style’ leads to lack of exposure. What I am trying to get at there, is the idea that ’successful’ artists/creators are the ones that get known for a particular style (see post: Branding & ’success’). Which is not a bad thing…. its just that there is then the possibility of getting trapped in that style by the demand of your audience.

So I have had the crazy mix of ‘knowing’ that to be successful I should have a recognizable style, yet not wanting that because I don’t want to give up all my other ideas – and which one should I pick anyway? And then there was knowing that to create a recognizable style I would have to treat it like ‘work’ and in comes  the fear that it would become boring…

essentially it all boils down to the fear that success = boredom!!

…………………………………

After a gook chat with my mother today I have realized that it doesn’t have to be that way. So I have come to the following conclusions.

• As long as you are still coming up with new ideas and finding new inspiration in other peoples work, art will never be boring.
• Art as work needs to be put in a different mental space and time needs to be set aside for it that is different time from general fun art. Art created in fun however, might move over into the ‘work’ area.
• ‘Success’ is not going to happen overnight and definitely won’t happen if you don’t get your work ‘out there’ into the public eye.
• Art should be whatever you fancy at the time and be as varied or as focused as you want. However, you might take one aspect/style to develop, create a focus for, and maybe a separate website from your other work.
• For the purposes of display of work it is probably better to keep different ’styles’ on separate websites / in different galleries / in different exhibitions.

…………………………………….

Despite all that, Scrabooli Studio is probably going to remain a mixing pot of everything I do. There is a new website in the pipeline though. . . . . so watch this space!

Well!

I have been doing a lot of thinking and talking in the last little while and have finally come to the conclusion that you can be an artist and not like those ways of creating art.

What really got the idea sunk into my heart though was a little walk with the sketch book a couple of weeks back…..
I decided one day that it was about time that I ‘got down to it’ and started developing my sketching skills further. So I took a walk down town to the mall and sat down, pen ready to sketch whatever caught my eye.

I managed a potted plant (It looked ok) and a kid busking on the corner (that looked ok too)…. But it was so tedious. Not boring, but not interesting either. I lasted about 20 minuets and gave up. 20 minuets and I was totally over it…. However I can spend hours drawing intricate doodles or fiddling with photos and creating textures in Photoshop.

So I have finally come to the conclusion that It doesn’t matter.
I am an artist anyway.

What makes my heart sing and my creative juices flow is textures and patterns and abstract art.

And its all OK.

That’s what I have been doing today…  Starting with a re-vamp of this site.

So I have had quite a bit of fun… finding a new template and adapting it to my taste. The new one is a Wordpress template: pixeled by samk. I had a wonderful time changing the background art file to something that is my own, making ScrabooliStudio.com nicely unique.

So, you can see here what ScrabooliStudio.com used to look like and what it looks like now:

Original Template Design

New Template Design

An interesting improvement I think…

And now, the rest of the refocusing task. A creative exercise of some sort I think. I have a folder full of unused exercises pages somewhere, I shall dig it out, pick one at random and see what comes out. If it works out I will share it tomorrow…

P.S.

If you like what I have done here and would like me to create a custom background image for your site that uses this template (or another that uses a backround art file), then feel free to contact me to commision one.

Or at least that is what the dictionary calls it. But what if there is more to it? Just how absentminded do you have to be, for it to be a doodle? What if the same ‘doodle style’ is used deliberately? When does a doodle become something else?

For a start, just take a moment to lay out in your mind what type of image you consider to be a doodle.
Is it abstract? angular? curvaceous? small? dotty? random? useless? a mental distraction? ….

…

…

Now, consider this… you do a little doodle on the side of a memo pad, or on the edge of the essay your working on, or even in your journal, or sketch book… The doodle gets lost for a while, then you find it again and are struck by the image in some way… You take that doodle and port it into illustrator, trace it and use it for something (a design element in a magazine spread, decoration for a product, or artwork in it’s own right,  for example). Now, is that still a doodle, or are you going to call it a sketch, or a drawing, or a design element now?

Now consider further… you liked the style of the 1st doodle and decide to make some more in a similar vein. The finished item looks very similar to the 1st doodle… but you did them deliberately rather than ‘absentmindedly’… Or you deliberately set out to make some more in an absentminded manner – as in the state of mind required to hold and use the pen… Are these still doodles?

OK, now what about concept sketches?… your sitting there at your desk (or on the couch) coming up with the 1st ideas for something (logo/artwork/business card/movie character etc) and your absentmindedly putting down any idea that crosses your mind… “rough drawing made absentmindedly” … are these doodle too?

…

So…  perhaps a doodle is a rough drawing made absentmindedly & without a purpose.
And when it gets a purpose, then it becomes (is named) something else: concept sketch, design element, wild & crazy idea… etc.

Right. That was an interesting dwardle through a lot of quetions. It’s late, and I’m not sure if this post has gone quite where I wanted it to. but it’s all an interesting thought. By the by, I invented the word scrabooli to cover a doodle-looking-type image that had been done deliberatly. …

Anyway… So there I was… huge big beach… the tide way out… wide clean un-foot-printed, slightly damp, smooth sand… and this neat little point on the cuttle-fish bone.

So you know what comes next, I just couldn’t resist! … …

About 5 minuets later I stopped scribbling and realized that the bone had just slipped into my hand and was completely and perfectly comfortable to hold and write and draw with. I even tried it in my other hand just to make sure it wasn’t a fluke!

If you don’t believe me, next time you find one, try it for yourself and tell me what you think, I would love to know if it was for real or just a double fluke – After all, it could just be the way I hold a pen. I’m going to try to make a mold for a pen grip based on the shape of it and then cast one out of soft rubber that will fit over a pen – like those triangular ones that you can slip onto any pen. Not sure how well it will go as I’ve never done anything like that before, but I am hoping that it will make scrabooling much easier to do for hours on end without upsetting the joints…. We’ll see.

Meanwhile, if anyone out there wants to use this idea and make an actual salable product from it. go for your life! I will look forward to seeing the result.

Dombrovskis was a Tasmanian wilderness photographer,
Piccaso was a cubist painter,
Tim Winton writes about place and community,
Le Corbusier was one of the 1st the architects to use concrete,
Azimov was a Sci-fi writter….

Now think about these names: Myers, Billabong, nike, McDonalds, Teva, Coles, Mountain Design, …. etc
Each of these also brought to mind an image did it not? one that included the logo and the style and the contents of their stores….

It’s got to do with the whole BRANDING thing. we love brands and logos and symbols…. an artist or creator who wants to be successful (as in well known) needs a brand – a way of doing things that fits within a recognisable template. So you have to have a recognisable style. one that is reasonably consistent. … Because people like to know what to expect.
People like to put other people in boxes – it feels safer that way! If you keep breaking out of the box they want to put you in, they don’t know what to do with you or how to relate to you and so you will be avoided.

Think of it another way: Homo sapients are a very social species who are also a little contradictory…
In general, we like to think of ourselves as individuals, but we also like to fit in to a social crowd. So unique artwork gets a higher price tag than mass produced stuff because it is unique, but people are more likely to buy unique one off / limited edition art or have their house designed or read a book if there is other things out there that are similar – that shair a brand-like identity.

So, a creative person who is just starting out and who wants to be ’successful’ needs to find a style, a brand and stick to it – at least until they get a ‘name’, then they can experiment if they want to, but only if the experimentation is extensive. By that I mean a series, a set, a whole exhibitions worth. … or several.

It also means that if an artist has a particularly ‘new’ and different style, it is going to be a very slow start while they wait for the brand to become known – while they wait for a few brave individuals start a trend and risk being different by buying weird stuff. After a while , when some point of critical mass is reached, the artists work will stop being weird, will become safe/different and maybe even popular. it is a funny old journey, to be sure!

I read somewhere that many of the ‘great’ creators (Picasso for example) were not going solo in a new style, but were part of a group of creators who were all exploring a similar style at the same time…. and the great ones were not necessarily the 1st, just the ones that became more popular. Maybe they outputted more work and so reached the critical mass point a little sooner, maybe their style was more constant, maybe they had better marketing skills….who knows?… (Someone must, I just haven’t found their report yet!)

Graphic Designers on the other hand….

From looking around the web, it seems that graphic designers and illustrators break this mold all the time. It seems that you need to be more versatile? Or is it only the people just starting out that are more versatile…  while the more experianced ones with a srtong client base or who are in demand have developed a style that works for them?

Perhaps that is how it works for all artists, designers & creators?

What are your opinions & ideas on this?

Which got me thinking …. …. ….  Just what is an online folio anyway?

When she mentioned that it should be a folio site… well my head just decided that was way too formal. because, well, what is the 1st thing that comes to mind when you think of a folio?

For me it it a large black leather album with photos and other work carefully laid out on the – usually also black – pages and all of it neatly labeled. Then, on the other hand an image comes to mind from a fictional book somewhere of an Edwardian Lady with her folio of paintings all neatly held on rack on a wheeled trolley.

In transferring that concept to modern media, we get the idea that a folio is a carefully laid out web page of images, using sub pages as needed and ‘galleries’ for each topic. Alternatively it could be something very similar, but burnt to DVD instead. It might include still images, as well as moving images and even music.

This is the most popular folio layout style on the web – eg, personal galleries, flickr, stock agencies, ‘light boxes’, flash slide shows, etc. However, many of these are also dynamic folios, in that they are searchable through the tag system, effectively letting the user create their own ‘folio’ out of the artist’s work to look through. So, in a way, folios are becoming much less artist driven: in that the artist no longer decides exactly what the viewer sees, or in what order they see it, or even what combination of images are viewed together.

That put my head in a spin and I realized that I could just incorporate the ‘traditional’ type folio idea right into the blog – instead of having it on a separate set of pages. I have seen a couple of other design/art blogs doing that same thing, but had dismissed the idea as impractical. But perhaps it is not, perhaps it is actually much more sensible!

After all, Wordpress uses a nice set of categories and tags for posts which readers can use to find the type of content/images they are interested in viewing, but at the same time, if I want to control which images are seen together, I can just put them together in one post.

So, getting back to the ‘What is an Online Folio?’ question …. It seems to me, that an online folio is, at it’s most basic, a collection of stuff that you present to the world in order to show what you can do, what your style is, who you are and what you are like. If a blog is part of your folio site, then your folio is not just your images/work, it is what you say about them too, and how you interact with the world, it is anything you say in that blog. Where the traditional folio of images was usually presented in person, an online folio is presented remotely. … So, in effect, the rest of the blog is like an interview, helping potential clients get to know you as a person rather than as a collection of works.

….

I would love to know your thoughts on this …. and what solutions you have come up with. After all, we are the ones that set the trend for the future.

Thinking of the future, just a another random thoght … What are online folios and blogs going to look like in the future when screens are 3D? How will 2D data be presented? not to mention navigation – 3D mice? Or just reach in and touch the links? the mind boggles!