The Diary Project suffered its first real casualty recently when this envelope came back so mauled that the Royal Mail put it in a special ‘oh dear, we’re incredibly sorry’ plastic bag. Amazingly, the contents are still inside.

Kirsty Hall: Diary Project envelope from the 10th September 2007

Kirsty Hall: plastic bag from the Royal Mail

I was totally thrilled, it’s the most exciting thing that’s happened so far!

The project blog is currently up to date until the 16th September and should be updated again over the weekend, although we have house guests this weekend so it might not happen until Monday. I’ve been a bit behind with it lately but I’m attempting to get back onto a regular schedule with updates. If I leave it too long it gets completely overwhelming.

I got an interesting email from someone a couple of weeks ago asking me why I post the letters to myself and not to another person. I won’t post their original letter because they haven’t responded to my request to do so but here’s an extract from my reply:

Why do I post the letters? Well, I like the sense of risk involved - the envelopes might get lost in the post or damaged. I’m a bit of a control freak so posting the letters is an interesting way for me to let go a bit. My work has always involved a certain amount of ‘letting nature take its course’ - in the past I’ve often made sculptures that rot, decay or slowly change. I like to open myself up to chaos a little because it challenges me and the posting does that. Plus, I’ve always been interested in the idea of journeys and I love the fact that the envelopes take these little journeys without me.

I wanted to send the envelopes to myself rather than someone else because I wanted to have them all to exhibit at the end of the year. Also, there’s just something very absurd about sending letters to yourself for a year and that aspect of the project makes me laugh. And on a completely mundane level, I absolutely love getting post and because of this project, I get a year’s worth of letters, which just delights me. I get a little bit excited every time a letter comes home safely.

Oh, and I think that posting the letters also stops me cheating. It’s a firm deadline - I absolutely have to get the letter in the postbox by midnight or I’ve failed for that day. It’s good to have that sense of ‘I must get this done’. I know that no one but me would know if I did the letter after midnight but somehow having to go out and post them keeps me honest about the project. I don’t know why, but somehow it works as an external control.

Artist Annie Vought meticulously cuts paper to make her beautiful and witty wall pieces. Her recent work has concentrated on writing, while previous work explored the human body through cut up anatomy drawings.

Annie Vought: To Do, 2006

As a compulsive list-maker, I just adore the absurdity of this piece - just think of the hours it must have taken to cut away the paper from something as transitory and throwaway as a to-do list. She’s clearly a woman after my own heart!

The use of shadows in these works interests me and I see obvious parallels with my own thread drawings where the shadows also work to complete the image. Unsurprisingly, it also delights me that she uses pins to attach the delicate cut paper to the wall.

Annie Vought: Slightly, 2006

Kirsty Hall: Thread drawing - work in progress

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Vought is also involved in a radical form of curating in public spaces through her involvement with the Budget Gallery.

The Budget Gallery is not in a specific place. We don’t have a building, so we’re beyond low-rent. We don’t even pay rent. We set up our gallery in co-opted public spaces like vacant walls and fences. The shows are carefully co-ordinated, prepared, and publicized. The pieces are displayed much like a traditional gallery. We paint walls white, install art works and labels. We announce openings that are attended by hundreds. Refreshments are served and one can often hear jazz playing in the background. Of course, this is no traditional gallery - it’s all taking place on the sidewalk. In the end it’s a blend of all the greatest things about attending an art show, a garage sale, and a block party rolled into one.

Check out their project rules:

1. We use underutilized public spaces for our exhibitions.
2. If work doesn’t sell at the opening, it stays, in public, unguarded, for at least 1 week.
3. After the opening the unguarded work is sold on the honor system.
4. All art work in our shows will be sold, stolen*, or vandalized** and we can not pre-determine the outcome.
5. Our commission is arbitrary, optional, and determined by the artist.

*Having a work stolen is the highest honor of the Budget Gallery because it means someone wanted the work so badly they were willing to abandon personal and societal mores to acquire your piece of art. In our eyes, this may be considered a more valuable compliment to you than a simple monetary transaction.

**We suggest you consider vandalism a form a collaboration.

I find that a fascinating concept but also very challenging: it certainly brings up a lot of issues around letting go of control.

How would you feel about your work being shown in these circumstances? Could you deal with it? Would it upset you to have your work stolen from an unguarded public wall? Would it upset you more to have it vandalised?

I think I would have to make work especially for that space, with those aims in mind because if my regular art was stolen or vandalised I’d be upset. I actually had my degree show vandalised and even though I’d known beforehand that it was a possibility because of the extreme delicacy of the piece, I still had to go and cry in the toilets for a while!

I promised a round-up of the comments that other artists have left about their experiences with blogging and here it is, although much later than I’d planned…

Usiku from Writer’s Whirlpool writes:

Blogging has allowed me to reach and meet people that possess a range and depth of human experience, yet it reminds me there is a sameness to us all.

What a lovely sentiment, Usiku. One of the things I love most about blogging is the way it can encourage people reach out and help each other - I’ve seen everything from people offering words of sympathy to people giving real life support such as organising online baby showers, paying medical bills for ill bloggers, supporting families through bereavement or other difficult times, raising funds for charities or coming together to sponsor art projects.

I get so fed up of all the negative portrayals of the internet because it just doesn’t reflect my online experience. Blogging is frequently portrayed as a selfish and egotistical thing to do but I’ve often seen it used as a powerful and meaningful way to connect with other people.

Michelle from Pencil Portraits brings up a point I hadn’t considered:

Another benefit to blogging (for me anyway) is that when I am focussed on updating my blog regularly I am more productive in my art, because I can’t wait to post it. But I have noticed a definite correlation in lower productivity when I get slack about updating my blog, so even though it takes a bit of time to post, it is definitely worth it for so many reasons.

I love the idea of using a blog as a way of giving yourself motivation - great idea, Michelle!

Mark from Graf Nature Photography: Notes From The Woods writes:

I use my own blog for connecting with viewers of my own work, as well as exploration of my own feelings and analysis of why I do what I do. Turns out, a lot of readers often wonder the same about their own work. Sometimes it helps just to write things down to work out what you are thinking.

Oh, I couldn’t agree more, Mark. I’ve always used writing, and indeed, making my art, as a way to work out what I’m really thinking and feeling. I’ve always written about my work a lot so writing on a blog wasn’t that big a step for me. I think that so many artists work in isolation and having that link with viewers and other artists can be so helpful - just to get an extra set of eyes on the work, if nothing else. One of the reasons I like exhibiting is because of the dialogue and additional perspective that you can get on the work - I guess you can think of blogging as an informal sort of exhibiting process.

That leads us neatly onto Katherine from Making A Mark, who makes a similar point:

1) Blogging can also be thought of as the virtual equivalent of the ‘private view’. Thinking of it like that helps people to pitch their remarks - one to one, helpful, informative - but also professional.

2) I like supporting galleries, exhibitions and other artists on my blog - and they come back and tell me they’ve sold work as a result. More co-operative support for one another would give a nice artistic twist to “the wisdom of crowds”

3) It should never be under-estimated how much slog blogging can feel like at the beginning - but it is habit-forming and it does get easier the more you do it and the more frequently you post. The growth in visitors is also exponential - my second tranche of 50,000 visitors arrived a lot more quickly than the first 50,000!

Woah Katherine - 50,000 visitors! I can’t even imagine that yet but maybe I’ll get there one day. I do agree that blogging is habit-forming although I think a lot of bloggers get dispirited at the initial ‘writing in a vacuum’ feeling. I think you’ve got to be writing for yourself as well as an audience - if you’re getting some personal reward that isn’t dependant on other people reading or commenting then it’s a lot easier to continue. In that respect it’s a lot like making art.

Tina from The Cycling Artist blog brings up the importance of regular blogging:

I’ve been blogging a while but only recently made a pact with myself to do it *every day*. Strangely enough it gets easier. I used to wonder what to blog about, what was interesting enough to write and direct my fans, collectors and other artists too that wasn’t just a rambling self-journal. I didn’t want it to be for artists only, so had to find a happy balance. Sometimes I get on a bit of a soapbox but hopefully not too often.

It’s about 20 minutes each day typing up, copying into two blogs (I duplicate my tina-m.blogspot.com blog over to my MySpace account too). It’s a nice start to the day actually. And I’ve just recently found out about RSS feeds and used feedburner.com to set them up - in case any other artists are as mystified about it as I was!

Tina, I’m interested in the fact that you duplicate your blog over at MySpace - do you find using MySpace works in terms of visitor numbers? I’ve been wondering about setting up an ‘outpost’ over in MySpace but I don’t want to commit to something that’s going to take lots of time.

Deanna from Artist, Emerging writes about damage to a piece of her artwork that was returned to her by a gallery.

Deanna is obviously very careful about packaging her work - she makes up special foamcore boxes and wraps her work carefully in archival paper first to protect the delicate wax surfaces of her encaustic paintings. She was pretty unlucky to have a piece damaged.

I don’t want to sound as though I’m making excuses for the gallery - they should definitely have been more careful - but I do have some advice on avoiding this situation. Having packaged up loads of works as a curator, I’d strongly recommend that artists include a sheet of packing directions, especially if there are any special requirements for repacking the work. Don’t leave things to chance; spell it out in black and white. Wrapping up works to send back is a pig of a job: it’s boring and tedious and when you’re packaging up 20 or 30 pieces at the end of a show it’s often difficult to remember how it looked when it arrived. You also can’t guarantee that the people who unwrapped the work will be the ones repackaging it - at the Here Gallery we rely on volunteers and sometimes the people wrapping the work don’t have any art experience at all. What seems like common sense to an artist might not be so obvious to someone who isn’t an artist. Written directions make life a lot simpler for everyone, plus if the gallery doesn’t follow the instructions then you have more ammunition to complain to them.

Unfortunately not all artists are as meticulous as Deanna: I’ve unpacked work that I was amazed survived the trip through the postal system - work sandwiched between two ill fitting bits of cardboard, work that wasn’t well wrapped, even work that wasn’t protectively wrapped at all.

Work being sent anywhere should be properly wrapped in bubble wrap (and any other protective packaging that the work needs) before being placed in a strong, well-fitting box.

Please buy or make the correct size of box: don’t hack together several bits of cardboard. I know it’s good from an environmental point of view but bits of cardboard taped together are a nightmare to get into, even worse to reuse and they tend not to provide enough support to the work, especially around the edges. It’s OK to cut down a box that’s too large though.

With bubble wrap, you should use larger pieces rather than taping together smaller pieces - the later are horrible to reuse. If you’ve only just had enough bubble wrap to wrap your work, then the curator probably won’t have enough to securely re-wrap it because bubble wrap invariably gets damaged where it’s been taped. I know that money is an issue for all artists but please don’t skimp on protecting your precious work.

If you’re packing more than one piece in a single box, you’ll need plenty of packaging between them and you’ll also need to consider weight issues. For example, if you’re packing a lot of framed pieces then they’re usually better stacked upright rather than in a pile with one unfortunate piece on the bottom. Reinforcing the base of the box with extra cardboard can be a good idea when sending heavier work, although if the work is very heavy then you’ll need to use wooden packing crates.

Your box should also include: instructions on how to repack the box, a return address label (including postage if required), written instructions on how to install the piece (especially important for sculptural works) and any fittings needed to install the work. Obviously, you should make sure the box is properly taped shut but using too much tape on the box can actually increase the risk of damage because the person will have to use more force if it’s very difficult to open. Now mark your box to show which way is up. Boxes should also be marked ‘fragile, handle with care’ although frankly I’m not sure if that makes any difference to the way the post office treats them!

If I get all that, I’m in heaven.

Professionally packed work containing clear instructions and fittings lets the curator know that you respect and value your own work, so they should too. In addition, by making things easy for them, you also demonstrate that you’re courteous enough to care about their time. Knowing that I’m following the artist’s wishes and don’t have to sit around worrying about how a piece should be hung takes a lot of stress out of the process for me. Then all I have to decide is where it should be hung. Believe me, I much prefer that!

I liked this post by ceramicist Shannon Garson on her blog, Strange Fragments.

This is a lesson I learn time and time again, if I have misgivings about a project it is not superstition, it is because I am experienced. Those misgivings are all my years of experience telling me “This project is not right. Stay Away!”

Isn’t that great! I absolutely love that line about it being experience not superstition. It’s so true, yet unfortunately it’s a lesson that I also seem to have trouble learning and I bet I’m not the only one. Why do we second guess ourselves in this way? Is it lack of confidence in our abilities or blind optimism that hey, things will turn out just fine if we ignore that little niggling voice?

Shannon goes on to say:

I think it’s important for artists who speak about their practice to tell emerging artists and their peers about their frustrations as well as successes.

I totally agree and it’s one of the reasons that I’m very open on this blog about the times when I mess up. I hope that people can learn from my mistakes. I also hope that if I publicly confess them then maybe I might learn from them!

I am slowly learning though. For example, I’ve learnt to ask myself “is this a gesso moment?” in the run up to an exhibition: this is my personal code for ‘am I about to stress myself out by attempting something monumentally stupid right before a deadline?” This comes from an experience I had last year when I tried to learn proper old fashioned gesso (the sort you make with plaster and rabbit skin glue) a month before my solo show with the crazy idea that I would make a series of brand new drawings on gessoed boards - a medium, let me repeat, that I had never used before. I’m sure you can imagine how well that went… I still have a bunch of gessoed boards sitting in my studio, waiting to be sanded and then drawn on. Goodness only knows what I was thinking but it’s quite a frequent trap for me - my optimism always seems to outweigh my sanity in these situations and I get carried away with a ‘good idea’. The trouble is that it often really is a good idea - if I’d had it six months earlier!

I was delighted to discover the lovely Rag And Bone blog today. I’ve just spent several happy hours reading their entire archives. If you’re interested in paper as an art medium, journalling, book artists or bookbinding, then you definitely need to check them out.

They’re also a great example of a small craft business (they make delicious handmade journals and albums) using blogging to increase awareness of their business but without being constantly ‘in your face’ about it. Sure, they mention their own work now and again but mostly they link to other people and their passion and enthusiasm for paper and book arts really shines through in their generous and knowledgeable promotion of other artists in their field.

Since I seem to have been on an ‘art made from books’ theme this week, I thought I’d share one of the few pieces that I’ve made using books.

Burn was a small sculpture I did for an exhibition in a church in Gloucester in May 2004.

Kirsty Hall: Burn, May 2004

It’s a glass bottle engraved with the word ‘burn’ and it contains handmade ink that I made from the burnt and ground up ashes of a Bible. Although it sounds rather blasphemous the piece was actually about William Tyndale, who translated the Bible from Latin to English and was strangled and then burnt by the Catholic Church for his efforts.

Kirsty Hall: Burn, May 2004

I was trying to convey the idea that although you can burn both books and people, once an idea has been expressed you can rarely eradicate it completely - even if you burn the books the words will be rewritten and if you burn the people who wrote the words, others will pick up the pen. So to me, it’s a very hopeful and positive piece and I liked it a lot. However, it was tiny and was completely dwarfed by the space. One day I’ll do something with it and the lovely series of photos that I took of the burning Bible and the ashes. Ironically enough, I quite fancy making a book…

Kirsty Hall: Burnt Bible, May 2004

As a dedicated bookworm, I had a bit of moral trouble with the book burning part but it was so integral to the piece that I couldn’t not do it and I have to confess that once I got going, I took a wicked glee in the process. I was also worried that Christians might be offended that I’d burnt their holy book, but I’ve yet to get any complaints.

The following is the text I wrote for the exhibition brochure:

Burn
Glass, ink made from the ashes of a bible

“Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.”
Heinrich Heine

“The paper burns, but the words fly away.”
Ben Joseph Akiba

The Catholic Church burnt not only Tyndale’s Bible, but also more than 1,000 people found with the forbidden text. This work is a memorial to everyone who has been killed for reading the wrong books.

Erin from the Sculptress blog asked:

Would you clarify something for me? How do I know for sure I am hosting an image, do you mean save the image as a file on my computer and then repost it from the computer file?

Good question, Erin - it was something that confused me a bit at first and my web designer had to walk me through it several times until I got it.

…do you mean save the image as a file on my computer and then repost it from the computer file?

Yes, that’s exactly what you do, Erin - from the way you’ve phrased the question it sounds like you may know how to do that already but I’ll run through the exact steps just in case other people are a bit unsure about it.

What I do is this:
1) Find an image I’d like to use
2) Drag and drop the image to my desktop
I do this by left-clicking on the image, holding down the mouse button and dragging the image until it’s off the browser and onto my desktop. You can also do it by hitting the right mouse button and clicking on ‘copy image’ but I think dragging and dropping is quicker. Make sure that you’re dragging a reasonably sized image and not a thumbnail.

The image file is now on my computer. If it’s too large and I need to make it smaller I can edit the size in Photoshop but I usually don’t need to do this.

Next I need to get it onto my web server:

In Wordpress there’s an upload section just beneath the text box where you write posts. Hit the ‘browse’ button, locate the image on your desktop and click on it to select it, write the artist’s name and the title of the work where it says ‘title’ (this is optional but I always do it), then hit upload. After a few moments a thumbnail of the image will appear in the ‘Browse All’ page - the file is now loaded onto your server. You can put the image in a post by selecting ’show fullsize’, followed by ‘link to file’ and then hitting ’send to editor’. You’ll see that a bunch of html appears in your post, this is the image file, it’ll become an image when you publish the post.

If you’re using Blogger you do the following: Go into dashboard and select new post. Now hit the little image button on your blogger toolbar - this is the 6th button along or the second from last. This will bring up an image page. You’ll see that it says ‘add an image from your computer’ on the left, hit the browse button next to it and select the image from your desktop by clicking on it. Now choose the size and layout you want and then hit the ‘upload image’ button at the bottom of the page. Your image or the image html should now appear in your blogger editing software. This article from Blogger give more details on uploading images, including where the images are stored and how you can check how much room you’ve got.

The only thing left to do is to add the artists name and the title of the work - oh, and write the rest of the post, of course!

Lisa Lam, who runs U-Handbag has just started a new blog called Craft Boom, which is all about marketing for craft businesses. There’s some great stuff over there that ties in nicely with what I’ve been writing in my Artists Online series. I spotted Lisa’s announcement over on Flickr - yet another confirmation that Flickr really can help artists publicise themselves and their projects.

If you’re an artist working with Print Gocco, Bristol’s Here Shop & Gallery has an opportunity for you.

We’re looking to do a show in 2008 provisionally to be staged in March - June time for a period of 3/4 weeks with (hopefully) all works for sale to the public.

It’ll be a group show with works from as many artists as possible on any theme you like, highlighting your own particular style and demonstrating the breadth of versatility and styles displayed by print gocco artists.

We’re open to submissions from anyone anywhere.

If you can email us with links to examples of your work and a short blurb about you at heregallery@yahoo.co.uk then that’d be great!

For some reason, I seem to be very attuned to art made from books this week. Cara Barer is a photographer who often works with old discarded books, which she soaks in water and shapes into new forms before photographing.

She says:

My photographs are primarily a documentation of a physical evolution. I have changed a common object into sculpture in a state of flux.

Cara Barer - Found Reference

This one really stood out for me, it reminded me strongly of a mushroom, so it was no surprise to find that she’d also taken pictures of fungi.

Cara Barer - Mushroom Dust

Link found on the Daily Poetics blog.

OK, after nearly two weeks of hassle, it looks - fingers crossed - as though my email is now working properly again. If you’ve contacted me by email in the last couple of weeks and I haven’t got back to you then I probably didn’t get it, so please do send it again. I’ve also just realised that there were a bunch of comments on one of the blogging posts that I missed seeing, so apologies for not replying to those sooner.

I hadn’t realised just how much I rely on my email until it went so badly wrong, in fact, I still feel rather insecure about it because I don’t know how much stuff went astray after our stupid email provider ‘upgraded’ their spam filters. I’m still hoping that they’ll be able to send me the stuff they filtered out but I’ve got a horrible feeling that they probably just threw out several hundred genuine emails.

Brian Dettmer makes wonderfully intricate work using found books and maps, which he carves into to reveal the illustrations within.

Brian Dettmer - Untitled

Needless to say, I love the obsessive quality of this work but the results are stunning too - he’s clearly got a strong eye because the pieces also work well as collages. I particularly love his map pieces where he’s dissected maps leaving only the road systems, which he’s layered over each other to make works that seem far more related to anatomy books than cartography.

Brian Dettmer - Untitled

There’s an interesting little discussion of his work here, with comments ranging from ‘wow, that’s amazing’ to ‘it’s horrible because he’s destroying books’. What do you think? Is it a valid form of art if you destroy/seriously alter other creative works to make it? I think so but as a confirmed bookworm, I also understand the resistance to reusing books in this way.

Link found on Something To Say

So, I’ve just signed up for del.icio.us - I’m kirstyhall if you want to add me to your network - after being inspired by this great little video explanation of social bookmarking from Common Craft. Their other videos are fab too - I love the simplicity of their format. I’m going to have to come to grips with RSS feeds next - it’s one of those things I’ve been meaning to sort out for ages but I feel that I understand it a bit better now. You know, technology can be wonderful for all of us, artists included, but it can also be very overwhelming and daunting so it’s great when other people take the time to explain things in a clear and simple manner like this.

I read lots of different blogs, not just art based ones. Lately - probably because of starting this blog and writing the Artists Online Series - I’ve been reading a lot of blogs about blogging and business. Even though they’re often describing a different world to mine, I still find it interesting because I do a lot of this stuff too.

I’m always quite aware that artists are professionals. Sure, we often don’t get treated as though we are (”ooh, it must be lovely to be doing something creative all the time, I wish I could quit my job and sit around painting/writing/making pots all day”) but anyone who’s trying to establish themselves as an artist knows that it’s lots of hard work. We do a bunch of stuff that most people probably don’t think is very ‘arty’: answering email, talking with suppliers, checking proofs, designing flyers, writing press releases, sorting out our tax returns, writing proposals and invoicing people - the list is endless and guess what, it looks a whole lot like everyone else’s workday! The reality of being a professional artist is about a million miles away from most people’s romantic view of it, including, unfortunately, the vast majority of art students to whom daily life as an artist often comes as quite an unpleasant shock.

So I was very amused by this article by Fiaz Khan of NextBigLeap, that describes what it’s actually like to work for yourself. I was reading it and to my amusement suddenly noticed that I was constantly nodding my head in agreement. I think this should be mandatory reading in art colleges!

Gosh, it’s been far too long since we had an Artists Online post. I was going to do the round-up post next but my email is still extremely messed up, which is making it difficult to check with people that it’s OK to use their comments. So instead, I’ve decided to move this post about getting blog visitors up the queue.

………

OK, so you’ve got your blog started - you’ve set the table and put the kettle on and now you just need some visitors. So how do you go about enticing people to your site?

Obviously you need to have great content but even if you’ve got the best blog in the world, people won’t know you’re there if you’re doing the online equivalent of hiding in the kitchen at parties! You’re going to have to get out there and meet some people. Here’s a few ways to do that…

Link, link, link

The first thing that any article on this subject will tell you is ‘link’. There’s a very simple reason for this - it works. At least a third of my visitors to both this site and The Diary Project arrive here via other bloggers who’ve linked to me in their posts or on their sidebars.

Linking is, quite simply, the foundation stone of the blogging world. Sure, you can blog successfully without ever linking to anyone else but you’d better have another promotional strategy worked out. I don’t use links much over at The Diary Project because of the type of blog it is, consequently I have to work a lot harder at promoting it. This site, where I link to a lot of other artists, has snowballed for me in a way that the Diary Project just hasn’t yet (although I keep hoping it will).

Linking just works. And it’s easy: find someone whose work you like, nab one of their images *unless they prohibit that*, host the image on your site so you’re not stealing bandwidth, write a little bit about their work and what you like about it and voilà, almost instant blog content with the added advantage that you might have drawn the artist or blogger in question back to your site.

Be generous with your linking, link to people you like or who’ve done or said something that interests you. It’s OK to link to people that you’d like to be noticed by but don’t make those the only people you link to. Be genuine and think about linking in terms of good karma, not in terms of what it might bring you. And don’t expect to be linked back - you might be, but it’s not automatic and it doesn’t mean anything if you’re not, so don’t get huffy about it.

Tell People You Know

You’ve already got a ready made audience in your existing friends and family - send them all an email to let them know you’ve got a new blog. You should also change your email signature so that you’re automatically letting people know about your blog every time you send an email. If you’ve got a mailing list, let them know too. Do you have profiles on other sites, especially networking ones? Go round and update them to include your new blog address.

Watch Your Numbers

Get Google Analytics or a similar programme installed on your blog and keep an eye on your numbers. It’s helpful to know your baseline and encouraging to see the numbers gradually rise. Plus you can usually spot when you’ve been linked somewhere. If you are linked, nip over to the person’s site, check it out and leave a comment or email to say thanks. Obviously, if you get really huge, it might not be possible to say thanks to absolutely everyone (you’ve got to leave some time for the studio!) but give it your best shot, especially in the beginning.

NB: If you have already linked to me and I haven’t thanked you either by email or in your blog comments, then it almost certainly means that Technorati has missed the link so I don’t know about it.

Make Some Cards

A couple of months ago I bought a box of 100 Moo cards to advertise the Diary Project and I’ve gone through two thirds of the box already. I carry them in my handbag and give them out to people who seem like they might be interested - you know, bus drivers, random people on the street, small children in pushchairs! OK, I’m kidding, I only give them to people I’m already talking to but I do know that people often do visit the project after taking a card because they often email me to tell me they have.

You don’t have to get Moo cards made (although they are fab) but you should already be carrying some sort of visual card to hand out to people you meet, so you might as well have your blog address on it too.

Leave Comments

Leaving comments on other people’s blogs is a good way to meet people, make connections and get readers back to your own site. If you leave a comment on here, I’ll invariably go and check your site out because hey, I’m nosy! I’m not alone in this, it’s common blogging behaviour. I don’t end up regularly reading everyone’s blog but I have discovered some great new sites this way.

Most blogs have a fairly open comments policy and it’s usually easy to leave comments, although some sites do moderate to avoid spam so your comment might not appear instantly.

Leave your name and URL so that people can find you. Oh, and definitely make sure that you get your own address right - I’d accidentally been leaving the slash off the end of this blog address in other people’s comments for about a month before someone kindly pointed out that hey, they couldn’t actually get to my site that way. Boy, did I feel stupid! I can’t believe that I could make such an elementary mistake despite being on the net for about 12 years, but I did…

Link To Yourself

If you have more than one site, make sure you link to your other sites in your sidebar or profile. All your sites should link up to each other - it sounds obvious but it’s a step that many of us forget about. Looking at my numbers, I can see that both this site and The Diary Project get about 15% of their visitors from my other sites.

Remember my mantra of Make It Easy For People, well it applies here too. If you’ve got a cool project on the go, a nice little blog or a great new site, don’t make people go hunting for them: the information should be right there, out in the open and very easy to spot. When I added a ‘My Other Sites’ section to the sidebar of The Diary Project, my visitors to this site from over there absolutely rocketed. This site was already mentioned and linked to in the profile, which was right at the top of the sidebar but for some reason having that extra ‘My Other Sites’ section made a huge difference. Sometimes you’ve just got to make things really obvious.

You should use this approach in your blog writing too - link to your sites or projects when you mention them in posts. It’s not shameless self promotion, it’s making it easy for people to investigate this neat thing you’re talking about. Treat yourself with the same consideration that you would give to other artists or sites that you were talking about. If you find it uncomfortable to link to your own stuff, then ask yourself, “if this was someone else, would I put a link here?” - you’ll probably find that nine times out of ten, the answer is yes.

The excellent Empty Easel has this to say about general linking and this to say about internal linking.

Submit Your Site

This is something to do with the bigger sites rather than individual blogs. Most of the big hubs on the web have a submissions page where you can enter your details. Work out where your work fits and then submit to those sites. This is something I do regularly with The Diary Project - since I don’t use links much in the project blog, I have to raise interest in other ways.

A couple of weeks ago I submitted the Diary Project to Craftzine and when they blogged it (thanks Craftzine!), I got a big increase in numbers and visits from that site have continued to steadily climb.

You can also submit your stuff to individual blogs but that’s a technique you should use only sparingly because it can be a bit spammy. I know many of you discovered this blog through Alyson Stanfield who kindly blogged about my Why Artists Should Be Online article. I had emailed Alyson directly to tell her about the article because I thought she’d be interested and fortunately she was. However, I already knew her slightly through commenting on her blog and because she’d linked to a previous article of mine, so it wasn’t a complete ‘cold call’. This is yet another good reason to build up your blogging relationships through commenting - it makes approaching possible allies a lot less daunting.

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I should also point out that there’s absolutely no obligation to try to improve your visitor numbers - if you’re happy with a very personal blog that has a small intimate readership (or even none at all!), that’s completely fine. It’s a valid way to blog and one that I’ve used for many years over at Livejournal. Just don’t expect it to be a particularly effective way to promote your art career.

I love Abigail Percy’s jewellery and regularly read her blog.

Geranium Outline Earrings…, originally uploaded by Abigail Percy.

Her latest blog post has some simply gorgeous photographs from a little shop she discovered during a recent visit to Paris.

Paris ~ shop…, originally uploaded by Abigail Percy.

It’s been years since I last went to Paris and now I have yet another reason to want to go - I love shops like this.

You should check out her Flickr too, the sympathetic way she photographs her jewellery is well worth noting.

My partner sent me this story about an attempt to make a record breaking amount of porridge. It made me laugh because a couple of years ago, I made some art using porridge and did an accompanying ‘Porridge Performance’ where I made big pans of porridge for people at the private view.

The piece in question was called My Glorious Cultural Heritage. It was a chest of drawers, filled with various items that related to my Scottishness.

Kirsty Hall - My Glorious Cultural Heritage, Feb 2004

Here’s the text from the exhibition it was in:

When I was a child my dad told me that Scottish shepherds used to make porridge and pour it into a ‘porridge drawer’. The porridge would set hard and during the week slices would be gradually be cut off and eaten cold. I remembered this late one night and became obsessed with finding out what a drawer full of porridge would actually look like. Now we all know!

Without understanding the culture we come from, we have no anchor for our imaginations. Recently I have become increasingly fascinated with my own conflicted relationship with my homeland. William McGonagall, Calvinism, a strong work ethic, a dour practical morality, Robert Burns, Celtic romanticism, tartan, shortbread and a harsh Border wind: these are some of the stories that have shaped me.

Kirsty Hall - My Glorious Cultural Heritage, detail

The drawers were collaged with Scottish literature and contained shortbread, a book of Robert Burns poetry, a Bible, a bottle of whisky and of course, the infamous porridge.

Kirsty Hall - My Glorious Cultural Heritage, detail

The ‘Jacobite’ text was made from shortbread and was probably my favourite drawer.

This remains one of the odder pieces I’ve made - I’m still not too sure how it relates to the rest of my work, although collaging the drawers was certainly obsessive. I find it a bit literal now and feel my work has moved on quite a bit from this. I think if I was ever to show it again, I’d take all the drawers out of the chest and just show them and I’d probably alter it quite a lot (I have absolutely no compunction about revisiting and remaking work).

And here’s the porridge making, which I enjoyed immensely and would happily do again.

I had masses of little bowls filled with various nuts, dried fruits, chocolate chips and spices, plus honey, maple syrup, sugar, rice milk and cream so people got their bowl of porridge and then added the things they wanted. It was wildly popular because it was a freezing cold night and many people came back for seconds and thirds so they could try out different combinations. It was a lot of fun and definitely helped the private view go with a bang. Actually, that night remains one of the best private views I’ve ever done because we had me doing porridge plus a fantastic performance piece by my friend Elly and then a live band later one. People ended up staying for hours and it was a real event. I always think it’s worth having things like this at private views, it makes them more memorable and exciting for people.

There are more images of this piece over on Flickr, click on any of the images in this post to get over there.

Ohh, I just discovered the Daily Poetics blog because they’d linked to The Diary Project. What a find! I love the clean pale aesthetics of the site and the high quality of the work they’re linking to and the use of quotes as post titles - there’s lots to fill up your eyes and mind with.

I particularly loved this wallpaper piece from Tracy Kendall.

Tracy Kendal - Fly On The Wall

Unzippable wallpaper - I love it! Her other handmade wallpapers are gorgeous as well. This is wallpaper very much as an installed artpiece, something I’ve noticed quite a bit of lately. Although of course, this is an old tradition, originally all wallpapers were handpainted or handprinted and it wasn’t unusual for them to be individually designed for rich clients.

This article about copyright has been causing some controversy over on WhipUp. Some of the comments got a little heated. The original poster is talking specifically about designer quilts but it’s an issue that I think all artists need to consider.

At what point does inspiration or homage becoming derivative copying? How much can you really control your work once it’s out in the public domain? Who owns ideas? How much copyright protection do you need or want? There are no easy answers to these questions and every artist needs to find their own peace with the issue but in an increasingly global and instant world, it’s not an issue that artists can ignore.

Copyright is something artists have a responsibility to educate themselves about. Do you know what the laws are in your country? Do you understand how to protect yourself if your work is shown abroad? Do you want to protect yourself using traditional copyright laws or are you more interested in things like Creative Commons? Or are you and your art operating beyond copyright altogether?

I don’t have any easy answers or advice for people on this one - I’m not even 100% sure what I think about the issue - but I wanted to flag it for discussion.

Little People - A Tiny Street Art Project is a blog documenting an art project by artist, Slinkachu. I love the subtitle of the blog, it so elegantly and succinctly sums up the project: “Little handpainted people, left in London to fend for themselves”.

Slinkachu - 20 Inches Under The Sea

I’ve mentioned my love of miniatures before on this blog and this art hits all my buttons - miniatures - check, slightly disturbing - check, dedicated obsessiveness - check.

I adore the fact that most people will pass these little tableaux by, totally unaware of the tiny dramas taking place beneath their feet. It reminds me of The Borrowers, a series of books that I passionately adored as a child: I was always captivated by the idea that other lives could be going on around us, almost completely hidden from view.

I particularly enjoy the random element of this project - the way the tiny people are obviously painstakingly made but then just abandoned to their fate. It reminds me of the way my brothers used to set up elaborate battle scenes with their plastic soldiers in our garden that would leave my Dad cursing when a forgotten one invariably wound up mangled in the lawnmower!

As someone always prone to anthropomorphising everything, I was usually pretty nice to my dolls (although my Sindy was always slutting it up with the Action Men in a jeep!) but I’ve heard surprising amounts of rather disturbing stories of doll torture. I’m always amused by people who think that childhood is a time for bunnies, pastels and sweetness and light - I always wonder if they’ve ever met any actual children! Of course there’s an innocence and sweetness to childhood, but there’s a darkness there as well and that darkness often seeps out in the way children mistreat their ‘little pretend people’ with casual or even gleeful cruelty.

Slinkachu - Cash Machine

Slinkachu - Spare Some Change

There’s clearly plenty of social commentary going on in this art too - this isn’t a cheerful world of little teapots and tiny plates of food but an urban world of litter, violence, random encounters with prostitutes, clueless tourists and homelessness. It reminds me of another of my favourite blogs - Overheard In New York is a blog that hilariously documents the more surreal aspects of living in a large city as revealed through randomly overheard conversations.

We will now have a small kitten interlude. Here’s the newest member of our family, we picked her up tonight.

We’ve named her Chiana (yes, I am a geek, why do you ask!) and I am madly in love. She’s sleeping right now so I can sneak off to use the internet but I can see that getting studio time is going to be a struggle for the next few days!

She’s 10 weeks old and a Bengal cross on her Dad’s side (hence the beautiful markings) and an absolute little sweetie. She’s a confident wee thing - she walked right into the cat box of her own accord, didn’t cry in the car and when we got in, she came straight out of the cat carrier and promptly made herself right at home. We’ve spent the evening bonding, she’s just been curled up on my lap asleep. Predictably, I have utterly lost my heart to her - so if I’m not around as much as usual in the next day or two, you’ll know that I’ve been sucked into a Kitten Wormhole.

The latest podcast over at Craftypod is about crafty overload, but it applies equally to any kind of creative overwhelm. As someone who suffers from ‘too-many-ideas-and-starting-too-much-and-not-getting-enough-finished’ and the resultant ‘oh-shit-oh-shit-my-head-is-going-to-explode’ on a regular basis, I was laughing and nodding all the way through. Total comedy of recognition, right down to using compulsive list-making as a solution!

One of my latest tricks for staying in control is to keep a card index of blank cards on my desk to write down my art ideas. That way, instead of things being written in lots of different notebooks, various scraps of paper or just jumbling around in my head, all my art ideas should theoretically end up in the same place - a nice, safe red box that I can close the damn lid on!* Of course, I have years of bits of paper and sketchbooks to go through to unearth all those lurking ideas that are still nibbling away at the edge of my consciousness, giving me insomnia and constant feelings of being overwhelmed but I’m sure that the theory is sound…

What are your tricks and tips for avoiding feeling overwhelmed?

* It’s only just occurred to me how amusing it is that the box is red. Actually, it was the only colour left in the shop but the symbolism does seem apt since it’s clearly dangerous in there.

I did a massive update over on The Diary Project at the weekend. It’s been getting harder and harder to find something to say about every individual drawing, so it sometimes it takes me a while to get the scans up there. I’ve got another six that I uploaded onto Flickr over the weekend that I need to write bits of blurb for.

It’s definitely getting harder to come up with new drawings too, I keep worrying that I’m repeating myself too much but fortunately I hit on a couple of new drawing techniques last night, so that should keep me inspired this week.

I’m going to try to get round to that second Diary Project update later today but right now, I’m heading over to Spike Island to sit in the Associate Space and do some research. I’ve been meaning to get over there and do some reading for ages, they’ve got a small but interesting-looking selection of art books. The thing I miss most about college is the lack of access to decent art books and magazines. I don’t have much of a budget for them (they’re so expensive) so I miss the college library like crazy. The local council library doesn’t have a particularly great art selection and although I can and do order stuff in, I miss the serendipity of random browsing. The little local college where I do my silversmithing course has an art library but it’s so small and after several years of studying there, I’ve read most of the interesting stuff. I’m looking forward to starting back there on Wednesday though because there’s bound to be a few new books and magazines that came in over the summer.

My book consumption slumped drastically over the summer. For some reason I just wasn’t feeling like reading (it happens occasionally, even to this confirmed bookworm!), so I could use a bit of a boost in that area.

John Dempcy - Field Day

John Dempcy’s luscious acrylic works really speak to me. I love the use of patterning and circles to create endless variations on a theme but most of all, I love his masterful use of colour - the way the colours bleed into each other, the subtle pale colours he uses as backgrounds, the way he uses colour to change the tempo of a piece. I’m not particularly great with colour*, it’s not one of my art skills but I can appreciate it in other people’s work. Not being a painter, I look at these works and just have no idea how they’re done technically but I love them.

Found on Dear Ada, a blog that I like a lot for its great mix of links.

* I say this but I’ve discovered over the years that I’m only ‘not great with colour’ compared to other artists, particularly painters. When I talk to non-artists about how they perceive colour, I usually discover that my colour sense is better than average. It’s all relative!

We Make Money Not Art is a blog that’s always worth a look, they have a lot of stuff about the intersection between art, design and new technology. As a keen knitter, I loved this story about a couple of students, Magdalena Kohler and Hanna Wiesener, who hacked a 70’s knitting machine so that it turns your voice into a secret binary design on a sweater.

Just say a message into a microphone and the frequency of your voice is analyzed by a computer and turned into binary code that the machine will interpret to control 24 servo-motors which will turn your words into knitted pattern. And hop! You can wear an individual voice message on a sweater. No one will understand the message, it will stay in your head. The pattern doesn’t just depend on the words but it varies also according to your modulation, whether you are excited or totally introverted.

Isn’t that neat!

My email is currently very unhappy. If you’ve tried getting hold of me that way this week, I’m not ignoring you, I just almost certainly haven’t received it. I can post out OK but I’m getting very little inbound mail despite knowing that there’s plenty mail out there (LJ, Wordpress and Flickr comments + tons of stuff from my Yahoo groups). Of course, the damn spam can still get through!

Goodness knows what our stupid email provider is playing at - my resident geekboy is trying to sort it out with them but in the meantime, if you need to get hold of me urgently you can try leaving comments on this post. I’ll be checking back here occasionally.

OK, if you’re not already blogging then hopefully I’ve convinced you with the previous article in the Artists Online Series that it’s something you can do. In the next couple of days, I’m also going to be doing a round-up of some of the comments about blogging that other artists have left me. If you’re an existing blogger who’d like to be included in that, then leave a comment telling me what you get out of blogging or how it’s helped your career.

If you’re new to the idea of blogging but roaring to get going already, then you might be wondering where to start. Well, basically you’ve got two main options - a blog that’s part of your website or a stand-alone blog.

Website Blogs

A dedicated blog with an attached website, ideally hosted at a snappy domain name (i.e your name.com or some variation on that theme) is a great option and obviously, the one I’m currently using.

The advantages are that your portfolio, CV and statement are all right there for people to see. Plus you’ve hopefully got that snappy, easily remembered site name. This can be quite an important issue - after less than three months, I can always remember the name of this site but not the Diary Project blog address, even though the later has been up since the start of the year. I can never remember the full address of my Livejournal blog either and I’ve had that for nearly four years! Admittedly I have a stinkingly bad memory but it’s certainly easier and quicker to say or write yourname.com than yourname.blogspot.com or yourname.wordpress.com.

Being on your own domain also means that you have ultimate control over your content - this may be a big issue if your art is controversial since the free blogging services tend to put limits on what you can publish on them, especially if there’s adult content.

The disadvantage is it’s not very instant. Unless you already have a website you’ll have to do a fair bit of work - even if you pay someone else to design the site you’ll still have to sort out all your photos, update your CV and your statement. If you go with designing it yourself you’ll have to do all that and the design and coding. Even with the best will in the world, in my experience, it takes months. Even if you do already have a website, designing and inserting a blog into it might involve some reshuffling.

It’s not free either, at the very least you’ll have to pay for a domain name and hosting and if you’re design-impaired like me, you’ll need to pay a designer too.

I do think a dedicated website with an inclusive blog is well worth doing. However, if it’s going to take you a little while then you might be better to start a free blog now rather than waiting for all your ducks to be in a row (because we all know how that duck thing goes!) Remember, you can always move your blog over to your dedicated website once you’ve finally got it up and running - people do it all the time.

Stand-alone Blogs

To set up a stand-alone blog, you’ll need to sign up with a blog hosting site. Some of these cost but these days there are lots of places where you can blog for free. I’d say the main ones are probably Blogger, Wordpress and Livejournal and I have experience with all three of them.

The Diary Project is hosted over at Blogger and I don’t have many complaints. It’s pretty stable with only the occasional glitch - I know it had big problems with crashing in the past but I’ve not seen many in my 8 months over there. The software’s not too bad, although I have had problems with certain parts like inserting code into the sidebar. The clickthrough rate from people finding me by hitting the ‘next blog’ button in Blogger also seems to be quite high - I get a surprising number of visitors to the Diary Project that way. If you go with Blogger, make sure you read this article about improving your visitor numbers.

Wordpress can be used to run a dedicated domain, including a blog, or you can set up a free blog over on Wordpress itself. This whole site is run on Wordpress and while I’m not a software expert by any stretch of the imagination, I like their software a lot. It’s free, open source, upgraded fairly often, mostly intuitive and easy to use and the help forums seem quite decent although I haven’t needed to use them much. Personally I also prefer the Wordpress interface to the Blogger one, it seems slicker and plugins definitely work better.

I’ve had a blog on Livejournal for nearly four years and I love it over there. That said, I wouldn’t recommend Livejournal as a place to host your primary blog if your aim is to promote your art career. It’s a very enclosed community so it can be hard to reach a wider audience from there, plus Livejournal is not taken seriously by the rest of the blogging community - something to do with ‘drama’ and ‘weirdos’ apparently! While I’ve loved being a member of Livejournal, I’ve definitely reached far more people here in three months than I did in three years on Livejournal (although to be fair, I wasn’t really trying to get a big audience over on LJ). However, Livejournal and similar sites who use the Livejournal code, like InsaneJournal and GreatestJournal, can be fantastic for building communities and I’ll be addressing this in later articles on social networking.

You could also check out Tumblr to make a tumblelog, which is a bit like blogging for people who’re too lazy to blog! Tumblr describe them thus, “If blogs are journals, tumblelogs are scrapbooks.” I’ve given it a short go and found it a bit like eating junk food - kind of addictive but ultimately unsatisfying. I don’t like the aesthetics, which are deliberately basic - to the extent that posts blur into each other far too much for my taste. But that’s just my personal opinion, tumblelogs do work for some people and it really depends on your style of blogging and what you’re trying to get out of it.

Read the various FAQ over at the blogging sites, do some research and decide which place suits you best.

Decide On Your Focus

Next, take some time to decide why you want to blog and what you want to get out of it. There are lots of different kinds of blogs and reasons for blogging and you may well find it easier to find your writing voice if you’re clear in your intent from the beginning. Read my article on the different forms of art blogging if you’re still unsure what your approach should be. You can also just dive right in and at some point, you’re going to have to do exactly that, but taking some time to set out some goals first can be helpful as long as it doesn’t become an excuse not to start (watch out for those damn ducks again!)

Get Educated

OK, so you’ve chosen your platform and decided on your focus. What next? Well, you should probably read the Wikipedia article on blogs to get an idea of some of the background issues in blogging, particularly defamation and copyright issues. There’s a ton of stuff that you can read on blogging - after nearly four years as a blogger, I’m still learning new stuff every day - but that’s a good place to start if you’re pretty new to the concept.

Choose a Blog Address

Now you need to chose a name and get your blog set up. I’d advise using your professional name in your blog address, where possible. If you’ve got a common name, someone else might already have nabbed it but it’s a good idea to use it if you can, for the following reasons:

• Even the most addled of us can usually remember and spell our own names, which is useful when you’re telling people where you blog!
• Blogging under your professional name will increase your Google ranking and make it easier for people to find you.

Choose a Blog Title

Now choose a snappy title for your blog. You might want something that relates to your art practice or, if you’re like me, something that makes you laugh. Incidentally, my original title for this blog - “Look At Me, I’m Fabulous” - is still up for grabs, feel free to use it if you want!

Your blog name can include your own professional name but it doesn’t need to unless your blog address doesn’t. This site rates highly in Google searches for my name because although the blog is called Up All Night Again, the actual blog address contains my full professional name. However, over at The Diary Project, my name isn’t in the blog address and I had to change the blog title to Kirsty Hall - The Diary Project because it wasn’t registering well in Google. When I added my name to the title, the site’s Google ranking improved drastically.

Mind you, this advice is only relevant if your blog is intended to be a professional one: if you’re setting up a blog about your interest in clown porn, then you’ll probably want to go for a completely anonymous title and blog address! Well, unless clown porn is a relevant part of your art practice, of course…

Setting Up Your Blog

If you’re blogging from your own website you may want your blog design to match or echo the rest of your site design, although you can go for a different look if you want. if you’re setting up a stand-alone blog, most blogging sites have a range of predesigned templates that you can use. In my experience, you can fiddle around happily for hours until you find one that you like and I’d advise you to do so. If you’re a computer expert with good graphics skills, you can also design your own completely from scratch.

You should try to find a template that you like but which will be accessible to other readers i.e easy to read, especially for visitors who might have visual impairments. Don’t go for anything too cluttered and if you’re planning on posting regular photos of your own work or that of other artists, then I’d strongly advise against background wallpaper. Take a look at other blogs and see what elements you like or dislike in their designs and use that to inform your own choices. If in doubt, err on the side of minimalism and readability.

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Great, your blog should now be up and operational. Now you just need to close your eyes, take a deep breath and start posting… Good luck and remember to have fun with it.

If you’ve recently set up a new blog and want me to go over and have a look, I’m happy to do so. Just leave me a comment - for some reason, I’m not receiving all my email this week, so comments are a better way to get in touch right now.

I’ve been involved with The Here Shop and Gallery in Bristol for several years now. Until the spring of this year, I was on the gallery committee and did a fair bit of curating over there but I’m taking a break from it at the moment to concentrate on my own work. It’s a fantastic place - the shop part is full of funky crafts, art, magazines, independent music and small press books, while the gallery shows monthly exhibitions of cutting-edge, emerging artists. And despite being entirely run by volunteers, it’s survived for nearly 4 years without any significant public funding (we’ve had the odd little drop but mostly the shop funds the gallery). It’s unique in Bristol and deserves a much higher profile than it currently has.

This month the gallery is showing Mark Pawson. I went to the private view last night and had a fun time hanging out with folk I hadn’t seen much lately, including Alys, Camilla and Peskimo.

The show is good with lots of different stuff to see but all of it with a clear and identifiable ‘Mark Pawson’ look. I like his ‘low tech’ ethos, particularly in relation to printing and the emphasis on the handmade.

Mark Pawson - Sugar Packets, originally uploaded by here shop and gallery.

I loved these little sugar packets all sewn together like a patchwork pattern.

If you’re in or near Bristol, you should definitely try to get along to see this one but if you’re a bit further afield, you can experience the exhibition virtually on the gallery Flickr page.

If you’re interested in showing at the Here Gallery, take a look at the previous exhibitions page and the submission guidelines.

Well, it’s time to get back to the Artists Online Series - today I’m going to be exploring the different types of art blogging.

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One of the golden rules of blogging is that ‘content is king’. All the articles about improving your readership numbers will tell you to ‘write great content’ and ‘post regularly’. But how do you do that? Where to start? It can all seem a little daunting at first.

Fortunately, there are lots of different techniques for art blogging and it’s probable that you can find at least one that suits you. Here are a few different kinds to think about:

The Blog As Art Project

This form can be a great way to stand out from the crowd. My own Diary Project is an example of this but there are plenty of other artists using blogging to create art projects. Some notable examples are The Textile Files, PostSecret and Skull-A-Day.

I’ve noticed that art project blogs usually have a set of defined rules, however, this isn’t set in stone and blogging is a form that lends itself to plenty of creative interpretation. Blogged art projects can be a one person affair or a collaborative or communal project. If you’ve got a great idea for an art project, why not take a moment to consider whether blogging could enhance it. Remember that blogging can often bring you a larger and more diverse audience than a gallery show.

The No-Writing Blog

This is an excellent way to blog if you’re not confident with writing or don’t have a lot of time to write in-depth stuff. Because art is a visual medium, you can put together a great blog simply by linking to other people’s work. Do make sure that you have images of their work though, rather than just a text link - you’ll have a far more interesting blog that way.

Maditi Links is a good example of this form, she doesn’t write about the work at all, just posts an image and a link. Her blog is a feast for the eyes and I visit regularly for inspiration and to find interesting artists for my own blog.

If you want to use this technique, make sure you host images on your own site rather than stealing bandwidth and don’t lift any images if the artist has stated that people shouldn’t do so. If in doubt, simply ask the artist. Always give full credit to the artist and link back to their site. If you want to include a little bit of text, you can usually pick up a description from the artists’ site (be clear that you’re quoting them) or write a brief piece about why you like the work.

There are plenty of places to find artists to blog about - Flickr, other art blogs, other artists you already know, general search sites like StumbleUpon! or dedicated art sites like Saatchi Online or AXIS.

Linking to lots of other artists in this way will often improve your traffic since the artists in question usually come over to your blog to check you out. Don’t be cynical though, only link to people whose work you genuinely like, rather than people you think might be useful to you.

The Process Blog

Blogging as a way of recording artistic process is a popular choice amongst artist bloggers. It can be helpful for artists because it creates a journal-type record of their practice but readers like it too because it gives them an insight into how an artist creates and the way a piece develops - warts and all! It’s a way of unlocking the studio door and that’s always appealed to people. If you can talk about your work until the cows come home (erhm, guilty as charged, officer!) and are comfortable showing unfinished work, then you’ll probably feel quite at home with this technique.

I don’t have any numbers to back this up but I suspect that this could also be a good way to drum up sales because allowing people to see the process might get them emotionally attached to a piece.

Blogging images of your own work also exposes more people to your work - I’ve found that a large proportion of people who read my blog don’t visit my galleries. Posting images of my work on a fairly regular basis means that those people see at least some of my work. Blogging about your own work also allows you to go into greater depth about subject matter or technique than might be appropriate in the portfolio part of your site. If you’re not comfortable showing unfinished work, then just show finished pieces and talk about them instead.

The Tutorial Blog

If you’re a frustrated teacher then this could be the blogging technique for you!

A step-by-step guide to a technique, especially when accompanied by clear informative pictures, is a great way to draw people to your site. Plus, there are plenty of places where you can promote tutorials - sites like Whip Up and Craftster are always on the look-out for them and I’m sure there are plenty of other sites that would happily link to them. If you can’t find an existing place to promote them, then why not set up your own Squidoo? Squidoo isn’t something I’ve got into yet but I know a lot of people find it a useful concept: Katherine from Making A Mark uses it to provide a handy round up of art resources and a search for ‘art’ on Squidoo gives nearly a thousand results, so there are clearly plenty of people interested in art who are using it.

If you want to try this form, you’ll need to have reasonable photography skills and be good at writing out projects or techniques in easy to understand steps.

The Article Based Blog

A similar approach to the tutorial blog but with more words and less pictures. Good if you’re confident with writing and have plenty to say on a subject. This really works for visitor numbers - the articles I’ve written for my Artists Online Series have brought a large number of people to this site. Watch out though, this kind of writing is time-consuming and you may want to balance it out with some of the other forms, both for your own convenience and so your readers aren’t drowning in words.

The Subject Blog

If you want a very defined blog, then blogging about a single subject can be the way to go. The Carrotbox is a blog about rings and nothing but rings. You might think it would get boring but it’s actually a constant source of delight and a brilliantly condensed way to learn more about contemporary jewellery because there’s lots of images and the work chosen is so diverse. The downside to this type of blog is that you may only attract the people who’re already interested in your niche subject.

The News Blog

A round up of news stories in the art world is a fairly easy way to provide regular, topical content. You can provide stories without comment as The Arts Journal site does or add your own opinions, like The Arts News Blog does. If you’re going to focus on this form you’ll need to have the time to keep up with current art stories and you should also have a few research and journalistic skills.

The Opinion Blog

Aren’t artists always a bit opinionated? The ones I know certainly are, myself included! If you’re a critic at heart, love to analyse things and don’t mind sticking your neck out, then you’ll probably enjoy this form of blogging. Just remember that being overly critical might not win you too many friends and being overtly nasty can look very unprofessional.

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Of course, your blogging might cover many or all of these forms, there’s no rule that says you can only do one and I use a combination on this blog. However, if you mostly blog in one way, why not try shaking things up a little by trying a different form? You might gain a new readership and surprise yourself by being good at something you didn’t know you could do.

Ooh, ooh a present!

Huge thanks to Mandy from Feltbug for very kindly nominating me for an Inspirational Blogger Award. I am hugely touched and very flattered to have won something like this, particularly since this is such a new blog.

I now have to nominate five other people and it was a tough choice, I can tell you.

Cally Creates gets a Courageous Blogger Award. Her blog is consistently inspiring and interesting - she blogs better than a great many bloggers who aren’t struggling with a chronic illness.

Yarnstorm gets an Inspirational Blogger Award. I’ve been reading her blog for years and she always makes me drool with her ’slice of life’ writing and luscious photos.

Solveigh Goett from The Textile Files gets a Creative Blogger Award for her innovative use of blogging to create an online art project.

Susie Bright gets a Courageous Blogger Award for being a wondrous funky chick who tells it like it is - I love her bravery in tackling taboo sexual subjects that lots of other bloggers wouldn’t touch with a bargepole!

Kim Carney over at Something to Say gets an Inspirational Blogger Award for her inspiring combination of gorgeous photos and masses of delicious links.

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The Awards come originally from Writers Review, an interesting site that I’m pleased to have discovered.

Katherine, over at Making A Mark (an art blog you should all be reading - she has masses of great information), has a very informative article about using labels in Blogger. Despite hosting The Diary Project for 8 months over on Blogger, I’d honestly never noticed the little labels box before Katherine pointed it out. I’m a bit rubbish at using tags - I always forget them over in Livejournal and I only use them in Flickr because they make them so very obvious - but I can certainly see how useful they are: not only can they improve your visibility but they can also make it a lot easier for you to search for older posts that you might want to link back to.

So I’ve just mass edited the Diary Project posts to include the labels ‘Diary Project’, envelope, drawing and art. Not very helpful in terms of separating them out but it might improve the project’s visibility in Google and on Technorati. I’ll go and look at the posts individually when I have the time to see if there are more individual categories that I could add. If you subscribe to the Diary Project and it republishes all the posts because of this, then I apologise.

Well, the wedding was delightful and we had a lovely weekend but I’m very glad to be home and picking up the reins of my life again: the wedding has dominated the last couple of weeks and I’m keen to get back to my own work. I did hand out lots of little Moo cards though, so many in fact, that I’ll need to do another order soon. I’d been planning on buying a box this month anyway because I wanted some to promote this site. Just a