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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.

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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
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 - Cash Machine

Slinkachu - Spare Some Change
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.

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

Kirsty Hall - Chiana aged 10 weeks old, photo of kitten

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.

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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.

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Kirsty Hall - art, mail art, Diary Project 242

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.

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John Dempcy - Field Day
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!

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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!

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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.

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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.

Get more help
If you'd like more information about building your online presence, check out the free resources section.

I am also available for online consulting if you need one-on-one help.


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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.