The home page for Valerie Fraser, Abstract Artist in Oil, brings up one of her paintings but I've rigged it to make it a slide show. The trouble with that is people hate slide shows ... unless they actually look for one. But, any way you spank the monkey he's still in a slide show (tip: skip the monkey slide show).
My thinking now is the home page should be static and totally In.Your.Face as you know how she paints. This is not wallflower stuff. Assume there is one piece for the home page, which should it be. If it's my own pick then it's VF13 with the flamingos but I don't think I should make the selection. I can, I just don't think I should. Maybe think some artist stuff also that could be presented on the page. I don't know what that would be as I whack things to make art ... hmmm ... there is some similarity to some of Valerie's pieces (laughs).
The suggestion was to go from the Inventory of Works page up to a full-screen pic when someone clicks a name. The viewer should then be able to go forward or backward through the inventory without going back to the Inventory list ... unless that's what the viewer wants. This take a bit of puzzlement as one of the ridiculous things about the Web is that it's difficult to send information between pages. For all the linkage they have about the world, they don't talk to each other worth a damn. When you see the insane URLs you get for some Web sites, that's why. That page needs the information and it's the only way to get it there.
That sliding full-screen is an intriguing puzzle and if anyone learns anything from this then it should probably be never ever pay me by the hour. This stuff is like heroin except for, well, dying as you will keep doing it and doing it because the thing starts to unfold and it's like opening the gates of fookin' software heaven, man ... and you can put whatever the hell you want in there. No, it doesn't go past me at all that this is strongly sexual. Freud had it right. No need to repeat anything. Well, unless it's sexual.
School is where they teach you the brushes and out here we can teach some knocks. You'll see artists all over Facebook and they're just starving the hell out of the place. Woe, woe, how will I survive. Pro tip on that, Annie Oakley: get the fuck off Facebook and work.
From what I see of relatives, they have it down fairly well as they get in and get out. If you start chatting on Facebook, your day is gone and you won't get one damn thing done. I've done it multiple times as I'm one hell of a time-wasting chatter but it's still fookin' wasting time.
So the artist has to survive and the Silas recommendation is for the full slut workup with everything from bumper stickers, ash trays, posters, t-shirts, and postcards. Every single one of them is advertising for the true work which only one person can have. That piece is real so I don't see any real slutting, this is just commercializing the brand. Maybe that's bad ... but so is starving. Maybe I'm a bit sanctimonious but ... fark ... I've starved plenty. I haven't liked it much.
From my experience with CafePress, I know they turn out good products. They're expensive but they last and they're well-made. So long as you're not trying to be a millionaire it should be reasonably-foreseeable to bring a steady income from these products. That income makes for more paints makes for more art and it all goes around. Everything is gravy if someone buys the original piece during the course of the cycle.
Something I may not have made clear is that everything you put together on CafePress can be fronted on a Store on the Valerie Fraser site. That's why I keep suggesting this possibility. Yes, they do take a big piece but, man, they make it so fookin' easy.
They 'take a big piece' in terms of the price of the products. Sure can add 10%, 20% or whatever you like to that but, in so doing, the product becomes so expensive that no-one but fanboys will buy it. I suggest keeping the percentage low as it's to your very large advantage to turn out lots of them.
I write this in some depth as any artist may benefit from it. That others choose to do exactly the same thing doesn't matter at all as there is plenty of manna to go around. Think worldwide.
Yah, I do say so myself but the German translation was a good trick. A 'good trick' is an Oscar in programming world. If a manager comes up and says something was outstanding, systems programmers will look back and think only, man, you just don't get it. So I'm awarding myself a good trick on that one. Hey, no-one else here.
I haven't got the authentication from Cat on the quality of the translation. I think it's adequate to not so bad. Any suggestions for improvements will be gladly received, most particularly from Valerie as she has studied German.
I have no significant skill in other languages but translations are welcome and would be most appreciated. I'm most interested in French, Russian, and Italian ... in no particular order.
I would be willing to try Japanese and Chinese implementations but it would be one technicolor bitch trying to work with the character sets. I'm willing to try but that would be hard.
There is one difficulty in that I'm using a lot of PHP code rather than straight HTML as basic Web pages use. I've been programming for well long enough to know that clever code is the worst so I write it so any competent programmer should be able to read it. Bad code is anything someone else could not modify so I write with that in mind.
Apart from the above, the site looks largely built-out now. All it needs is more stuff and that will go online as it arrives.
My thinking now is the home page should be static and totally In.Your.Face as you know how she paints. This is not wallflower stuff. Assume there is one piece for the home page, which should it be. If it's my own pick then it's VF13 with the flamingos but I don't think I should make the selection. I can, I just don't think I should. Maybe think some artist stuff also that could be presented on the page. I don't know what that would be as I whack things to make art ... hmmm ... there is some similarity to some of Valerie's pieces (laughs).
The suggestion was to go from the Inventory of Works page up to a full-screen pic when someone clicks a name. The viewer should then be able to go forward or backward through the inventory without going back to the Inventory list ... unless that's what the viewer wants. This take a bit of puzzlement as one of the ridiculous things about the Web is that it's difficult to send information between pages. For all the linkage they have about the world, they don't talk to each other worth a damn. When you see the insane URLs you get for some Web sites, that's why. That page needs the information and it's the only way to get it there.
That sliding full-screen is an intriguing puzzle and if anyone learns anything from this then it should probably be never ever pay me by the hour. This stuff is like heroin except for, well, dying as you will keep doing it and doing it because the thing starts to unfold and it's like opening the gates of fookin' software heaven, man ... and you can put whatever the hell you want in there. No, it doesn't go past me at all that this is strongly sexual. Freud had it right. No need to repeat anything. Well, unless it's sexual.
School is where they teach you the brushes and out here we can teach some knocks. You'll see artists all over Facebook and they're just starving the hell out of the place. Woe, woe, how will I survive. Pro tip on that, Annie Oakley: get the fuck off Facebook and work.
From what I see of relatives, they have it down fairly well as they get in and get out. If you start chatting on Facebook, your day is gone and you won't get one damn thing done. I've done it multiple times as I'm one hell of a time-wasting chatter but it's still fookin' wasting time.
So the artist has to survive and the Silas recommendation is for the full slut workup with everything from bumper stickers, ash trays, posters, t-shirts, and postcards. Every single one of them is advertising for the true work which only one person can have. That piece is real so I don't see any real slutting, this is just commercializing the brand. Maybe that's bad ... but so is starving. Maybe I'm a bit sanctimonious but ... fark ... I've starved plenty. I haven't liked it much.
From my experience with CafePress, I know they turn out good products. They're expensive but they last and they're well-made. So long as you're not trying to be a millionaire it should be reasonably-foreseeable to bring a steady income from these products. That income makes for more paints makes for more art and it all goes around. Everything is gravy if someone buys the original piece during the course of the cycle.
Something I may not have made clear is that everything you put together on CafePress can be fronted on a Store on the Valerie Fraser site. That's why I keep suggesting this possibility. Yes, they do take a big piece but, man, they make it so fookin' easy.
They 'take a big piece' in terms of the price of the products. Sure can add 10%, 20% or whatever you like to that but, in so doing, the product becomes so expensive that no-one but fanboys will buy it. I suggest keeping the percentage low as it's to your very large advantage to turn out lots of them.
I write this in some depth as any artist may benefit from it. That others choose to do exactly the same thing doesn't matter at all as there is plenty of manna to go around. Think worldwide.
Yah, I do say so myself but the German translation was a good trick. A 'good trick' is an Oscar in programming world. If a manager comes up and says something was outstanding, systems programmers will look back and think only, man, you just don't get it. So I'm awarding myself a good trick on that one. Hey, no-one else here.
I haven't got the authentication from Cat on the quality of the translation. I think it's adequate to not so bad. Any suggestions for improvements will be gladly received, most particularly from Valerie as she has studied German.
I have no significant skill in other languages but translations are welcome and would be most appreciated. I'm most interested in French, Russian, and Italian ... in no particular order.
I would be willing to try Japanese and Chinese implementations but it would be one technicolor bitch trying to work with the character sets. I'm willing to try but that would be hard.
There is one difficulty in that I'm using a lot of PHP code rather than straight HTML as basic Web pages use. I've been programming for well long enough to know that clever code is the worst so I write it so any competent programmer should be able to read it. Bad code is anything someone else could not modify so I write with that in mind.
Apart from the above, the site looks largely built-out now. All it needs is more stuff and that will go online as it arrives.
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