Tidbits

Looking for funding for your creative project? Here's how to use Kickstarter to successfully raise money for a creative project and now there's an iPhone app for Kickstarter. 

Did you know that you can submit your self portrait to Artists Self Portraits in the smartphone era? 

There can be beauty in lost, abandoned buildings and places. A vintage object carries its story on its sleeve. The beauty of broken Macs: photos of abandoned Apple kit found by explorers. 

Quotes can be so inspiring, can't they? Illustrator Lisa Congdon has designed a  photography journal full of  inspiring quotes from the masters of photography. 

It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see. 
Henry David Thoreau

The Color of Love

“In our life there is a single color, as on an artist's palette, which provides the meaning of life and art. It is the color of love.” Marc Chagall

How beautiful and inspiring, and what a perfect quote for the month of February, the host of Valentine's Day!

I just put together this desktop wallpaper with the quote set on a cherry red background. Designed for iPhone, iPod and iPad. 

It's going to be the club perk that's delivered with the February issue of the Marmalade Monthly, that you get (for free) as a member of Club Marmalade Moon. 

“In our life there is a single color, as on an artist's palette, which provides the meaning of life and art. It is the color of love.” Marc Chagall

The Creative Mind

Art is when you hear a knocking from your soul — and you answer. 

When I think about using your iPhone to harness your creativity, this quote comes to mind: 

Art is when you hear a knocking from your soul — and you answer. 
~ Terri Guillemets

Because your smartphone is no longer a phone with a camera, it's become a camera that you also can take regular calls with. You're using your mobile phone to take calls from your soul, and expressing them creatively. 

You're using your iPhone as a tiny, portable studio that fits in your pocket or handbag and that doesn't create a mess to clean up when you've finished. Exploring a new kind of contemporary art form, where you can express yourself creatively as you move through your day. 

I felt so inspired by this quote, that I made a desktop wallpaper as a club perk that comes with the December issue of the Marmalade Monthly, that you get (for free) as a member of Club Marmalade Moon. It's accompanied by four minimalist wallpapers in solid colours. Adapted for iPhone, iPod and iPad. 

Tidbits

I was interviewed by Diane Gilleland of CraftyPod, in an Image-Only Interview! Such a fun idea! Check it out! 

"Against simplicity/ for complexity . . . against the collective/ for the individual.” Salvador Dalí’s famous vision and credo My Struggle. 

“Nothing is mysterious, no human relation. Except love.” Susan Sontag on love. 

iPhone Photography Tutorial – Vintage & Ageing Photo Effects (for beginners)

Instagram release a new filter, Willow. "A monochrome filter with subtle purple tones and a translucent glowing white border. This filter works well on portraits, still life and architecture photographs with contrast."

The social media landscape shifts again: Google+ Is Growing at Facebook Speed

A Shout Out for my courses over at Seek Your Course: Getting Started with iPhoneography

Turn your Instagram photos into a calendar that reveals a new photo each day. Tear off your photos one-by-one, use them as notecards, put them on your walls or give them away as gifts. Printstagram. 

DIY: Make Photo Gift Tags That’ll Make Even Santa Jealous

This week you can win a free spot in my ecourse Getting Started with iPhoneography. Find out more about developing everyday magic and enter the giveaway at oh my! handmade goodness. This giveaway closes December 19th at midnight EST

Danielle's Creative Process

Before and after. Sophisticated doodle in different stages of the creative process. By artist Danielle Ambrose of Artistic Expressions.

"Your lessons happily reminded me of how important it is to doodle. I do a lot with permanent markers and lines and shapes are a huge factor in the success of a drawing. It was a great way for me to step back, practice, and refine my skills using an entirely different approach than I had tried before."

Hope is asking for rain. Faith is taking an umbrella.

iPhoneography: Danielle's creative doodle

iPhone photo: adding more patterns

iPhone photo: Adding more detail. 

Danielle's doodle goes wild

"Hope is asking for rain. Faith is taking an umbrella."

iPhone photo: Danielle's creative tools

Amy's Creative Doodle

Before and after. Creative doodle by Amy. Jeweler of AG Ambroult elemental designs.

"I just want to say that I am really enjoying your creative jump start course. It's the "delivered in tiny pieces" part of it that makes it so do-able."

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.

J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

Think Different

Apple Keynote

In memory of Steve Jobs (1955 – 2011).  Visionary American computer entrepreneur and inventor with a passion for simplicity, ease, elegance, beauty and a human interface.

Steve Jobs turned personal computers from brown boxes into user friendly, minimalist, seductive devices and mobile phones into sparkling digital jewlry. You leave us with a legacy to inspire and think different. To create, invent and reinvent. 

7-year old girl: "He made computers that when you touched the screen, they touched you back." 

Steve Job's Stanford Commencement Speech 2005 where he talks about following his intuition, joy and curiosity. Being poor, getting fired from Apple in 1985, about life & death.

Think Different

"Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes.

The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them.

About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They invent. They imagine. They heal. They explore. They create. They inspire. They push the human race forward.

Maybe they have to be crazy.

How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art? Or sit in silence and hear a song that’s never been written? Or gaze at a red planet and see a laboratory on wheels?

We make tools for these kinds of people.

While some see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do."

"Think Different" is an advertising slogan created for Apple Computer in 1997.

Ink Drawings

I've been experimenting with an ink pen during my life drawing project. It makes me think of the calligraphy master who meditates for an hour before making a brush stroke. Obviously, I'm not claiming to be anywhere close to a calligraphy master, but I do find myself working at a different rhythm, pausing, and then putting down my brush stroke. Ink is so definite.

I made a series of life drawings defining shapes as either white or black. Finding a quality of mystery emerge in the drawings when resisting the temptation to add outlines or boundaries. Which leads me to a quote about art and mystery:

The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.
Francis Bacon

Life drawing with ink

Life Drawing With Ink