New tools: Behance's Prosite

I just wanted to mention this new opportunity for those of you that are code impaired but want to get as much of your work “out there” in an easy to use, networked, product. As you know, I use Squarespace for this blog which suits my needs well. No need to know code. Easy to use. Back up systems. Nice gallery features etc.

I have been placing my work in other visual networking areas with my favorite being Behance. Behance’s Gallery organizes your project work in a simple to use, plain field to showcase the art and not someone else’s graphic design. Now Behance has taken it a step further by offering their Prosite which repurposes these portfolio and links these projects to LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, along with offering buttons for iPhone and a “favicon” for the URL at the top. For $99. a year, it is easy to use and has great reach with relatively low input. Take a look. I plan on a more graceful header when I have time. However, the simple template is not obnoxious. Take a look>>

Monday update

Chequered Bunny, Q. Cassetti, 2011, pen and ink, colored in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop CS5Monday. Things have changed. We have two kids in the house with a summer guest in the offing. Today is Rob’s birthday! We will hopefully have dinner out at our nice restaurant a block from here. There is an awards ceremony we need to attend…so maybe a late dinner.

We had a nice evening with all sorts of “Facebook Stalking” (Alex’s phrase) with the review of all the prom pictures (which is almost as much fun as the prom)—the dresses, the hairdos, the white dinner jackets etc. Kitty and our friend Thea were very consumed by looking at all these pictures—sort of a yearbook of some sort. Shoes and hairdos took the lead insofar as conversation. 

Interesting. Behance Network, a free, social networking page for visual people is a terrific resource to share (and get interesting feedback) where you can post projects and follow others. I have gotten some interesting leads on work from folks that have seen my work on Behance, so I cannot say enough about it. Also, Behance and LinkedIn, have an app. that allows you to post Behance projects (known as portfolios) to LinkedIn as soon as its posted. So, that is a nice extra to make your content get out there, easily. Now they are doing a Beta on easy up personal websites that parse the same projects/portfolios to a central page with a series of simple but really nice skins to show your work. One has choices in background, background color, font selections etc. This is something I may look into because of the reach, simplicity and to better understand what these two social networking sites can do with/for each other.

Wow. Look at this! You can flow the Behance stuff to your Facebook page! I need to try this out! I guess it pays to wander a bit on Monday morning! You never know what you will find! From the Behance Blog>>

Beautiful

Work beckons. There are a bunch of little projects gathering around my ankles…and should get them moving.

It is so so great that it is cooler and raining as it is changing the high pollen content here. Everything has been coated with chartreuse pollen from the walks to the cars, to even our furniture inside as it wafts in through the screens and windows. Shady is snoring.

Quiet Day

Rabbit Run, Q. Cassetti, 2010, pen and ink/ digitalI am trying out new things with this illustrator coloring of a reverse out of these pen and ink drawings. I have an egg started with another planned for tonight's Olympic watching. I like what's happening...and need to look more at the silhouette portraits and landscapes that are out there in cyberworld. I have had some really lovely insights from friends through Facebook and here on this page. My friends really seem to have responded to yesterday's "Quiet Night" by putting themselves in the picture or themselves as woodland animals in the scene. I do not know there this is going...but its happy making--for me, and comfort for my friends and viewers. Also, I like the back and forth between hands, photoshop and illustrator, and illustration and photoshop back again. I am showing you two looksees of the color... I think I prefer the one on the left-- seems brighter, snappier. Plus, I am trying to use the 80/20 per my mentor/ Murray Tinkelman re color and the balance of the image. Yesterday's was more successful I think-- but we are rolling and see what happens.

Made a big boule yesterday afternoon. Its great to be able to make bread--particularly this King Arthur Pain Levain, as its one big mix and then a series of risings and foldings which takes no me time, just sitting time. i discovered I was not allowing my poor boules to rise in a warm enough place. So, yesterday I fired up the Fridgidaire ( my 1940 electric stove that came with the house complete with the "Thermonizer") and had a nice hot top to allow real like rising. And dang, it did. The loaf turned out well along with the requisite texture in the bread along with holes(!) --- And, it was delicious. R. said it was equal to Le Pain Quotidien bread we had in NYC. There's a huge complement! So, the bread journey continues. I am going to keep doing this one recipe until I really understand it, and nail it. The home team continues to eat it...and I can cut the big boule into two pieces to take to the neighbors--so we all benefit. Only trouble is that I broke my pizza stone... and need to order a new one. My brother sent me a nice link that will be perfect. Breadtopia carries that same stone.

Alex has a track meet tomorrow with hopes that we shop for a suit on Saturday. Kitty is charged about our visit to Hampshire soon. School play practices abound.

grey Monday.

Sunday was quiet. Kitty stayed home from skiing and collaged and drank tea. Rob cleaned out cabinets in his pursuit of a more orderly kitchen as well as organizing furniture to make the living room more homey. Mandy was in and out. Bruce left us with hope to join us in a month or so. Alex skiied to his delight in the terraine park at Greek Peak--testing his new skiis and seeing if he could do some tricks. I made a chocolate cake, a pan of rolls, a leg of lamb, a pot of soup (leftovers reconfigured), a bread pudding with the left over cinammon buns, a tuna noodle casserole (from the reorganization of the cans courtesy of R) and a mac and cheese for later this week. It was cooking central. The three pots, bread hooks and paddles on the mixer were heavily pressed into action.

The snow has melted and we have a dreary day that would be nice in April (as Kitty said this morning)--but its cold weather time which seems so wrong. The water in Rabbit Run is churned up and very high this morning. I bet Taughannock Falls is raging.

I am still enchanted by these black and white silhouette images. I am going to let this horse run for a while and then pull back and edit out 4-6 pieces to color and see where that goes.

Speaking of color, Steve R. on Facebook, tuned me into this wonderful too that interfaces with Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop. This tool is called Kuler, a color picking tool that you can use to create your own palettes, or start with someone elses--and once they are finished you can save down to your programs on the desktop. This will give me a chance to really create strong palettes prior to coloration versus my go to now...which is plinked and planked an plunked around taking a lot of time just to get to thes starting place. So, I am psyched to try this out...and join that coloration to that of Live Paint (a terrific function that Illustration has as part of it's collection of tools that allow quick recoloration and selections). We will see...but good stuff on the horizon.

whirly

Feeling busy and stale. Sad. Might be that I am a bit housebound...but the work is frustrating and fast...where a more sophisticated approach isnt understood (more color is better and please fill up all the white space...). But I am feeling stale and inept with illustration (I have no idea...but my confidence is in the crapper. Its been only 3 days of just us...so I need to give it time... and we are expecting an impromptu guest tomorrow night. I will not have a chance to prep the room, make up the bed in advance...Rob is in two all day meetings with dinner tonight. The truck is still broken, so I am situated at the Camp House with nothing to drive. Enough kvetching...? Sorry.

I am using the new things I learned with Jean and Nancy (brush making, live paint, live trace, "average" points) and I am surprisingly making some productivity strides. Additionally, I am reading two books on illustrator (one paper book, another on my kindle and picking up all sorts of other new stuff along with the power user stuff (like the minus sign is the minus points key)...

Whitney Sherman, Chair of the Illustration Dept. at MICA (Maryland Institute College of Art) broadly asked for names of books/etc. for the History of Illustration she is teaching this fall. However...good things flowed from this call for entries--this marvelous, eccentric, smart and illuminating blog surfaced, "A Journey Round My Skull" captioned as ""Unhealthy book fetishism from a reader, collector, and amateur historian of forgotten literature." Recent obsessions: illustration and graphic design." Will, the author surfaces interesting and new people everyday along with smart mini "bloglets" on illustrators, ideas (like beards)--a magic place where Will's imagination captures ours and we soar together.

Take a look. Click through the placeholder pictures on the right. Interesting and a big time consumer.

Time to take Kitty out for a sandwich!

another find

Have you ever had the problem sending a web address to someone and its huge and gets all bolluxed up, broken, unfunctional? If so: go to Tiny URL>> Its a freebie...and highly functional. The Twitterers dig it and alway reference tinyurls as part of their shorty messages. Give it a spin.