Going back to publishing links to interesting artsites on my own blog.

About a year ago I started publishing links to sites with interesting drawings and paintings.
At first I published them on my on website. By doing so I hoped to get two results.

• I wanted to show people the many beautiful sites that are out there.
• And by publishing about (popular) artsites I wanted to get a bit of their traffic.

Not totally unselfish I admit

But since I started doing this only a few months after I had started this website I didn’t have much traffic. And most of the people who visited my website weren’t looking for beautiful art. So hardly any of them left my website via the links to artsites I featured.
Which was a bit sad. Partly because of the work I put into finding beautiful sites and partly because beautiful sites deserve to be seen.

After publishing links to sites on my site for a few months I decided to try something else:
At my Stumble account I have a, not very large, but loyal following of people who are interested in the, mainly, paintings I find for them. Why publish my links on this website were people didn’t seem to be that interested. A better idea would be to publish them at Stumble. And so I did for a few months.

Then some-one mentioned Twitter.
I found out it was even easier to publish links on Twitter then it was on Stumble. And even better. I found a plugin that made it possible to post those same links on my website.
Now I had three places to post my art links: Picture of beautiful painting to my Stumble account and links to interesting sites both on my Twitter account and my own website.
For a few months I was very content with myself.

But now I’m getting restless again.
A few days ago I came across an article about spam on Twitter. It seems that a lot of people are starting Twitter account to bother as many people as the can with their garbage. They follow thousands of people in the hopes that they will follow them back. But they never read the stories of the people they follow.
Looking at the last few people who started following me I find that they are mostly spammers: “Following: 4000, Followers: 50, Updates: 12″.
These people won’t appreciate my art links.

Problem is that the same holds true for my Stumble account. At the moment I have 35 fans who visit me regularly, but not very often. On average I get about 1 visitor a day.
By following those visitors back to their own Stumble blog you get an impression of what they are interested in. Most are interested in naked women…

An other problem I didn’t even consider when I started using StumbleUpon and Twitter is copyright. Everything I publish on Twitter and StumbleUpon falls under their copyright.
Although the paintings I link to are owned by there respective copyright holders and links are something of a public domain. My opinions are mine.

Starting today I’m going back to publishing links to beautiful and unusual artsites on my own blog. Although I’m not a art critic I will try my best to tell you what you can find on the different sites I link to. If possible I will even publish one or two of there paintings/photos.

Today I’m starting with the site of Raj Alrihal. He paints very large pictures that seem to tell a story about the future and far away places. Whether these paintings are part of a game or maybe a movie isn’t clear.

Most of the paintings are to large to publish here but these are nice samples of his work. The top painting is a detail of a larger painting.

The second site that I will feature today is Mark’sSketchblog by the American animator Mark Behm

Any one who has visited some of the artsites I to which I’ve linked in the past will know that I love paintings and drawings about people and monsters. Mark has both.
His portraits take the form of caricatures like this one

His monsters are more funny then scary, like this one

By visiting Mark’s profile you can find two more blogs he runs with some friends. Both are quite nice.