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As the regulars among you will have noticed. I have changed my layout and started promoting my art.
Both are things I’ve been dreaming about.
Changing my layout for months. Promoting my art for years. 
Layout
To see my new layout there’s no alternative to visiting my site.
But in short I have cleaned it up.
I’ve created a basic layout that showcases my art without all the clutter to encourage people to visit other pages.
If you are interested you’ll find the tag cloud, categories and history of this site on the “archive” page.
Promoting
How to promote my drawings. Or even, if I should promote my drawings is something that I’ve been doubting for years.
If I compare my work to that of people like Van Gogh or Rembrandt how would I even dare to promote my drawings.
But an article by Seth Godin (he advises entrepreneurs) pointed me in the right direction.
A shoe salesman only has to prove that his shoes are better then those of his competitor.
My job is a little more complicated.
I don’t have to prove to you that my art is better then that of other artist.
I have to get you to buy art.
That job turns out to be far more challenging then you would think.
Everybody who reads this site regularly knows that they need art.
That is why they read this site.
The problem is that they don’t know how much art they should buy.
It’s easy when you are very rich.
Someone like Bill Gates buys art as an investment and gets to enjoy it to.
But what about us regular people?
How much art do we need?
Godin advises to just take an arbitrary figure. Something you can maintain.
So I’m assuming that you are a about the same as me. I have my good months and my bad months. But I could spend 1% of my income on art and enjoy it without having the feeling that I’m robbing myself of something else.
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About:
I know this picture isn’t working. Which is strange because if you click through to the Flickr site you’ll find the picture is indeed present.
I’ve tried several times to file a complaint with Flickr but they keep telling me that I should show an example.
So here’s an example.
About:
Posted on Flickr by Raffy Carvalheira
Update: I got an answer from Flickr.
Everytime you change the state of a photo, by replacing it, rotating it,
editing it, or setting it to private or to public, Flickr generates new
filenames for it. It’s a security feature to prevent people from linking
to images without permission.
Doing any of these things will permanently break the html code to the
image and you get a “photo is currently unavailable” message on your
blog.
You may want to click the link to see if it takes you to the photo page.
If so, you will need to edit the post or make a new post using the fresh
information.
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One week of silence
My regular readers must have thought I fell of the the face of the earth because I stopped posting after the second edition of the Art Showcase blog carnival.
I didn’t. Actually you could say that I fell on the face of the earth. On Tuesday the 25e of November we had some local patches of ice on bridges and bicycle roads. On route to my work, about ten meters from my home, I hit such a spot. I even though I recognized what was wrong it was too late to react to it. My bike and right leg went one way and my left leg went the other way. A second later I lay on my back on the ground and the pain in my left leg told me that something was very wrong.
I was rushed to the hospital and, after an examination, told that my hip was broken and that I would be operated upon to put some screws in the bone. By 11.00 AM (only 4 hours after the accident) I was brought to the operating theater and the bone of my leg was set.
After that they told me that it was only a question of rehabilitating for a few days. The nurse told me that I would most probable be sent home the next Friday.
When they told me that I thought that would be not nearly enough time to learn to walk again. But in highensite it’s clear that it might have been true if they had taken into account that I’m autistic.
I told every doctor and every nurse I talked to but they seem to think that it was not very important.
So at first they had my practice walking with crutches. Which was less then successful. I nearly fell flat on my back. Then they had my practicing with a walker. Which worked a little better.
I could have learned to use the walker and I can learn to walk again. But not simultaneous.
It was only by Monday morning that I realized what was going wrong and suggested that I would be given a rollator. After that walking became a lot easier. Or rather less difficult.
I’ve been told that it will take only 2 or 3 months to learn to walk again.
Henk’s art showcase
The regulars will have noticed that I started posting pictures and pictures of paintings without any text.
Early November I thought it might be a good idea. So I tried it for a few days on a blogger blog and then moved it to this blog. Only I never stopped posting pictures to the blogger blog.
The thing is that I find hundreds of pictures and paintings a day. Of course most aren’t beautiful or interesting enough to post. But I’m still left with far more pictures then I could post here.
Thinking about my readers it dawned on me that it wouldn’t be much use to subscribe to the RSS feed of both blogs if I post the same kind of pictures to both of them.
I’ve been thinking about the difference between the two blogs.
Henk’s art showcase is going to be kind of cosy. I’ll be selection pictures and paintings for there beauty and for the feeling of normality and cosiness. Most paintings and pictures will be of landscapes and buildings. Maybe some people.
See me draw on the other hand will stay the main outlet of my thoughts and feelings.
The pictures and paintings I’ll be posting here will be selected more on what I find interesting then on beauty. Although they can be beautiful. They will be different. Different in the way they are painted or the kind of subject the artists choose.
For a while I thought that I would stop drawing. I even put my drawing box away and was thinking about changing the name of this blog. But I’m getting some new ideas I want to try.
This afternoon I got my drawing box back out and tomorrow I’m going to draw again.
Let’s see where this takes me.
This afternoon I found out that I’m on the 11the place of Twitters with most followers for the Netherlands. That’s nice.
Of course it would be much nicer if I were to reach the first place for the Netherlands. So I would very much appreciate it if you would be willing to follow me on twitter.
If you do you’ll get several things. First you’ll get a listing of all the articles I post on this site. Second you’ll get at least one post a day from Henk’s art showcase. Usually the last post of the day so you can find the others by clicking throught to the older posts.
There’s also a bonus you’ll will only get to see it you subscribe to Twitter. Ones in a while I find a site or a Flickr set with so many beautiful or interesting pictures or paintings that it would be a waste to post only one or two on See me draw or Henk’s art showcase.
I’ll post those sites or Flickr sets only to Twitter.
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After the problems I had with my new PC last week I went back to using my old computer. Which worked nicely for a few days. But Saturday windows tried to install the new windows xp sp3 upgrade. After that I started getting blue screens of death.
My dealer advised my to install a pro version of windows xp on my new PC almost guaranteeing that all problems would be solved. But it seems his guarantee isn’t worth very much.
The last few days I’ve been busy installing windows xp pro. But almost immediately I ran into a familiar problem: Windows won’t recognize the usb ports. The same problem I had when I tried to install windows xp on the new PC.
Only this time the problem is even larger. Last week I only had problems when I tried to use my usb mass storage device (external backup harddrive). Now I’ve reach the point where I can’t even use my wireless modem. I can’t connect to Internet to find the right driver.
The funny thing is that about 15 years ago I would have loved a problem like this. A real challenge to get my PC working again. But nowadays a PC is kind of a tool I need to do my work. It should just work.
But anyway I’ve reach the point were I’m willing to through my towel into the rink.
I don’t want to spend more time trying to find a way to get a PC working with windows XP where it is so clearly meant to work with windows Vista.
Using the save mode I’ve set my old PC back to the last working configuration and turned the automatic updates off. That means that I have a limited time to get my new PC working with windows Vista before the old PC gets so buggy that it won’t work anymore.
That could mean that I’ve have less time to work at this blog then I would like but… Since backups are never perfect, I would like to be moved before the old PC runs out of steam.
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Describing the art work of Arne Hoffmann, Lorena Alvarez and Albert Watson.
One of my biggest hobbies is watching people. Just sitting in a little cafe watching the people walk by.
Arne Hoffmann photographs people being beautiful. Either by the way he stages them or by the clothes they wear.
Lorena Alvarez writes books and illustrates them. She shows her lovely illustrations on her flickr site.
Lorana Alvarez does have a website but it is still under construction
Todays Last site is special. Albert Watson Photography Inc is a photography site with a difference. Like many of it’s kind it show you a slideshow of picture. Pictures of people and objects. Some special, some commonplace.
What thing that makes this website jump out is that the slideshow is accompanied with beautiful music. Kind of a mix of classical and modern music.
(One snag. If you watch this site with Firefox you don’t get to see the slideshow.)
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Making a decision about the future of this blog.
I’m finding that I’m slowly getting to a point of which I naively thought I would never reach it.
When I started this blog I thought that I would be drawing beautiful pictures without ever having to practice technique. Since I have a photographic memory I thought that I only had to draw what I saw.
But it doesn’t work that way. To draw what you see you need a fair amount techniques I don’t have.
So a few weeks ago I spent a few days drawing circles. I didn’t blog about it because I thought it wouldn’t be very interesting if I blog about the same subject 10 days in a row.
But last week I didn’t do any drawings and I remembered that there was an important reason why I started this blog at about the same time as I started drawing:
I need a way to publish my drawings. Even if I’m only do boring practice drawings I still need to publish them. If I don’t I get the feeling that I’m doing something that is without purpose and I stop doing it.
So I’ve gotten to the point where I have to take a decision both about drawing and about blogging. Either I stop doing both or I continue practicing my drawing and write articles that probably will be rather boring.
A few months ago I would probably have chosen the first option but in the last few months I’ve noticed that my readers are very picky. They only read the article that are of interest to them and ignore the rest. So I think I could get away with writing 10 articles about freehand circle drawing without any one noticing it.
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A little blogging fun.
I just found a site where they can calculate the monetary worth of your site.
The worth of my site is a little over 2000 dollar. But since I have no plans of selling my domain I’ll never get it.
But it is fun to know that my work hasn’t been for nothing.
My blog is worth $2,258.16.
How much is your blog worth?
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Going from “Beautiful art sites” to Twitter and back again.
I don’t know whether there is any one around from the time I started this blog. But those who are will know that when I started with this blog I daily featured an art site.
There were two reasons to feature other sites. For one thing I liked it. Showing sites I like and sending them some traffic. The other reason was to promote my own site.
But after a while I run into a little problem. There are a lot of art sites and as my methods of finding them improved I found I had to make ever more painful decisions: Which sites to include in my feature and which ones to leave out.
It took me a while but in the end I decided that it would work better if I where to use my Stumble account to show art sites. Which at first worked perfectly.
But after using it for a few months I’ve found that StumbleUpon isn’t a very good fit for what I want. Stumble is a perfect place to show off the nice pictures you have found on the web. But it’s powers to promote my site are slowly dwindling.
The other problem is that there doesn’t seem to be an easy method of including my stumbles on my blog.
Last week I’ve found Twitter. Twitter seems to be the answer to all my prayers.
- It’s very easy to feature sites on Twitter. Even describing a site on Twitter seems easier then on Stumble. Only being able to use 140 characters means that you have to condense your description.
- It’s very easy to find people to follow your ramblings. Instead of just sitting and waiting whether anybody will come by, you can actively scout for followers. I like that a lot better.
- Twitter does seem to influence the amount of traffic I receive. The more people follow me, the more traffic I receive.
- And last but not least. With a little help from the Twitter tools plugin I can again post my art site feature on my blog.
The only strange thing I’ve found up till now is that all that traffic isn’t coming from Twitter but from Google. I’m sure there is a very logical explanation for that phenomenon but I have no idea what it might be.
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Commenting on comments
by Henk ter Heide on Thursday January 10, 2008
Putting down some ground rules for people who want to comment on my blog.
When I started this blog early last year I was very tiered and a little afraid of comments.
Being autistic means that it takes a lot of effort to communicate with people. Being tiered means that you can’t defend yourself against critics.
But I never received any critics. Apart from getting a lot of spam every one who commented seemed to like my blog.
But having received a number of comments I’m finding that there are some things I don’t like:
I do realize that most people won’t read this article before commenting. It’s just something to point to in case some one doesn’t understand my motivation for changing a comment.
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