New Art Blog

[JosephOng]

Hi there!
.
Edit: I totally forgot to attach the blog link! Thanks, myturningshop. Here's the blog: Water Flares

Joseph here again. This time, I've decided to coauthor an art blog with a friend at school. We're pretty excited, as we're usually academic people, but we're pretty artistic (just that we don't have outlets to express that creativity). We've decided to create a blog chronicling our journey with art as we attempt to get better (taking turns making art pieces and posting them up).

The two of us ourselves are pretty diverse in the types of art we do (fractals, digital design, sketching, painting, drawing, photography), so the content will be varied. Also, we will be asking many other people in our school as well as fellow artist-friends online to become coauthors - not only to reduce the stress of having to churn out art, but also to diversify what types of art we have.

The template is the default, because I'm currently working on a custom one. I have some questions and hope to receive some suggestions from this great community!

1) What type of widgets should an art blog like this have? So far, I'm thinking a small Picasa/Flickr slideshow that will scroll through just the art pieces alone, a slide show for each artist, which will scroll along an embedded flash file on the top of the blog. Any other ideas?

2) What generic widgets am I missing, besides the subscription boxes (I'm working on those now)?

3) How do you sort blog posts? I.E. If the user can press the category "Fractal", and only blog posts containing the tag "Fractal" will be displayed, and the others will be omitted until another category is selected.

4) Offer any other advice you think would be appropriate!

-J

I would appreciate it if anyone who looks at this post follows up on the blog later! We just started, so the art collection is not very big. We're planning on adding a lot to our collection in the coming days!

[myturningshop]

Joseph...

Is this the blog you want feedback on? Water Flares

For a blog with the purpose of featuring art, I like the idea of keeping a simple theme. The solid white simple theme will let the eye focus on your graphics.

I'll let others comment on widgets since they are sure to know more than I. However, when there is more work you might want to think about some kind of gallery where a person can just scroll through your portfolio.

[JosephOng]

Originally Posted by myturningshop

Joseph...

I'll let others comment on widgets since they are sure to know more than I. However, when there is more work you might want to think about some kind of gallery where a person can just scroll through your portfolio.

Is it possible to do this in blogger with a widget? If not, I'm thinking of making a flash mouseover scrollbar at the top (one that blends well the template) that grabs pictures from the Picasa album where our pictures are stored.

Thanks for the opinion on simple templates. I think I will keep it simple and clean.

[Monsterblood]

Hi there, I like how you have kept your blog really simple but I think some adding some colour would defintely make it a lot more attractive. As an artist I really think having a nicely matching template with your art that you are showing off would really work well together, an example of this would be here (damn I can't post links, convert the (dot) into a full stop - yourartfeature(dot)blogspot(dot)com) a new blog of mine I will be working on soon.

Usually from experience black is really nice background for bright and colourful pictures. But as the art on your blog is more of darker colours, the white background really suits it although if that was me i would either go for a more a lighter colour of background rather than just white or i would choose a really nice light coloured template.

i usually feature art on Deviantart - 1monsterblood1(dot)deviantart(dot)com but i have decided to take a further step and blog on some really fantastic peices of artworks that i have come across.

[JosephOng]

Thanks for the feedback, guys.

Anyone else have more critiques of the blog?

[elle-tea]

Hey,
I really liked your artwork. I think you can spice up the background a bit by adding some kind of design to the plain white background.
Followed!

L.T. @ elle-tea.blogspot.com

[marciepoo23]

it's nice to see some art blogs around! good work!

[lcadier]

I'm with the others, you could include some nifty transitions between the photographs. love the work.

[cartwheel soup]

for some reason, your photos loaded very slowly when i went to your blog. not sure why.

[xjosh2k6x]

Nice arts...need to improve the blog's template...