November 24, 2008

Progress Report...


Archives 2002 - Beta 4 - mixed media on paper

Thought I'd best take care of some loose ends as the rest of the week will be occupied with a house guest, Thanksgiving dinner and being generally out of pocket around here.

Didn't make it to the opening of local gallery's Tiny Treasures show so don't know how my efforts went over... will take house guest to visit at some point and see for myself. These days, one hates to ask.

As to the new programs I've been testing:

Website makeover... still not crazy about being stuck in template mode but am trying to make it work for me... at least until I can devote time to learning Kompozer, CSS and whatever... maybe next year. For now, Sandvox is it (though not ready for prime time.)

Image control... Gimp was working for me but it seemed to be overkill for what I needed for it to do. As mentioned earlier... I'm mainly looking for a tool to square up my painting images. The shareware, Graphic Converter does that painlessly, and other things as well. But those other things are found on just about every program... I think some standardization in naming these tools would be helpful. Took me forever to get it that 'resize' might now be called 'scale'! Who knew? I'm so out of it!

Inventory Documentation... the reason I still have two computers on my desk! My old faithful MS Word Database is going to be hard to replace without taking Accounting 101... or something way more advanced. I don't know a thing about spreadsheets except that they look like my database but require much more manipulating. I've downloaded iWork on trial... was able to copy my old db info (for the most part) by saving to .csv mode and importing, but have no idea how to formulate the info into useful printouts... such as consignment sheets of old and new works for galleries. I even bought a little program called Artist's Butler which requires all data to be hand entered but gives a sharp little accounting complete with image.... thought maybe I'd just use the past eight years of info (my database goes back to the 70's!) but it's lacking the flexibility I prefer. So... if worse comes to worse, I'll keep the program on my laptop and keep it current until a better thought comes along. (Open to suggestions!)

Social Integration... that would be my experience with Facebook... which is coming along nicely with some fun interaction with family and friends I didn't expect to bump into. I think I've only scratched the surface of understanding of all it can be.

Still getting a couple of hours in the studio each morning... got to get serious about a few deadlines coming up early next year. Going through my permanent painting files turns up some that make me stop and think back... the painting above was one of a large series... thick gesso enhanced with filler and slathered on heavy paper which made a great painting surface.

No comments: