Website is up! Sort of.

Ah the complicated process that is making a website. It's definitely been a learning curve in that I thought I knew more than I did about making websites before I started.. Today I bought the domain name, hannahboulter.co.uk, I figured it was probably more professional to use my real name rather than a nickname. Upon buying the domain name and hosting package I assumed my website would be functional, the domain name immediately available to be seen, but it's not. At the moment I have a temporary address for which I am trying to edit the site on, I don't actually know if all these links are even going to work after my domain name starts working though so I think I'll just put the index page on at the moment with the few images I need for it to work just so I have something to show one of my tutors during a tutorial tomorrow.
The email says it could take about 24-72 hours to be shown 'due to DNS propagation and caching', not that I know what that means, but I'll assume it means the internet needs to catch up because there's a new website coming to town! It could be working between 24-72 hours from now.. Ahh, the waiting, why didn't I see this coming? I should have bought the domain name days ago, everything has lag.. At least I know this for next time I guess.
Anyway, above is the layout I've come up with since last time, it's changed a lot, I felt the last one was too simple, I wanted it to be simple, but the other one looked well.. Just too plain.
Hopefully the site will be up and running with working links by Monday.

Exhibiting work

Today I went to go and see Jess at the Student Union to see if I could display some of my work there, I think it would be a really good opportunity to have some of my work on display somewhere physical rather than all of it being on a computer or online. I'm still going to continue with my website but hopefully this will give me more options and could even give me more ways to promote the website. I'm hoping to create a piece of work specially for the exhibiton using digital media and print it off in a large size to display on wallspace, something I've never done before. Just need to get the dates sorted now! Oh, and make the piece of work.

The only calm

Lately I have not felt like myself, here's something I drew today
Here's a song that makes me feel calm

Being self employed

The fact is, is that I've always seen myself working for other people. I don't think it's to do with not having ambition to 'rise to the top' so to speak, I think it's just that I'm perfectly happy to take orders. Even when I worked as a cleaner I would be happy just getting on with any task that was given to me even if it was more than most people were given, it was a satisfying feeling knowing that I had done my job properly and that I didn't have to 'think' too much about the work I guess.
What I enjoyed about it was the reliability, I knew I'd get paid at the same time every month, and I knew I was always needed to work and that I could do a good job.
What's scary about art is that it's not always seen as needed by people. It's not going to be a reliable career path, a steady career path, but it's always been where my talent has turned to, ever since I was little making my little clay elephants, my teachers would say I was talented in the arts, so that's where I went. Somehow my world became all about creating the best pieces of works I could, I would look at art and think.. I could do something like that, one day, so I kept trying and trying to better myself, to build up my skills, to one day become an artist who made works and thought 'that's great' instead of 'I could do better' or 'there's so many artists more talented than me'.
What I'm trying to say in a long winded kind of way is that the lecture on being self employed really got me to thinking about what I want out of a career, a job. I want to be stable, to have a reliable source of income, to contribute to society. I don't expect to be rich, but I don't want to not be able to support myself, I want to be independent, but still have the cushion of support from a stable career. I guess I'm just writing about what I'm feeling at the moment, I think the above is what the majority of the population wants, a stable life.
Most of the lecture was on accounts, how to apply to become self employed, I'm a bit surprised it made me think so much about where I want to be in the future, how I'm going to get there.
Juan (my university tutor) sent me an email the other day about applying for an internship with Disney, it sounds pretty perfect so I think I'm going to apply for it, it involves games and art, two of my favourite things, so fingers crossed I can make something worth sending for my application. It would be amazing to get that kind of opportunity.

Growing Pains

In thinking about getting my work out into the world I started looking at how some of the artists I admire do this, a lot of artists I follow via websites and blogs, such as Alex Pardee. Well, I've already got a blog so I figured I'd try to make a website to showcase my work. It's not up yet but everyday I'm attempting to create a layout I'm happy with (which is not easy considering how picky I am).
In doing this I've also started considering what kind of content I want to be on the website and how it will benefit me by being on the world wide web. Upon thinking about this I realised I haven't really got much to put on there in terms of work I'm actually proud of, most of my work lately seems to be what I would consider unfinished, sketches, rough ideas of things that never happened, could this be the work I show? No. I want this website to showcase the best of the work I've done, so if that means only showing three pieces for now and building up the content later I guess I'm happy to do that. The thing about me and digital art is that somehow it feels like it has to be perfect. When creating work with paint or pencil it's understandable that certain mistakes could happen but you consider them to be part of it's beauty. Digital art for me means I can go back and edit the piece whenever I want to, it means I can save previous versions and if it doesn't work it doesn't matter, I've always got a previous stage to work from.
Ways I've considered promoting my website have been in short supply, I've considered leaflets, business cards, trying to get my work into some kind of online gallery to build a community and draw an audience from there. There is a big flaw in making a website to try and get my work out there in that in the end it might be seen by no one but myself. The internet is a very large space, lots of people from around the world competing for traffic and clicks of a mouse. The fear is that no one will be interested in looking, I'll be just another website that never gets seen or heard of, but I think I'll just go for it and see what happens.

~

For the website I'm making
It's coming along slowly
Hopefully it'll be up next week