Valencia - Symmetrical Tiling Digital Abstract in Pink and White

Uploading images is not nearly as fun as creating art, but I'm starting to streamline the process a bit. Here's another of my new digital artworks. I named it Valencia because the little sections in the middle reminded me of orange segments. 

"Valencia", Digital Symmetrical Abstract

I really love the look of one colour on white. It's very simple, yet works so well. I'd love to have this pattern printed at Spoonflower and make it into a shirt or dress at some point. If you're interested in purchasing prints or items with my art on them, you can check out my Fine Art America or Society 6 stores. Fine Art America is also great if you want to see my art in more of a gallery format, rather than in blog posts. Thanks for looking. :)

Kurt - Digital Symmetrical Tiling Abstract

Lately I've been trying to upload some of my art on a stock photo website. I've been contemplating getting into digital downloads again, like the cat silhouettes I used to sell on Etsy. Actually I've been contemplating a lot of directions I could take my art, and it has left me at a bit of a standstill. I don't know the best way to tackle it, so I overthink everything and don't get much done. I know that I could spend many hours on a project, only to realize that my time would have been better spent another way.

This morning I spent about an hour uploading files to Society 6. I like the amount of control they give you, but wish the process could be more streamlined. There should be an option to upload the largest size file, have them automatically resized by their system to fit the dimensions of each product, and manually fix whichever products you might want to turn out differently. Maybe it's more complicated than that, I don't know. 

This is my latest addition to my Society 6 store, Kurt. I designed it in a few colourways, but only the teal and purple version at the top is in the store. I don't know that I have the patience for any more today. It's just a shame that things that shouldn't take so long take many hours away from actually being able to create new things. 

Check out my store on Society 6 if you want to see this design (and a few of my others) on mugs, tote bags and other products.

Like Renee Dillon Art on Facebook, Maybe You'll Get to See Some Art

I just added a gadget to the blog so that people can click a button and easily Like my Facebook page for Renee Dillon Art. Though, after reading a few articles about how fan pages on Facebook work, I don't know why I bothered. Facebook makes so much sense as a resource. It's a place a lot of people go every day to see things that entertain them. They can customize the things that come up to be of most interest to them. Or at least they should be. These days, it seems, a vast majority of items on the news feed are ads. And they're not even well targeted ads. They're not even ads that interest me. Isn't that the whole point?

Apparently many of the people who Like your page (with the intention of receiving updates from you) don't see your posts at all, unless you pay Facebook to reach a larger portion of your audience. I could understand advertising to reach new fans, but paying to reach current ones? That's absurd. So now I'm not even sure if I should put that much effort into my Facebook profile. 

Everyone who talks about online marketing stresses the importance of creating an email mailing list - that getting a person's email is the only real true way of capturing them in such a way that you don't lose them when a social network goes under. But that's not the way I engage with the people I want to interact with. I follow people on Youtube, I Like artists on Facebook, I pop in and out of blogs that I've bookmarked. It never occurs to me that I want updates emailed to me about the things I'm interested in or want to see. Because email is full of spam, and I believe that a large proportion of people only have emails these days because you need them to sign up for other websites.

My email inbox contains over 900 unread emails. Most of them are things that I might have genuinely interested in at one point. But the companies trying to sell me something all blend together, the clickbait titles lose their appeal and suddenly it's all just a shade of uninteresting beige advertising that I'm not bothered to even open.

So how are we supposed to find our fans, and retain them? How do we make sure the people that we want to entertain, teach, enlighten and inspire can actually hear us, now and in the future? To be honest, I don't really have a good answer to that. All I can suggest is to grab as many people as you can now, in as many places as possible, and hope that they have enough passion for what you do to try and find you if your method of communication falls apart. It's not ideal, but it's all we have. And even if they don't find you again, just hope that what short period of time you could reach them left some kind of positive impact on their life.

"Turbulence", Acrylic Paint on Paper

Well, now that rant is out of the way, here's another of my new abstracts. This one is called "Turbulence". I'm still not really figuring out this whole abstract art thing, but I have decided to start trying to make my painterly abstracts into mirrored, symmetrical designs like my previous geometric abstracts. I'll see how I like that after I've tried a few. There should be a post about it soon.

Also, despite my earlier rant, if you want to Like Renee Dillon Art on Facebook I really would appreciate it. For all I know, you will get updates. Maybe they'll change the way you can interact with your fans, maybe they already have, I don't know. Either way, click the Like button in the Facebook widget at the side if you're interested. Thanks for looking. :)

New Abstracts - "Cacophony" Painterly Abstract on Paper

Well February is behind us and it looks like I've averaged an hour per day on making art, though not necessarily on what I had expected. This last month I worked a lot on a new kind of abstract art for me. Most of my abstracts in the past have been along the lines of Austin - symmetrical, repeating shapes with bold outlines. This month I've wanted to try my hand at the more conventional style of abstract - paint splattered on a page, with varying textures, colours blending into pleasing combinations, and other mediums creating different types of line and shape. In future, I''d like to be able to blend this type of abstract with my own pattern making style in order to create something new and hopefully interesting.

One thing I've learned about this is that creating a simple looking abstract is, in fact, super hard. There are particular types of marks that I want to make but I'm not really sure how. Sometimes things don't go according to plan and you cover up part of a layer that you intended to keep. It's harder to create a balanced composition when it isn't symmetrical. And for me, it's really very difficult to keep spaces blank as well as busy, complicated areas. Blank spaces look like they need to be filled before they're finished. I need to cut that out, because leaving blanks can lead to a more sophisticated looking image.

I started thinking about this style of loose, painterly abstract because of something I posted during Leslie Saeta's 30 Paintings in 30 Days challenge back in January. One of the artworks I posted, Bethany, seemed to garner quite a bit of attention. That image received more pageviews than any other artwork that I posted to the 30 in 30 blog. I thought this was interesting, for something which had been intended mostly as a place holder, some filler art. I had worked on something else that day which had not succeeded, so plonked my remaining paint on a piece of paper in the hopes of creating a nice background for some future art and called it a day. I hadn't thought it would appear to be interesting to anyone as a standalone piece of art.

I think it's important for this reason not to write off anything you create just because it isn't particularly to your own taste. We all enjoy different things, and your favourite piece of your own art and someone else's might be very different. Since looking into the subject, I've found quite a few abstract artworks that I'm quite enamored with. It's all about finding the examples that appeal to you and figuring out why they appeal more than others.

Unfortunately, I seem to create the best abstracts by accident. Anything I try to do deliberately doesn't seem to come out as visually interesting to me as a random splodge on a piece of scrap paper. My paint palette is fascinating to me, even if the canvas I've spent a couple of hours on isn't. I need to find a way now to trick myself into creating some beautiful art.

"Cacophony", Painterly Abstract in Acrylic Paint on Paper

Fergie - Mixed Media Portrait by Renee Dillon

I feel like I've found a solution to the problems I was having with finding a substrate for my art. I thought I'd get a nice pad of watercolour paper to try out. Instead I found a Canson Acrylic Pad at Lincraft. It has an almost canvasy texture to it, but it's still thin enough to use on my lightbox. It doesn't crease and the paint sits nicely on the surface.

This was my first experiment using the new paper and I'm loving it so far. It feels a bit more classy than regular cartridge paper, so I wouldn't feel bad selling an artwork made on it, but it's not so expensive that I'm too afraid to use it.

PRODUCTS USED:

(Not this paper pad, but something very like this, various brands of paint)