Reflection

Dirty whore. Take a look at your reflection in the dirty mirror and see what you really are.

Success is all about Tagging.

Not entirely.

First, in the matter of appealing to a large spectrum, one must have something relevant to modern culture - something that most of the population finds some interest in.

The next part is tagging. Take deviantArt, for example. Just post a picture and don't tag it with anything - don't put any keywords on it at all. Now think about it. Who's going to see it? Sure, the people who are watching you will see it. Who's going to see it that doesn't already know your work? A few individuals may see it on the homepage. That is, if they have their settings set to show newly uploaded deviations rather than popular ones of all time. With all the people potentially posting art, the piece you've submitted may only be on that homepage for three seconds before it's outdated by the many other more recently uploaded images.

Well, what do people want to see? Honestly, that's all their business. If they like kittens, they'll search up kittens. What if they're searching up something that's similar to your piece? Of course you'd want your piece to show up in their search results. That's where the tagging comes in. By labeling anything you post with every possible accurate description of it, that is where you get viewers.

Watermarking Tutorial

Hello, my dear readers!

If anyone is interested in art but worried about potential art thieves (and don't want something obstructing the artwork itself), watermarking is for you!  

We'll start by going to Picnik and opening up an image. (For the images used in this tutorial, simply click on them to enlarge them.)

 Below: Choosing an image to watermark. This is a picture of my hamster, Cupcake. So cute!

 You'll be directed to a basic editing page where you can crop, resize, etc. The watermarking is in another tab, the text (unless you want to use a sticker as a watermark which wouldn't really be a good one to use)

 This is the fun part. In comparison to Photobucket's photo-editing software, there are way more fonts to choose from in Picnik. Pick the one you would like to use, and enter your text for your watermark (the best watermarks are ones that have your name or the username for the site you upload your work on). In this case, I'm just going to put my hamster's name as the watermark.

 Of course it's going to stand out like crazy when you first add it (which is why I don't recommend using a paint program to put a gray colored watermark - it still stands out like crazy). What determines the watermark is the opacity of it (think opaque like milk - you can't see through it; you want your opacity at a low percentile so that it's not as thick). However, in the case of Picnik, it's reversed to "fade"; where you want to increase that to decrease opacity.

 Personally, I like having my fade level set at 80%. But that's my preference. If you like it a little less noticeable, increase the fade to a higher percentage. If you would want it to be more noticeable, decrease the fade.

Also, depending on the picture, you might want to alter the color. Picnik has it set on white as a default - which is good for darker colored photographs. If your watermark is going to be against a light part of the picture, you're probably going to want to set the color to black or gray, and then fade it to your preference.

 And voila! You are finished. Enjoy!

The Art of Interesting

Lately I've realized that not many people really care about what I write here. And maybe that's the reason why I write what I write. But for something to be truly interesting to make people want to see it, now, that's a true talent. That's someone who's always up to date on all the latest trends, inverting it in whatever way they can to get people to pay attention to them. It's targeting the specific audience, the diversity of wanting to please all potential readers and get them hooked.

We're all just attention whores.