Blog Action!

The Storm Begins On High

9" x 23"

Pastel

Casey Klahn

Thanks to the following wonderful bloggers for noting The Colorist: Donna Zagotta, Laura K. Aiken and Alyson B. Stanfield. With Donna, this blog been featured 3 years running among Blogs to Watch, and it is wonderful to be found in this company.  Laura and I share a love for Henri Matisse, and so I am honored by this attention.  Alyson is the Art Biz Coach, and her work with artists has helped them make incredible strides in the business and outreach aspects of their studios. I have benefited from several of her workshops, and recommend her to you without reservation.  Be prepared to work hard, and reap benefits, at her workshops, including and especially the online ones!

Donna Zagotta
   22 Art Blogs to Watch in 2013

Laura K. Aiken  
   Eight Blogs That Rock My World

Alyson Stanfield
   Save The Apologies...

I also made it in Alyson's newsletter.  Thanks, my blog friends, for the exposure and for the interaction in blogging over the years!

Five Years of The Colorist

Five-Year Letter.  Click twice to read.

Kind Readers,


Today marks five years of this blog!  Thank you to the smart readers who have participated in this blog about art and art topics.


In this time, The Colorist has published 1,063 posts.  Artist's blogs don't get the huge audience of many blog genres, but we are happy for what we do receive in the form of an audience.  The audience here includes artists, art patrons and university students throughout the world.  Statistically speaking, there have been about a half a million visits here since 2007, when this all got started.  Daily visits range from 250 to almost 600 hits.


Readers come here looking for Jackson Pollock and his masterwork, Galaxy.  They seek news about the recently attributed painting, Salvator Mundi, by Leonardo da Vinci.  They are directed here by following links from other kind bloggers, among them Pin Tangle and Loriann Signori.


Of course, numbers at an artist blog are not very big as far as the broader world of the internet is concerned.  Perhaps it is the depth of images, writing, conversations and ideas that attract visitors.  Content is always cited as the key to successful blogging, and I try to follow that advice.


Very popular features at The Colorist are the Top Ten posts by artist bloggers, awarded at the end of each year.  Quotes posts and the 101 Blog Topics were also well received.


Thanks again to the readers of The Colorist for five stimulating and fun years.  The future will carry more art, interests and interaction and I look forward to it with excitement.

Motivational Poster

Somebody asked me to make these motivational posters available for sale - I think it was on Facebook.  I am considering it, and they aren't all as self-promoting as this one.  There are lots of projects like this on the back-burner for wintertime, and since we now have the first snow, they will be moved forward.  Some of these (surprise) projects are very exciting, and I hope I can get even half of them done.

A Letter for You - Four Years of The Colorist

Text of letter:

Four Years of The Colorist

December 16th., 2010

Dear Readers,

This special greeting is my heart-felt thanks to you for your visits and participation over the past four years.

With over 82,000 page-loads this year, 16,000 per month at this point, and one day with 892, The Colorist continues to grow in many ways!

See more bench marks about The Colorist in the post that accompanies this letter.

All my best,

Casey Klahn

This is the four-year anniversary of The Colorist blog. There would be no blog here without the intelligent, kind and consistent readership that you provide. Please accept this handwritten note as my thanks.

With 847 posts here at The Colorist, and 220 at Pastel, there have been many fun and thought-provoking exchanges between you and I in blogland. When I met artist blogger Celeste Bergin in Oregon this year, she chided me that she had once gotten lost in the loop that is all of my many blogs. Hey, they're free, so I take as many as will fit in my pocket.

I also met and painted with Maryland artist and blogger Loriann Signori this year. Other highlights of the year for me include exhibiting in a new gallery, and receiving a national first place award for my art.

On The Colorist, one post went viral (Jackson Pollock) and the number of Blogger Followers ticked over 300. I introduced The Prairie Series, Mind Mapped my blog and studio direction, and was selected as one of 27 Art Blogs to Watch in 2010.

Popular posts and series' included:

• Live-blogging the Sausalito Art Festival
• A close-shave bear encounter
• 100 Things I Love About Art
• Artist's Quotes posts
• Ten Life or Death Studio Tips
• How To Make a Blog Banner
• Degas copies
• The Artist's Ideas series

I look forward with joy to the next year of sharing my studio life and art with all of you.

Casey Klahn

Glitch Marketing

Casey Klahn

I can't figure out why my stats went ballistic two days ago. It seems like an explosion of interest in just one page of my blog. I think Google has a glitch, where a redirect takes surfers to the Pollock page. I can't complain. For an early effort by The Colorist, that page lays out a lot of meat.

Not my art, though. And, not much original content. For more original art content, I suggest this page.

Anyway. Thanks for tripping into The Colorist, which is a newsletter blog about my colorist works, and essays on fine art.

Free Blog

I'm still blogging, and while I'm at it the studio has been in full fiddle.  Above is a studio on-the-easel image, and I want to begin posting from my sketchbook, as well.  Here is the first of these.

Banner Banter - How To Make a Blog Banner

Banners and Badges Are Creative Blog Design Elements

Here is a special thanks to those of you who voted to choose a new blog banner. The gray banner has prevailed. There were 16 votes for gray, versus 11 and 10 for the brown and green ones, and some sentiment for keeping the old one was expressed.

A new and attractive blog banner can be the most dramatic change for your blog, next to selecting a new template. Yesterday's post presented various types of creative blog banners for your inspiration.

This post will link you to the simplest tutorials I have found for creating and posting a new banner to your blog. I won't touch on platforms other than blogger, except to say that I think the information here on designing and creating your banner will benefit you no matter which platform you use. I will add the following advice that I found helped me. I use Photoshop Elements (version 2!).

1. Determine the size that you want your new banner to be. I experimented with my old one and discovered that 717 x 426 pixels was my preference for a banner in my particular template. When you open a new file in Photoshop, designate the size you choose.
   
2. A helpful hint in choosing a banner size is to find an image that you feel is an approximate of what you want to make and open the properties by right clicking on it. Use that as a starting point, but don't copy - you want to stand out.
3. Notice that a few of the banners I linked make their statement in a small space, about 70 pixels tall. That may be your solution if you want to cut to the chase. Charley Parker's is 593 x 110.
   
4. Why not allow your readers to participate in choosing a banner design by polling them?
   
5. Make sure your finished product doesn't look pixelated, or fuzzy, when you post it at your blog. I suggest that creating it in the right size, by pixel dimensions and by dpi, will do the job. I try to create my designs in a 200 or higher dpi, and then I save them at 110 or so to make sure they look sharp enough. In my (uneducated) opinion, most people's web feeds can support at least an image of 110, rather than the old 72 dpi. Any other opinions on this?
   

Some have advised against big banners, and I sympathize with that opinion. I have gone with a big banner to make a graphic statement and to make my blog recognizable. I have found that there are many ways for readers to arrive here, and usually they have followed a subscription tool, which highlights the image or title of each post. The downside of having your post "below the fold," as Katherine van Schoonhoven says, is not too critical, in my opinion.



How to make a banner and post it:

Blogspot Tutorial
Photoshop Tutorials
Paul Stamatiou
Design Mom (embed code tutorial provided)


Don't forget to have a tag line. I like Angela Taylor's, "I have marks to make." Mine is "New School Color." Many bloggers make the name of their blog fit a tag line, such as "Robin Pucell, Watercolors in the Plein Air Tradition." I think it's important to include your name somewhere in your header, because people want to view and buy art from an artist. An internet nom de guerre doesn't help in building your artist profile.

Keep in mind the overall look of your blog, not just the header or banner. Also, your background color. The Colorist sported a mid-value blue-gray background for the first half a year of its life. When I went to white, the added light was well worth it as far as my art was concerned.





Why I'd never make it as an IT guy.

Blog Remodel Underway

Sketch WW II Climber
11" x 9"
Charcoal, Pastel and Compressed White Charcoal on Rives BFK
Casey Klahn

The Colorist blog is undergoing a remodel, and that includes new tabs, a sidebar clean up and a new banner. The strategic concepts were aided by the rigorous mind mapping which I posted about here and here.

One thing already accomplished is a revamp of my profile by:

1. Killing the blogger profile widget and adding a picture that links to my blogger profile;
   
2. Updating my picture at my profile (and then I had to go around to my other communities, like Twitter, etc., and change those to match);
3. Cleaning up my blogger profile page;
4. Placing the profile in my tabs rather than in the sidebar.

Further cleaning will involve deleting as many sidebar widgets as possible. I have added a few that I feel I will want after the clean-up, so it looks more crowded than usual now. My criteria are that they have utility. I value widgets that link within the blog, those that link to other content I have placed on the web, such as an artist statement, other blogs, website or whatever, and those that link to other authors' blogs. Next, there are the blog awards, which gives a reader a sense that "this blog has enough merit for me to read." There is the Follow widget, which I have found to be my easiest way to read around the blogs I like. Ditto the bloglist with thumbnails, although I find it to be so space-filling that I keep mine short. Time to clean that one up to reflect current blogs, too.

More widgets are there, as well, but I admire blogs like Steven LaRose whose blog Fish or Cut Bait, is so devoid of marginal clutter that the result is a page that reflects a graphic statement I like very much. It points more readily to his content, but I also love the contrast it provides to his rigorous abstract art. Cool.


Tech crazy, yet?


Labels have become a tag cloud, thanks to the input of my readers who voted for this. For now, I opted for the blogger version. Maybe a better one will appear later.

Next post: Banner Banter (including a How To make a banner and post it).
Still to come: Keeping Tabs. Find out what have I decided to do for blogger tabs.

How To Mind Map Your Blog

"I must create a system,
or be enslaved by another man's,"
William Blake

The Mind Map of The Colorist blog was posted a week ago Monday, and you may wish to do this exercise for your own blog. My goal in doing a mind map was to clean up my busy sidebar and sort out what kinds of data I may want for the new Blogger tabs.

The following describes how I did my mind map.

detail - center of the mind map

I began with the identified subject in the center of the blank page, and drew radii with subjects that I found easy to describe based on what I like to write about in the blog. The broad subjects included Art essays, Art History, My Art, The Art Blogging Community, Casey Klahn (it is my newsletter), etc.

I skipped the rule about using color (go figure!). I think in color when I draw, though - that's part of my whole job description. A rule I will follow next time is that one should pose the subject as a thesis statement or as a question, not just, "The Colorist." I should have written: "what are the components of The Colorist?"

Next, I consulted my labels, and then I described the sub-branches by associations of content with the main branches. For instance, "My Art" has several sub branches such as abstract and landscape genres. Also, the broad category of "Art Content" broke down into the associated subjects of "art philosophy" and "education."



The finding of links between the broad subjects, or a systems analysis of how subjects connect, was illustrated by double ended arrows running between the main branches. This is the most problematic area, and I think the worst represented by mind mapping. Systems are more complex than this 2 dimensional scheme, and they have multiple associations, not just those that are easily illustrated by an arrow. Anyway, the object was to get some systems identified, and to find groupings that will help me pull together types of content for my tabs and my sidebar widgets.

Below, I drew a pop-out that attempted to scheme some broad concerns of the blog. I want to keep my blog focused on ideas, and not so much on myself - people get bored with that. That's why I drew the overlap as a little bit of the artist's self, a better amount of content (ideas) and a whole lot of action (painting and drawing). The outside influences of culture and others I described as "world."




Like with the Borg, all ideas can be assimilated, but when you get the crew of the star ship Enterprise involved, all bets are off. I would say the same thing applies to the artistic mind. Artists are (or should be) the most individual souls on Earth. Systems that artists work within may not function for other offices. Create your own sets of ideas and make your artist's blog a "Mind Map" of your own personality.


Extreme Navel Gazing Links:

Brainstorming
Mind Mapping
Argument Map
Disney Mind Map 1957

Funny gif by EFAmbros

Mind Map of This Blog

Mind Map of The Colorist Blog. Click on the image to read in a larger format.

Cue the Twilight Zone Theme. We are going to mind map The Colorist.

Here is the theme music for this post ( Right Click to open a new tab).

The reason for this exercise is that Blogger has introduced tabs. You know the ones that make Wordpress blogs function so well? They take you to static pages that live (as I understand it) within your blog and I assume they accrue to your blog's statistical performance. I already use Google Page Creator (soon to be replaced by Google Sites) to direct readers to static pages, and the links have been via badges or icons that I place on the sidebar.

The mind map is my way of gathering the cluttered strings of this parachute that is my blog. I am trying to discover what sorts of things are interconnected. Which subjects would function better if found via tabs? Which want to be found via badges in the sidebar?

In addition to the mind map, I also listed my sidebar items by function. I look forward to reducing my sidebar to a more manageable affair. My plan is to use sidebar badges or icons to link to certain content, and tabs for other types. Now I just need one more important thing: some time.

Katherine Tyrrell has generously posted a How To for adding tabs to your blog.
Google Sites.
Mind Mapping.

Three Big Years

Turquoise Forest
13" x 9"
Original Pastel
Casey Klahn

“Color in a picture is like enthusiasm in life.”

Vincent Van Gogh


The 16th of December will mark the three year anniversary of this newsletter-style blog which I named The Colorist. That turned out to be a good move, because for some reason that name has struck a chord, and The Colorist is widely read and many have chosen to link here over the years. Why do people read The Colorist? Partly to see my art, and partly to read the process essays that I write. Occasionally, some nugget of interest brings a reader in via the magic of Key Words.

Did you know that I, personally, am not "The Colorist?" I may paint colorist works, but the name of this blog was meant to describe a place to explore, report and essay on the central theme of colorist art. Of course, anything else that interests me makes it in here, too. I styled it as a newsletter, with a mish-mash of interesting content, all held together under the central theme of "why make this art?"

Am I any closer to that manifesto? I would say, in retrospect, that I have written, and you have very kindly read, a number of things that are descriptive of the artist's process. If that draws someone in to take a closer look at my artworks, then I guess the words have helped. I am told (and the artists in my audience will attest to this experience) that the longer someone looks at my paintings, the more they see. It is like entering a room, and then somehow one finds another hidden room, and then another one, and so on.

So what is a contemporary "colorist?" Did the high mark of overly colorful art end in the nineteen hundred and oughts with the Fauvists in France? My very good blogging friend, Adam Cope, (who does brilliantly colored paintings of the Dordogne region of France) observed this week to me that we all use brilliant color now, and the inference was kind of, "so what?" I couldn't agree more - so what? The market for art supplies is sick with brilliant pigments, and we are rich - filthy rich - with paint intensities. Is it like eating that candy corn in the fall, or that sugar cookie in the winter, and rediscovering why you don't eat them all year? They are soooo sweet! Too much!

Not a few of the artists I admire in the present day use subdued color religiously, and to wonderful effect. Art cannot be "all about color," as these artists prove. But, why do I persist? To be honest - and maybe you've noticed - for the first time this past year, browns made it into my palette.

I think my favorite artist, Wolf Kahn, has said it best. He indicates that there is a knack, or talent if you will, for bringing colors together, that either you have or you don't. Put another way, I would say that the way to failure with intense colors is broad, but the path to success is narrow. High key colors are like dynamite - useful if you know what you're doing.

For those of you who've been around the whole 3 years, reading TC, I thank you. There are others who've been fellow travelers for one or two years, and I am equally thankful for you. As luck would have it, there are also more new readers lately. Welcome, and I hope the next three years will profit you as much as these past three have done me.

Am I a Stat Whore?

The One and Only Donny Osmond

Only my truly dedicated readers know of my coincidental association with Donny Osmond. There are two mega-star singers who share my age, and they have been "with me" since they became child stars many years ago: the inimitable Donny Osmond and the incomparable Michael Jackson. The three of us (perhaps the two of them don't know this) are all the same age (50).

If I were a stat whore, I'd be posting about Donny Osmond every day. Why Donny Osmond? Because Donny Osmond is responsible for a hefty chunk of my random visits here at The Colorist. Sometimes I regret ever posting a picture of Donny Osmond. Don't get me wrong. I like Donny Osmond just fine. He is a fantastic singing artist and personality in his own right. And much more popular than I knew. I know that from my stat counter.

My photo of Donny is the most often visited page of my "Came From" stat, after my subscribers and home page hits. He is a more powerful attractant than Matisse, van Gogh and Jackson Pollock. By a long shot.

We all work our hardest to get good content on our artist blogs. Good content would be an image of one's art, some text about the personal process of getting this art created, and some posts about the broader context of one's art. Broader context comes in the form of one's influences, both past masters, living artists and also the community of artist bloggers who share their art online.

That's good content. Stat whore content would be placing SEO (search engine optimized) phrases in incongruous places all over one's posts. If I were a true S.W., I would figure out a way to fit in names like E lvi$ Pre $ ley or Ang el in a Jo lie. But, what sort of silliness would that be? After all, I have Donny Osmond!

Seriously, my blog is graced with fairly modest statistics regarding readership. I value every one of you who reads here at The Colorist. I am very glad that more readership has come this way because of the daily posting for a month project, the River Series, and my new membership at Twitter.

I'll leave the SEO monkey shines to the experts.

In the interests of full disclosure, I have discovered that D.O. is about half a year older than myself. Jacko is nearer my own age, with his birthday about a week away from mine. How nice.

Newsy Schmoozy

The holidays are over, and the new year has begun. 2008 was a year I'll be happy to leave behind, although it was not without accomplishment. I had this studio post in January:


My studio now looks like this:



The reveal of my studio was posted under the title Studio Interior.

I did exhibit at the Bellevue ArtsFair 2008, which was my sixth year in Bellevue.

Another expansion of the *Klahn art empire* was participating in Tracy Helgeson's collaboration blog, The Fine Art Department. It led directly to the creation of my art-for-sale blog, Casey Klahn dot Blogspot. You might know that I have emphasized the blog-content side here at The Colorist, and have not really made it a big, commercial enterprise. Fair warning, that will be one thing changing for 2009! I am a big believer in capitalism, and I will be looking for new ways to monetize my blogger life. Adverts? Probably not. Product endorsements? Possibly- I have already done this a few times. I have a scheme to begin blogging for commercial entities, but that won't involve the happy land here at The Colorist.

For no reason I can possibly imagine, my post about my fiftieth birthday went ballistic in the Stat Counter. Is it me? Michael Jackson? I think it's Donny, but you be the judge. Again, for the record, I don't share the exact birthday with either Donny Osmond or Michael Jackson, but we share the same age. Well, it turns out that Michael and I are only a few days apart...

Most memorable in blogging was my series on Artist's Traits, which had a great and rewarding response from my readership. The traits of Commitment, Courage, Creative Integrity, Decisiveness, Excellence, Generosity, Knowledge and Self Understanding provide a foundation for my goals this next two years. I am going to work in a biennial format because I have some tough challenges looking forward, and I want to fit my expectations into a realistic outline. BTW, the impetus for thinking about traits before goals came from Alyson Stanfield, the ArtBizCoach.

Finally, I don't want to forget the support I have received from the Karlson/Gray Gallery in Langley, where my sales have been very heartening. I don't underestimate the bedrock value of my collectors to my artistic pursuits. I want to encourage the gallery owners who do find their way to this blog to contact me, as I need more gallery representation.

My final words on 2008:

Future Perfect?

The only thing perfect in the future may be the second coming of the Lord Jesus. All else is shifting sand, as the old hymn declares. Looking back on this past year, I never could have predicted the events that transpired in my artist life. What will transpire in the next year?

I do know the directions that my art will take in the near future. You guessed it: more color! I hear the voice of Tim Allen (Tim the Tool Man) growling, "What this baby needs is more COLOR!!! Awroooh-arrwrr!" My heart and soul is still going that way, and I have yet to discover the last color composition that my pigments have to offer.

New hope abounds for me, especially since the new art studio is suddenly "up", as they say in the mechanic's shop. Not "up & running" yet, though. The running of my new studio will have to be configured on a dream and a prayer. I haven't been in a regular studio pattern for months. Somehow, a lifetime of art habits will have to push to the front again. A little discipline probably wouldn't hurt, either.

I am thankful that my little kids are growing bigger and have interests that only their young childhoods can contain. Somehow I have to shoe-horn in a studio schedule that works on a weekly basis. I can't wait until next year when they will both be at the elementary school and I will have some full days out of the house (and across the yard in the mega-studio).

New opportunities abound. There will be new gallery contacts and the development of the one's I already have. I want to budget for a web designer to take my web site to the next level, since it has started bringing in contacts for me. More artistic development for me in the direction of the figure is at hand.

At The Colorist, my main goal is to tighten-up my writing and themes. The reason for this is that I want to try another self-published book based on the blog and on my Colorist Art. And, I feel that better threads or topics more fully developed may make a difference in the "information overload" environment of the blog world.

The posting of art should become more frequent. I am in negotiations with my photographer to develop a permanent system in the new studio for taking the images.

Interactivity will increase for this blog in the coming year. Do you want to participate in a guest post? Others have pioneered the idea of allowing a guest blogger to have their day in the sun, and I like that idea. The only guidance, I think, will be to fulfill the themes of the Colorist. Perhaps a group of Colorist artists may develop in the near future.

Admin: Thanks to Alyson Stanfield for tagging me. I will be writing my "5 things about me you don't know" in the near future.

Tilt!

Winter
10.5" x 7.5"
Soft Pastel
Casey Klahn

Before the era of the personal computer, we used to describe being overloaded by yelling: "tilt!" It had something to do with arcade games. And, it describes my artist's life at the moment. Gallery show in a month, magazine interview, slide deadlines, electricity projects in my new studio and in my home at the same time, winter storms coming through, and on and on.

Yesterday we were sans the Internet due to weather, and also had a blackout for a couple of hours. Just when I had to change into wool socks, the lights came back on.

On the near horizon in blogland, I want to offer the following content:

Northwest School artists, such as Tobey and Callahan
Drawing book reviews of the Classical Drawing Atelier and Figure Drawing, Anthony Ryder
Drawing projects in my Moleskine and also "Cast" studies of my deer skull collection
A whole separate list for Pastel
The Colorist 1-year Anniversary

Meanwhile, my "Link Farm" experiment is going very well with the Art Link Letter generating page loads and Technorati authority like a charm. But don't worry, I still intend to offer content worthy of your readership. As a for instance, the artwork posted today is posted at this blog for the first time.

Poll Results

Quickly, the results of last week's content poll are, so far, an even spread for the following three subjects:

1. Colorist Art
2. Casey Klahn's Art
3. Pastel

I want to thank the readers for this input, and it gives me a great start in my search for what to continue to write about here at The Colorist.