New work and New features

Well I just posted new artwork to my Deviantart account and I have some new Ideas that I am kicking around for the Blog.

The largest of which is a featured Section. I want to get Ideas from around the Community and see what survival tips you have.

if you want to be reviewed for a feature Let me know on either

Twitter: @Surivethearts

Or

Email: Artschoolsurvival@gmail.com

Survival is an option
Alex

Question of the Week: Halloween Costumes

So with the halfway milestone quickly fading into the distance and the new semester quickly approaching the question for this week is simple.


What are you going to be for Halloween?

yeah pretty pic I know. If you got some great ideas let us know because I am sure there are a lot of people who still have no clue what their costumes for Halloween are going to be.

A Need to Feed.

Ok so here we are another great morning to be an student. Surviving is really difficult I find when you have no survival tools. So I am here to describe a great tool that some people might not know about it. It is called the RSS feed.

It is that little icon that to the right of my posts. Looks like 1/4 of three concentric circles. Yeah that is called an RSS Feed icon. RSS is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication. Basically it is a subscription service. It allows users to subscribe to a website,blog, or really anywhere that offers information that is updated like videos, news, posts, articles, photos and stuff like that.

The reason this is so helpful to us as art students is that it puts the knowledge of experts and professionals right at our fingertips. If you are a user of iGoogle (which I highly recommend) then your RSS feeds will post directly to your homepage ready to view at anytime.  These are all automatically updated whenever the site adds content, which means that you don't have to go looking all over the net to find that Typography tutorial you saw or the really awesome free vector pack. It will all be cataloged right in your Feed Reader ready to go.

Subscribing to these feeds is as easy as clicking on the Feed Icon on the site. It may come in a variety of shapes, sizes and colors but they all do the same thing. After you have clicked on it you then have to tell the feed where to go, kinda like your address on a magazine subscription. There are many places to put feeds. I already mentioned iGoogle but Windows Live, myYahoo and Newsgator all have Feed readers on them and they will help you tremendously.

I want to wrap up this Entry with a short list of some of the Feeds that I use and that have helped me to grow and keep up with all the craziness involved in surviving.

GoMediaZine - A great site that posts tutorials and articles that pertain to Graphic Design and illustration

Psdtuts+ - The Photoshop arm of the Tuts+ network of sites. They provide top notch tutorials from some the best in the industry.

Freelance Switch- Information on all of the ins and outs of freelancing

FreelanceFolder- Another great freelancing site. They literally wrote the book.\

Do any of you have any RSS feeds that you subscribe to? Let us know!

Survival is an option.

Laughter is the Best Medicine

Well sorry that it has been so long guys but I have been swamped with geuss what? Art work!! Yeah

It really isn't too bad but it does weigh on me sometimes. I was up until 3am a little while ago working on a project for 3D Design. Not the most fun but I think I am finding my groove. Last night I was working on a project that was a strict follower of Murphy's law. I was painting on foam-core/ foam board and I was going for a stone texture with a silver corner. My plan was originally to spray the entire piece silver and then mask, spray with texture, remove the tape and be done. But no the masking tape began to peel the silver off of my corners. The texture paint I found was detrimental to the structural integrity of foam board. It was peeling the upper layer of paper off of the foam center. It also somehow made my hot glue corrode and become nonadhesive. So I am in the middle of crunch time and my sculpture is falling apart. What do I do? I work through it and just let it go and laugh.

In class this morning I was tired and not really wanting to be there. But the only thing to do is find the best in the situation. How? Laugh. not any one thing in particular but just find your own humor. If I can lighten a mood then it helps everything go smoother and keeps the tension of a critique down.

So today do yourself a favor. Laugh.