LOTS happened!

Ahhh, so much to say!

It's been a very busy few months, but the last few weeks especially have some major milestones in my creative career.

Back on the 18th July I joined the "Portobello Market, London" group of the Worldwide Photowalk. I had a brilliant time, photographing people as much as I could as it was an area I knew I was wary of. It felt much safer doing so on a day where lots of other photographers were off doint the same thing, especially in an area like Portobello Market which is PACKED with tourists and shoppers on a Saturday. My portfolio of shots from the day is found here on Flickr.

At the end, we could pick two images to enter into the associated competition, and each walk leader then picks one photo from their group selection which they submit to the next "round". Imagine my surprise when my photo was picked!

I was really proud of my photo, I call her "Purple lady". She was a stall holder, aware her photo was taken as it would surely have been hundreds of times a year by various visitors to London passing through. The instant I took it I knew I loved it. The composition and colours from the view on the camera just made me "know" it was my favourite, and luckily viewing it on the PC later didn't change that. Phew!

Well, some time later, and the winners were announced of the Worldwide round - nearly 900 entries, whittled down by Scott Kelby to 11, one overall winner and 10 runners up. I scrolled down his blog page and got the shock of my life... there was my Purple lady, a runner up! Hee made the following comments about it:

"When I look at this image, I just want to know her story. She looks like she’s led a fascinating life, and has amazing stories to tell. I love the flower in her hair, the look on her face, and the wonderful lighting. I even love the coffee cup—it all adds to the story. The colors work so well together and the composition is spot on. The shot, and the subject, have an awful lot of character. I wish I had taken it."

Ahhhhh!!! Amazed!

Surely that's all? Well no... on a slightly less grand scale, but equally important to me, I was contacted by a guy called Chad who was interested in using my Phoenix Rising From The Smoke image for his band's album cover. My image has a Creative Commons license, so although that technically gives permission for others to use, I love that people contact me too. I like hearing from others, especially if they're interested in using my work. Long story short, I'd offered my services to clean up the image and edit it to their album cover idea and so after a few weeks of emailing back and forth, we reached a result him and the band were pleased with. I really enjoyed working on it, frustrating at times, but exhilarating doing it for someone else. It meant a new dimension when looking at my work, it wasn't just for me, it had to fit the needs of others and I had to interpret the brief given.

I hope the guys go far, check out their Myspace page here - good luck Paradigm Shift, p.s. remember me when you're famous! ;)

Then, finally, there's the ongoing story from my last blog post about the DVD cover. Again, email correspondence to discuss the design and make a few amendments to better suit the product. All source images used were checked for commercial use, and only a few days ago through the post came my own copy of the DVD - complete with cover using my design.

It's been a very, very busy time lately! As a result I decided it was about time I fixed my site properly to make it a portfolio... and after weeks of struggling with a layout I finally reached a point where I could update the URL with the new version. Still needs the "projects" page - where I'll describe some of the progress with commercial endevours, but for the moment I'm pleased to have a better place to show off my work.

The new Sarahg.co.uk - available here!

Anyone else out there wanting to work with me? Please get in touch :)

Update update update

Update needed! Really. Sorry about that - the world has been a bit busy recently!

With weather being an unusual variety of heatwave for England, it's been heavy heads trying to work through daily tasks. That's not to say nothing has been done, quite the opposite. In the last month I've been working on designing a website for a friend/colleague, as well as some examples of stationery designs which could be of use. This resulted in a neat little payoff which I plummetted in my usual style into other things, notably some more mini easels which work beautifully to display small canvases. My first ever mini canvas painting of a cheery giraffe was recently listed on Etsy.com, testing the water... and shock horror it SOLD!


Amazed, not only money for design work but also an artist. Together with the cover credit for a photoshopped image which was seen on Flickr by a Dutch production company who approached me wondering if they'de be allowed to use it for a cover of their DVD, well it's all a blur.

Would quite like more hours in the day to get everything done, I'm a little behind in my photoshopping, and with the weather so warm the oil paintings have been put on hold (too sticky to concentrate on painting) - but am still keeping up with the daily Flickr photos which at the very least means I'm doing a bit of editing daily.

Finally, the 50th issue of Photoshop Creative is now out, and at least I managed to enter a pic on their "50" theme which got printed, see it on Flickr here.

All in all, I'm feeling a bit more positive about all this design & art work. If only I could make it a bit more of my main income...

Website v2.0

Since the last post I got my hands on a copy of "Serif Internet Design Suite 2009" to test thanks to a friend.  Perfect for testing on the old laptop which only has the power of a handful of hamsters and can't handle the big flashy fancy programs.   To test it properly I tried to recreate my first website idea from scratch.  Serif IDS 2009 requires no knowledge of coding or html, and works entirely on a DTP format to move and adjust images and boxes, and was quick to get used to and the results were impressive and looked sleek.  Once ready, you then "generate" the website by publishing it either to disk (where it saves on your PC as the html files and attachments) or direct to web.

I saved mine to disk, as I wanted to see how it all looks from the inside, curiosity may have killed the cat, but I'm human - just about.   The deisgn is clean, and very easy to use for someone unfamiliar with web design, however since I like to tinker with it all I found one issue.  It creates copies of all picture files, and names them with its own random alphanumeric code.  Should I want to replace an image I'd started off with called house.jpg, it would have probably been generated out as wp0177tu90.png.  Not a massive issue, but when it also generates every coloured background rectangle or shape from within the web site as its own .png, you quickly end up with so many image files you've no idea where to begin.

On the positive side, the resulting website is very fast to create and so I'm using the Serif generated site as the one linked to my domain.  Personally I want more control over the web design and I've not yet tested it in various browsers, but when viewing it on my mobile it has issues displaying all the image files which is a pity as it means the menu (which saves out as images) isn't shown.

For the moment, it's a good basic site maker with plenty of easy to use functions and certainly something I will play more with, but it isn't the permanent answer unfortunately.

The hosted site can be found here: http://sarahg2.atspace.com

One small step for me, one giant leap for the future

At long last! The website is coming underway nicely. A hiccup in the CSS coding has finally been fixed thanks to help from a CSS-whiz friend. Overall it seems to be doing what I want now, and so I just need to adjust a couple of colours to make them easier to read and then it's down to the nitty gritty of actually putting proper content up.

As it stands, I'm going to put a bit of everything up, as I'd like to see what it looks like "full", but once it's all there and working I'll edit it down to the pieces I'm happiest with and prune out some of the less inspired moments of genius.

Now I'm at this stage, I'll hopefully get myself back into a bit of actual Photoshopping too. Finished off some ticket designs for a Motocross presentation dinner, so am in need of a new project to tackle.

Abracadabra.... Zoomify!

Progress update: The site now has content!

One picture, the self portrait, has been added with the aid of the "Zoomifier", which is a handy little export function in Photoshop that allows you to zoom in to picture on the site. This was mainly a test of what on earth it actually did, but it seems like a pretty cool little gizmo and for some pictures could be a quirky asset. I'll have to see how it looks once I get some other things up there, see if it looks cluttered or not. Time will tell...

One step closer to mastering CSS

Well I read the chapters, made notes from the book.. but never actually put it into the current site. UNTIL NOW! I worked out how to detach my CSS stuff and make it just attach to the pages instead of being within it, and then cleaned it all up by renaming the default style settings to things which made sense to me and updating links.

After a couple of hours of scratching my head, huffing and tapping away at the keyboard, I've managed to complete that stage of the project and the resulting webpage looks absolutely no different to before.  This is annoying.  I did add a link to this blog, but it hardly sums up the amount of effort I put into it - hey ho.

Next I need to work out the layout and make it more visually appealling. Oh, and add content. That'd be nice too.