Archive for September, 2007

GRRRRRR! I have had soo much hassle with internet access the last few days… I am with Fast 4, who we went with because we didn’t want to get tied into a contract. However, they still want to charge us a cancellation fee. WHATS THE POINT OF NOT HAVING A CONTRACT THEN? Its broken so many times now its not even funny. I’d rather not have a lot of things than internet. Not having internet really sucks when you are a web designer!

Anyway, onto the real post: A lot of my friends are excellent illustrators or animators etc, but don’t really know alot about web design and what is possible.
I made this blog using wordpress, and most of the rest of the site is powered by the features and plug ins that wordpress has to offer. It takes a while and a lot of research to develop and find all of the things that you might need to make your plain wordpress blog into a portfolio so I thought I would gather the knowledge that I have together and present it in an easy to digest blog post. lol. It isn’t easy to make a portfolio in wordpress, but its better. You can update your site from where ever you are in the world quickly and easily without having to have any knowledge of html, new pages are dynamically generated and if you need to make a change you can just make it in the one place.

You can get a free wordpress account from http://www.wordpress.com, but you don’t have any control over how it looks or the plugins that you can use with it. However its very quick and easy to set up and update. There are many themes available for you to choose from although you don’t have any control over it beyond that.

I used the installed version of wordpress which you can get from http://www.wordpress.org. There are so many possibilities with wordpress, it has been in development for a long time and the updates are regular, so it is pretty secure. It comes with Akismet spam blocker, which is great. I have not once had a dodgy bit of spam through, its blocked all the sex comments etc.

Anyway, here are the other plugins that I have used or I think are worth using in a portfolio.

1. Next Gen Gallery- The support for this is amazing, alex rabe seems to be the kind of guy who wants to take peoples suggestions into account to make it better. Its easily the best gallery plugin out there, and it works extremely well.
2. Word tube- For embedding media files, flash, streaming videos, pngs etc. Its by the same guy as next gen gallery.
3. Comicpress- a really easy to install theme for people who are interested in using their blog to publish web comics.
4. WordBook- A great way of getting traffic to your site from your friends on facebook
5. Sociable- Make it easy for your viewers to tag your site through delicious or stumble upon and many others.
6. BloxPress- Really nifty web 2.0 style drag and drop boxes… and its degradeable! I might have used this if I was starting from scratch, but plugging it in later seems like a bad idea coz it might mess with it a bit.
7. Yak- Yak is a shopping cart for wordpress. I have recently installed it, but its a bit complicated. So depending on whether or not it appears here over the next few weeks is probably whether or not its worth it. Otherwise you can use up another database and use Zencart.

Anyway, if anyone has any questions about making a wordpress portfolio, then I’ll be happy to answer anything or enhance this post so that its more useful. Also if you are thinking of going with fast4 internet. Don’t.

This weeks illustration friday theme is wedding. I had 2 ideas, neither of which are finished, but its late thursday night and I know that they won’t see the light of day if I don’t post them up and it will all have been a waste of time.

The first one is a sketch idea, there was also a girl kneeling down resting her forehead on his big nose crying, but I deemed that sketch not worthy of the monster yet. I think it might make a nice illustration still so I am still going to do it.

The second one is a big photoshop brushes playground lol. I’d love to make the lighting a bit better and the dress more complete. But I have run out of time now. So here it is… unfinished for your eyes only. I am such a secret perfectionist I’ll probably end up deleting it from here after a few days! lol. (Just until I get to finish it)

Wow, 2 posts in a Day! Compared to my once every six months thats an improvement!

I found Mojizu today. Its awesome, its got lots of cool characters by lots of crazy people. You have a profile like myspace and you submit your characters to be voted on. I just got myself a profile, and I am going to submit atomic bunny and some of my other characters to see what people think. I’ll post them up here when I get them and you guys can vote on them if you want!

Here is the moji I submitted first, its Atomic Bunny!

AtomicBunny
by Landofpaintedsky
on MojiZu

Atomic Bunny is currently undergoing the 3d treatment by Woody, and we are hoping to get him 3d printed this week. He looks a million times better in 3d trust me But in the mean time if you could see your way to voting for him kindly that would be nice. Hes a dangerous bunny to mess with.

Illustration Friday this week was called Alphabets. I think I could get addicted to IF .

Every morning, I like to do a quick sketchy thing to get my brain working and I’ve been really wanting to do some hand studys, but not particularly realistic, Sarah style and mega quick so I get those crazy sketchy lines. So this gave me an excuse, I found the american sign alphabet, rather than the english one because it only uses one hand and that looks nicer.