Clovis Art Guild Newsletter October 2012

Clovis Art Guild

Oct

The Oldest and Best art Association in the Valley

www.clovisartguild.com

2012

Next meeting is Wednesday Oct 10, 2012 7:00 p.m.

Clovis Veteran’s Memorial Building, 808 4th Street, Clovis CA

OFFICERS

THIS MONTH WE WILL BE DOING A HANDS ON

Presidents Pro

WITH A LIVE MODEL

Tem

Please bring your own painting, drawing or photographic materials. We will be setting up tables for you to work. The model will do at least 2 poses.

Gail Daley

PICK OF THE MONTH Pick of the Month is the Guild’s way of supporting our members efforts.

We need at least 7 paintings to award 3 places, so please participate!

We’d like to see what you’ve been working on! So don’t forget to bring your art to the meeting! Classwork is acceptable too.

1st Place Mike McMullin

2nd Place June Livingston

We will be voting on pick of the year at the October meeting, so if you won a 1st place during the year, please bring in your art. If the art is not available, you may bring a photo of the art. February --- David Dalgety, March -- Ma Ly, April -- Julianne Smith, May -- David Dalgety, June -- Barbara Hamel, July -- Barbara Hamel, August, Andrea Thatcher, September -- Mike McMullin

You can download a copy of the Fall Veteran’s Show prospectus at our web site: www.clovisartguild.com

Gene Butler

Vice President Toni Magyar

Secretary Barbara Hamel

Treasurer Alice Sutton

INSIDE THIS ISSUE: Storefront Art Gallery

1

Vet Show Announcement

1

Pick Of The Month

1

President’s Message

2

Guest Columnist JD Grimes

NEXT EXCHANGE FOR OUR STOREFRONT GALLERY WILL BE MONDAY, NOV 5, 2012 @ 5:00 P.M. THIS DISPLAY WILL BE UP UNTIL JANUARY AND WE ARE ENCOURAGING EVERYONE TO BRING IN CHRISTMAS THEME ITEMS OR ITEMS THAT COULD BE SOLD AS GIFTS.

Internet Keyword Usage 4 Art

2&3

Officers & Committees

4

Membership Application

4

President’s Message 2012 in review: it was a pretty good year all told, although we were very sad to lose Dottie Arave who had been a mainstay of the club for many years. Dottie was a talented artist who always made the time and effort to support the Guild. For many years she handled Pick of the Month (our informal monthly art contest) and did a wonderful job.

Over Christmas we participated in the Clovis 100 year centennial first by sponsoring a Christmas tree to which we donated ornaments. Our theme was “an old fashioned Christmas). Then members put up art in the VIP room at Sierra Vista Mall when the centennial committee held its reception. We were able to continue with our window gallery at Sierra Vista Mall through the holidays and hope to be able to do the same this year.

All three of our shows did respectably well with entries and again our Miniature Works show sold art from the window gallery at the Mall. Our art receptions for the Old West Show and the Veteran’s show were well attended, although we could have used more artists showing up to receive their awards. We also started a picture scrapbook for the Old West and Veteran’s shows which can be downloaded from our website.

Gene Butler has done a wonderful job with our scholarship program and Central Valley Community bank has consented to sponsor this program so we can encourage young artists from local high schools at both the Old West and Veteran’s shows. We began the 2012 year with a positive balance of about $1,500 in our checking account and of about $1,200 in our savings account.

Although October will be our last official meeting, there will be one more newsletter in 2012 to announce the results of the Veteran’s Art Show.

This year the newsletter began running a series of guest articles on copyright which everyone appreciated, and were followed up by guest articles from some of our demonstrators. We hope to be able continue to provide our members with more articles on art techniques, internet and business tools in the coming year. We also started our own web site www.clovisartguild.com – many thanks to Ma Ly for stepping in and becoming our web master.

Clovis also has its own e-mail address now: ClovisArtGuild@att.net.

In February, March, April, and May our demonstrations were very well attended with many artists who brought in lots of art for Pick of the Month. Sadly, that attendance fell off drastically during June, July, and August when the hot weather kept a lot of artist’s home hiding under the air conditioners!

I’m looking forward to a great year in 2013 and I hope you are also!

Gail

Clovis Art Guild

Page 2

IMPROVING KEYWORDING FOR YOUR ART TO FIND BUYERS ON THE INTERNET

by JD Grimes Reprinted with permission from the Artist’s website Fine Art America. (see link below) http://jdg.artistwebsites.com/index.html J.D. Grimes is a teenage nature photographer, who lives on a

farm near Annapolis, Maryland (USA). He enjoys capturing the beauty of God's creation in his photographs, especially in the small, sometimes overlooked things. He is a bornagain Christian, and gives God the glory for the natural beauty captured in his photographs, and his artistic talent.

I am not a keyword expert, but over the last few weeks I have been doing some research to try to improve my keywording on FAA (Fine Art America). I know that many others will find these tips helpful, so here they are. Feel free to comment or add your own tips when you visit my site.

Redundancy Did you know that some keywords are redundant? FAA (Fine Art America) automatically adds certain keywords, and if you add them too, you are actually just wasting space. Some redundant words include: photo, photos,photograph,photographs,print,prints,photography,posters,painting,pi cture,greeting cards.

FAA adds all of these words automatically where they are applicable. In other words, FAA automatically describes the type of work it is. It knows whether it is a photo or a painting. You do not need to describe the medium of your work with these words. FAA does that for you. The only thing you need to describe is the contents of your work. I was surprised to see that in fact these are popularly used keywords, as can be seen on the Popular Keywords page on FAA. By the way, this can be a great resource for keyword ideas. Remember though, that these are not the most searched keywords, these are the words most used by artists in tagging their work. Just to prove my point about the above keywords being redundant, I will give you a few examples of what happens when you use them to search. If you type “j.d. grimes photos” in the search on FAA, you will get my page http://fineartamerica.com/art/photographs/ j.d.+grimes/all. It displays all of my work, because they are all photographs, even though I have not added this word to my recent uploads. It automatically selects the medium “photographs” because I included “photos” in the search words. Now let me show you what would happen if I search for “paintings” I get the message Page Not Found because I am not a painter and so did not include these words on my page .

Some notes on the popular keywords page on FAA: Remember that this is the most used tags, not the most searched. So although many of them are good tags to use, you also want to use other similar tags that are not so popular with the artists but which people may search for. One way to find other similar words to use is to use a site like this one. This one apparently does not do nouns, so it really won’t be much help for me. http://www.synonym.com/ Each word only needs to be used once! This can be a good thing to remember if you are running out of space. Each word needs to be used only once for your image to come up in a search for that word. You do not need to use the same word twice in different phrases. Each word is stored as just a word in the database. The only purpose of the commas is to separate the words for making the keyword search links that appear under your image on the page for that image. They have no other purpose, and do not affect the search. So save space by using each word only once. This is straight from Sean (FAA’s creator) somewhere in the discussions, and if you doubt it you can test it yourself, as I already have. I think using a word multiple times may actually cause your image to be sent to the back of the search results

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October 2012

Clovis Art Guild

on an external engine. (I don’t remember whether external engines have access to the keywords or not, but I think they do. I will find out for sure soon).

Synonyms Another thing that is good to remember is that some things are treated as synonyms on both the internal and external search engines. By using only one of the phrases, you save space for other keywords. An example of two synonyms is “close-up” and “close up”. You only need to add “close up” in your keywords in order to come up in a search for “close-up” too. Here is an example. I did not add “close-up” to these images, only “close up”.

Search for J.D. grimes crocus close-up In other words, you do not need to add the hyphenated versions of phrases for your image to be found. Also, “u.s.a.” is synonymous with “u s a”.

No Spaces Another way to save space is to omit spaces between your phrases. Example: flower, flowers, wildflower, flower,flowers,wildflower. In this way you save spaces when you need them. Many of you may have no fear of using up the entire 500 character limit in the keywords. But your aim should be to use every single character. Add every keyword that you can think of to describe your image. That is the only way that people will find you on the internal search.

Themed Lists Keywording can take time, and remembering all of the appropriate words to add can be difficult. A good way to save time and ensure that all of the proper words are added to your image is to create themed keyword lists that you can simply copy and paste into the keyword box.

Keywording (continued from page 2) Here is how to build keyword lists What you need to include: Your name. Including your name is not always necessary, but is usually a good idea. Some people realize that if you search for your name on FAA, all of your images will be displayed whether you have added it to your keywords or not. But this is only true when you search for your full name. But if someone only remembers your last name, they will not find you through the artwork search on FAA unless it is in your keywords. (They can through the artist search if they now how). Also, I always include my name “j.d. grimes” in the keywords, because otherwise you will not find my name unless you search for “jd grimes”. By adding “j.d. grimes” you will now find me by searching for “jd grimes” (even though I don’t have “jd” in my keywords) “j.d. grimes” or “j d grimes” or just “grimes”. You would not find me on the latter three searches on FAA unless I had “j.d. grimes” in my keywords.

Words describing the contents of the image. For a photo of a flower, I have this list: j.d. rimes,flower,flowers,flora,floral,bloom,blooms,blossom,blossoms,blooming,blossoming,flowering,plant,plants,botanical,nature, natural beauty. Other words would be applicable given various different situations. Where was the flower growing? You could add “garden”, or “woods”, etc. Don’t forget to include plurals. Don’t just put “flower” for a photo of a flower. Add the word “flowers” too. If someone is searching for images of flowers, they are likely to type in “flowers” even if they want an image with only one flower in it.

The names of the objects contained in the image. If you have a photo of a car, don’t just put car, put the type of car. For the example of the flower above, I would add the common and Latin names. Many times a species may be known by multiple common names, so try to add as many of these as possible.

The colors in the image. If your flower is yellow, add yellow to the keywords. Add all prominent colors in the image, especially those of the subject.

Where. Add where a photo was taken. Add the country, province, and also the city especially when some aspect of the image is recognizable as from a certain place, such that someone who lived there would recognize it. Some people like to have photos taken in their state or near their city.

The color format of the image. Is it in color or black and white? Note that in the keywords. Don’t forget to always add both the American and International (British) spellings of color: color, colour.

Other. Among other things, you should always add the words “close ups,closeups,closeup,close up” to your close-up images. Add “extreme” and “macro” when appropriate. Another thing that you may want to add to your keywords is the physical format of the image. Is it vertical format, horizontal format, square, panoramic, etc. Adding appropriate words like these can be useful. I always tack these words on the end, because although there is a way to have the internal search filter according to whether an image is square, vertical, or horizontal, without using keywords, people may not know to use that. So I add these on the end in case I run out of space.

Making your lists If you take a lot of wildflower photos like I do, you will want a list that would apply to any wildflower image that you would upload.

Remember to always title your keyword lists so that you will know what list applies to what sort of image. Never put words in a themed list that would not apply to every image that you would upload which would fit that theme.

Here is the order that I do my lists in: 1. my name 2. Image contents 3. Names of objects contained in the image 4. Colors 5. Where 6. Color format of the image 7.

Close-up 8. Physical format of the image 1, 2. Here is how I do my lists. First, I have my themed lists that describe the contents of the image. Like the example I gave for a flower image above. I always simply include my name on the beginning of these lists for convenience. 3. I am going to make separate lists to add after these with the common and Latin names of the species in my nature photos. 4. Next I manually add in the colors. 5. I have separate “where” lists that I paste in next. 6, 7, 8. Next I copy and paste from other separate lists for different combinations of color, physical, and close-up format. Examples: vertical,color,colour,close ups,closeups,closeup,close up,sepia,vertical horizontal,color,colour,close ups,closeups,closeup,close up,sepia, horizontal I do not copy the entire list, only the applicable part of it. Obviously I have some other combinations, these two are just examples.

Note that unfortunately you cannot see how many characters you have used up when copying and pasting into the keyword box.

That is why you should add things in order of importance. Also, don’t forget to add detailed descriptions, because the external search engines search your description too. Here is the Tutorial on Keywording and Descriptions for FAA. It is not as detailed as this, but I thought some might find it helpful.

If you wish to submit an item for the newsletter, please do so by the 25th of the month. Items should be sent to Gail Daley at:

OFFICERS & COMMITTEES PRESIDENT PRO TEM PRESIDENT PRO TEM VICE PRESIDENT SECRETARY TREASURER PROGRAM CHAIR PUBLICITY MEMBERSHIP PICK OF THE MONTH NEWSLETTER REFRESHMENT BARGAIN TABLE GREETER SUNSHINE CO-CHAIR STUDENT PROGRAM STOREFRONT ART GALLERY WEB SITE MANAGER

GAIL DALEY GENE BUTLER TONI MAGYAR BARBARA HAMEL ALICE SUTTON JULIANNE SMITH GLYNMARY BATEMAN ALICE SUTTON JACKIE MCCOY/MARY ANN FERSTL GAIL DALEY JEANNE NAITO SHIRLEY LINDGREN JOHN ROBERTS HILDA VANDERGRIFF SHARON GARCIA GENE BUTLER GAIL DALEY MA LY

960-2428 275-4304 299-0690 298-0984 787-2386 323-8496 787-2386 787-2451 960-2428 255-2146 255-0826 322-6186 322-6557 294-9626 275-4304 960-2428

ClovisArtGuild@att.net Or mailed to: 5688 E Sussex Way Fresno, CA 93727

GENERAL MEETINGS ARE THE 2ND W EDNESDAY OF EACH MONTH (EXCEPT NOV, DEC, AND JAN) IN THE VETERAN’S MEMORIAL BUILDING, 804 4TH STREET, CLOVIS CA. BOARD MEETINGS ARE THE 2ND WEDNESDAY OF EACH MONTH BEFORE THE GENERAL MEETING, AT 5:30 P.M. IN THE VETERAN’S MEMORIAL BUILDING, 804 4TH STREET, CLOVIS CA. MEMBERS ARE ENCOURAGED TO ATTEND.

Membership application MAIL Name __________________________________________________________ Address ________________________________________________________ ___________________________________CA _________________

THIS APPLICA-

TION WITH

$30.00

CLOVIS ART GUILD PO BOX 1594 CLOVIS, CA 93613

Phone ____________ _____________________________ E-Mail _______________________________________@__________________________________________

Clovis Art Guild PO Box 1594 Clovis, CA 93613

To:

TO