pretty pinterest (plus viewer data algorthithms, plagiarism etc)

When buzz about pinterest first hit my ears it was in the form of housewives giddy over finding cool recipes, cleaning tips, crafty ideas, and exercise routines to obtain the perfect buttocks.  Not really my thing.

Then I got involved in the Geek Love anthology project and Shanna Germain invited me to begin pinning to the group boards there and Oh...! a whole new point to these pretty pins revealed itself. I joined up and jumped in and eventually began to make my own boards. (Shanna recently wrote here and here about creatives using pinterest for inspiration, collaboration, etc.) I used pinterest for collaboration again when I started work on the Glitter and Mayhem cover, Creating a joint pinterest board where John Kilma, Lynn Thomas and I could throw shiny stuff at each other as the anthology took shape.

Now let me combine that with something else that's in the back of my mind and I think it is connected: I'm thinking about the way we create. The rubbing of elbows, the sharing of ideas, the give and take (both with other artists as well as with our audiences.) We don't create in a vacuum and social media increases the white noise around your creation. I observe some illustrations I've done that I love with all my heart get very little response while others that I'm more ambivalent about get much more fanfare. It has me thinking of the way Netflix is using viewer data and algorithms to give viewers 'exactly what they want' and ereaders are tracking audience reading trends to 'help authors create even better books'. There's no judgement there, just something I think about. For someone trying to make a living at this, creating work that get's good public reactions is pretty important. On a slightly different track, here's a rather sobering and controversial foray into artistic plagiarism in the Heavy Metal art scene. Not sure how much that applies to the topic at hand, but it's on my mind quite a bit lately: I use inspiration and reference material from a wide assortment of places but want to make sure that the end creation is authentically mine and could never be accused of plagiarism.

Anyhow, back to pinterest. Yes, I do love it! All the pretty pretty things I can find there. Inspiration, new discoveries, other people's variations on similar ideas, a wider visual world all nice and neatly organized. (Sort of.) And yeah... I am even thinking of starting a board for recipies I want to try.

Meanwhile, here! Two things found just this morning on pinterest:

1) A new artist I am swooning over. Full Mano, embroiderer artist working in Paris. (More here.):

Embroidery altered photo by Full Mano

and 2) More delightful art from Ann Siems:

Messengers by Ann Siems.

Okay, that's all. Back to other stuff.