I am still doing designs for my Zazzle shop on a regular basis, but I have slowed down a bit as the site has so many glitches as if it was in Hyper-Beta.
These are my latest creations for Zazzle. Those designs are a combination of drawings and digital manipulations. The coloring of birds, house and wooden stump is taken from gouache sketches which I added as a second layer behind the drawings with Photoshop elements. Each of the elements can be re-arranged and modified in size by the shopper. zazzle is unique in that way compared to other POD sites which allow only one image on a design. I appreciate that I can experiment with many elements or images in one design and that the buyer can decide whether an element is used or not and to some extent also how it is used.

Zazzle has added a number of new products, among them porcelain dinner plates which are nice, but frankly I wish they would fix the bugs first.

Bird, bird house and trees, collage illustration on dinner plate ]]> http://www.draw-a-tree.com/2012/02/hippie-birdsday-a-fun-collage-postcard-with-songbird-and-birds-house/feed/ 0 http://www.draw-a-tree.com/2012/01/please-do-not-pin-my-images-to-pinnerspest-sorry-pinterest/ http://www.draw-a-tree.com/2012/01/please-do-not-pin-my-images-to-pinnerspest-sorry-pinterest/#comments Tue, 24 Jan 2012 16:05:01 +0000 Martin http://www.draw-a-tree.com/?p=1848 A new social media website is coming up. Pinterest.com gathers people and invites them to pin from the net to their virtual pinboards what they like and what they want to share.
Yes, the net is for extroverts and this is their latest gimmick.

What’s wrong with that, spoil sport?

With each pin the members of Pinterest create a copy of the image they want to swallow, or should one say hijack, for their pleasure and interest to their board, hence the pinterest.

Unfortunately they not only create an image copy, they also create it under a different file name and store it as upload under different url on the Pinterest servers. Such manners are usually identified as the trademarks of ordinary image theft.

If members would read the Pinterest terms of service they would notice that as they pin they represent and warrant that they either are the sole and exclusive owner of all content that they make available or have all rights, licenses, consents and releases that are necessary.

How they get these rights and consents without asking the copyright owners for permissions remains a secret though.

Pinterest themselves are so free not only to impose all consequences of copyright infringements on their members but also to reserve the right to do with the uploaded i.e. pinned content what they wish. More precisely according to their terms members give a worldwide, irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, royalty-free license, with the right to sublicense, to use, copy, adapt, modify, distribute, license, sell, transfer, publicly display, publicly perform, transmit, stream, broadcast, access, view, and otherwise exploit such Member Content only on, through or by means of the Site, Application or Services, to Pinterest.

No wonder that visual artists, graphic designers and other image creators and copyright owners are delighted to hear that their rights and property can be transferred to a third party with a mouse click by Lizzy Miller who enthusiastically collects pretty images without further notice to them and free of charge (of course).

Sorry that is not fair. Let’s leave Lizzy Miller alone she is innocent, by saying that we can avoid the less favorable word ignorant. Instead let’s be grateful for the professional promotion that professional bloggers, preferably from the design and creative department of the net, sprinkle with these image copies generously over the net by re-blogging, at best on Google blogger, which again creates an independent image copy on Google servers, or by smart hotlink.

OK, the terrific backlink that is said to be the grand reward and prize of fame for those not asked about copyright at all gets pretty much useless as the original source in the most cases is not traceable at all from the start or lost after dozens or re-pins. But at least the bloggers can attract more viewers and traffic to increase their Adsense and other revenues. The image source until then is completely lost, the subject can be taken as orphaned image then i.e. free to be used by everybody, which is another great achievement.

OK the Pinterest TOS explain that their service is only for non-commercial and personal use, but who wants to bother with such trifles?

Some fools like me! They write protest mails to Pinterest and disturb their coloured world of lovely and inspirational prettiness.

As time goes by some others such known as lawyers will show up and have their say, hopefully.

Until then I kindly ask you dear readers : Please don’t pin my images. Thank you!

For those who like a less sarkastic take on the issue I commend Pinning Pinterest: Copyright protection for photographers by Tara Bradford

Beginning of October last year I took a little commission work. A person who had grown up in a nearby rural village named Illingen and later emigrated into the mediterranean asked me whether I could do some pen drawings of her home place for her. I liked the idea, the place is close by and I could draw some architecture from life. Unfortunately I am making only very slow progress. What I had not considered was how early in the afternoon it gets dark here, especially after the clocks switched to winter time. There is hardly any time left in day light after I get out of the office these days. I am glad and lucky that my patron is so very patient. Meantime I have finished two of in total four drawings that I will prepare for print and sale as reproduction prints on Zazzle (my Zazzle shop.

I do a bit of Photoshop editing on these drawings. Mainly adjusting the brightness and “cleaning” the background paper. Depending on how many line work is on a sheet my scanner will deliver a brighter or bit darker paper. Therefore I will have to adjust the paper colour to the same in all drawings.

The new year began in drizzling rain and oil pastels. I sketched with the nice medium soft neo pastels by Caran D’ache. The 6 color set I have has no orange, so I used the soft orange from an oil pastel set I got from Sri Lanka (Link to Homerun company).

I spotted this plastic chair in our local vineyards. Some of the owners turn their property step by step into a micro holiday villa with car port and solar panels on the roof, most of these amendments are illegal. I prefer those traditional little wooden huts, which are the allowed version to store some tools etc. if necessary. As a matter of fact nobody needs such a hut and nobody would put valuable belongings in there.

Producing wine from these grapes is not very rewarding, especially not for people who do it as a hobby and have to deliver their harvest to the local winery. I once tasted one of those “raw” red wines based on the “Trollinger” grapes. It was an interesting experience so to speak, since I understood why the Romans added all kinds of spices and sugar to their wine.

The photographs are from 2010. On the 1st of January 2012 we had no snow but incredible 8°C .

If you compare the pictures of his exhibitions at Art Space Gallery, London you might find that his work gets more and more abstract. He is moving nearer and nearer to the abyss of abstraction and may be one day, if he steps a bit further into the wrong direction, he will fall and crash on Auerbach I guess.

After long last I finally did a video and filmed how I do my monotype prints without using a press. I mounted my mobile phone over the glass plate and then started the film function. I interrupted the recording two times. This simple monochrome print took about an hour to make and I compressed the process into a 10 minute time-lapse. Under normal working conditions I need 2-3 hours for a print.

The basic steps in this example are:

1. painting basic forms and tonalities, adding structures by removing excess liquid with tissue

2. drawing with black oil stick color and modifying the drawing with brush sticks or other tools

3. adding or improving darkest tonalities, spurting color dots with a bristle brush on the paper
Here is more information on monoytpe printmaking.

Over the last couple of months I have done simple ink drawings which I want to use in another book publication. Neglecting branches and foliage I recorded only the barcode patterns i.e. the distance between and the diameter of trunks in relation to each other at certain places in the woods. The images displayed here are digitally simplified versions of the original panorama drawings.
This pattern is indirectly used in forestry to estimate the volume of the standing timber.

A friendly reader mailed me two incredible text quotes, one from Sartre and one from Vaclav Havel, which I want to post here.

From Nausea by Sartre
“So I was in the park just now. The roots of the chestnut tree were sunk in the ground just under my bench. I couldn’t remember it was a root any more. The words had vanished and with them the significance of things, their methods of use, and the feeble points of reference which men have traced on their surface. I was sitting, stooping forward, head bowed, alone in front of this black, knotty mass, entirely beastly, which frightened me. Then I had this vision. It left me breathless. Never, until these last few days, had I understood the meaning of “existence.” […] We were a heap of living creatures, irritated, embarrassed at ourselves, we hadn’t the slightest reason to be there, none of us, each one, confused, vaguely alarmed, felt in the way in relation to the others. […] In the way, the chestnut tree there, opposite me, a little to the left. And I—soft, weak, obscene, digesting, juggling with dismal thoughts—I, too, was In the way. […]
The word absurdity is coming to life under my pen; a little while ago, in the garden, I couldn’t find it, but neither was I looking for it, I didn’t need it: I thought without words, on things, with things. Absurdity was not an idea in my head, or the sound of a voice, only this long serpent dead at my feet, this wooden serpent. [...] I understood that I had found the key to Existence, the key to my Nauseas, to my own life. In fact, all that I could grasp beyond that returns to this fundamental absurdity.”

From Letters to Olga by Vaclav Havel
“Again, I call to mind that distant moment in [the prison at] Hermanice when on a hot, cloudless summer day, I sat on a pile of rusty iron and gazed into the crown of an enormous tree that stretched, with dignified repose, up and over all the fences, wires, bars and watchtowers that separated me from it. As I watched the imperceptible trembling of its leaves against an endless sky, I was overcome by a sensation that is difficult to describe: all at once, I seemed to rise above all the coordinates of my momentary existence in the world into a kind of state outside time in which all the beautiful things I have ever seen and experienced existed in a total “co-present”; I felt a sense of reconciliation, indeed of an almost gentle assent to the inevitable course of events as revealed to me now, and this combined with a carefree determination to face what had to be faced. A profound amazement at the sovereignty of Being became a dizzy sensation of tumbling endlessly into the abyss of its mystery; an unbounded joy at being alive, at having been given the chance to live through all I have lived through, and at the fact that everything has a deep and obvious meaning— this joy formed a strange alliance in me with a vague horror at the incomprehensibility and unattainability of everything I was so close to in that moment, standing at the very “edge of the infinite”; I was flooded with a sense of ultimate happiness and harmony with the world and with myself, with that moment, with all the moments I could call up, and with everything invisible that lies behind it and has meaning. I would even say that I was somehow “struck by love”, though I don’t know precisely for whom or what.”

Both texts evoke pictures or imaginations from our memories of trees. The texts do not only evoke pictures they need them to come to existence and to be understood.

This monotype print of a street in Aix en Provence is the newest addition to my gallery. Here you can see the page with the acrylic print Aix en Provence with impressive details and the full description of the new product.