Exhibition of Artists' Sketchbooks

The Fogg Museum at Harvard University has an interesting online exhibition, "Under Cover : Artists' Sketchbooks". On their website, they note that "Artists have used sketchbooks for centuries, entrusting travel sketches, figure studies, compositional ideas, and notes of every kind to their pages. Designed to be easily portable, sketchbooks are often kept in a pocket, and offer an unusually personal glimpse of the artist at work."

The Fogg Museum has a collection of 150 sketchbooks, and the online exhibition features 10 of them, including sketchbooks owned by John Singer Sargent, Jacques-Louis Divid, and Edward Burne-Jones.

You can see the online exhibition here:

 http://www.artmuseums.harvard.edu/sketchbooks/

Egg Pop

One of my books has just been featured in another online publication, PopMatters, an international popular culture blog. This time, it's my edible book, made from eggs, fruit leather, and coffee beans, called "Breakfast of Champions." I was really pleased that they wanted to use a photo of my book to accompany this article on the International Edible Book Festival. Those eggs are really going places -- kind of an egg and fruit leather road show! :)

Taking good photos of your work

Myhandboundregistry recently featured a couple of photos of my books in an article on how to effectively crop photos of your work. I was really pleased, as I've worked hard over the last two years to improve my book photos, and apparently it actually paid off! :D

Etsy seller Doodlage, who wrote the article, is a graphic designer, and the article has some great tips on making your photos stand out. If you're looking for some photo help, the article is called "Who Made the Cut? Photo Cropping Tips From a Graphic Designer" and you can find it here.

To give you an idea of how my photos have evolved, below is one of the first photos I took of my books, and after that, a recent book photo.

As you can see, the this early one had it all: dark, harsh lighting, fuzzy, bad angle, bad cropping. Yikes!

This is a recent one. Still plenty of room for improvement, but getting better (I hope!). I used natural light, a more neutral background, and cropped the photo so you can see the details:

Here are links to a few more articles on taking good photos of your work. Some of them are for Etsy sellers, but the principles apply to any kind of smaller item photography:

http://www.wikihow.com/Create-an-Inexpensive-Photography-Lightbox

http://www.boo.myzen.co.uk/artisan.html

http://www.etsywiki.com/index.php?title=Photographing_items#Photographing_small_items

And here are a couple of links to free photo editing software:

http://www.picnik.com/

http://picasa.google.com/