SEO etc

Spaceship Illustration, Early Stages in Inkscape

By The Illustrator  |  2010/02/26 02:27 Posted in Illustration, Inkscape, SEO etc, Spaceships  |  Comments (0)

I’m slowly – very slowly – getting on with stuff.

I’m adding vector shapes on top of one of my spaceship sketches, as I promised to do in an earlier post. I’ve already drawn about thirty shapes on to the sketch to represent such things as hull plates, greebles and other surface detail. I had the sketch zoomed in quite close as I was working on the spaceship image in Inkscape and when I zoomed out and I saw how much of the spaceship I still had to do with this first step, I got a little discouraged. It sure is time consuming to illustrate this way, but I’m hoping the final effect of a nice detailed vector illustration of this spaceship design will be worth the effort.

The new-look Starbright site, with clean white gallery like design to better show off my illustrations and designs, has also been getting some attention. It now has three pages. It is taking longer than I thought because I have to familiarise myself with yet another new app.

I was using Yahoo Site Builder on my old Windoze machine – but of course that died, so I had to find a free open-source alternative that would play nice with Linux.

Happily I found one and now I’m getting to grips with Kompozer. Kompozer is quite a simple WYSIWYG web editor, but the simplicity might well turn out to be an advantage. It is so difficult to use whiz-bang effects and all-singing-and-dancing Flash elements that the pages I’m creating are very small and quick loading. According to a lot of the SEO advice I have read, that can only be a good thing.

OK with my daily blog posting duties done, it’s time to get back to drawing little pink polygons onto my spaceship.

New cleaner look for the Starbright Illustrations scifi art site

By The Illustrator  |  2010/02/24 16:13 Posted in GIMP, Illustration, SEO etc, Spaceships  |  Comments (0)

As I mentioned in my last post, all the science fiction sketches, designs, art, 3D renders and illustrations have always been the most popular element of both the Starbright Illustrations main site and the Starbright Illustrations blog. It seems that now might be a great time to refocus the site towards this sort of work, to make the site more unified and understandable, but hopefully still vibrant, varied and interesting.

As part of this process I’ve been redesigning the site to have a white background, simpler layout and new logo. The first of these new-design pages is taking shape here. I’ creating the pages in Kompozer, and one of the advantages of using such a simple app is that it creates nice simple web pages that download quickly. At lest they should download quickly as long as I keep my eye on the sizes of all the images I’m creating. When I remember I use the Save foe Web extension for GIMP to make sure the illustrations are as small as possible.

Installing it was a bit of an effort with Mandriva Linux however. I remember with the old Windoze machine – before it died – all I had to do was drop the extension into the right GIMP folder. With Linux I had to download extensions to my operating system and type in different lines of code, using Google to look up how to react to the error messages that were spat out in a little black window when the extension repeatedly failed for various esoteric reasons.

But as soon as the new look has spread across the site a little, it’ll be straight back to sketching spaceships and other bits of sci-fi hardware and working these designs into completed illustrations.

Timewasting on the FarmVille online flash game from FaceBook and a fresh look at Office Live

By The Illustrator  |  2009/12/07 20:07 Posted in Illustration, Online Game, Review, SEO etc  |  Comments (0)

I’m still playing with FarmVille.

FarmVille is a flash based game you can play from a link in Facebook.

The stupid game is quite addictive, and I find myself spending quite long periods of time just staring at the thing of beauty that is my farm. I’m quite desperate for more money, and I’m also finding myself making stupid short term decisions to get more cash, just like a real farmer. Here in the picture I have just taken part of the animals grazing meadow over to plant strawberries, because they grow quickly and I can have the money in only a couple of hours. Most other crops take days to grow, and I want to make some progress now.

The gentle pastel coloured art work is a big factor in coming back to FarmVille over and over again and I hope it will actually be an influence on my own art practice, as proper artists call it, over the coming months that I will undoubtedly spend playing this terribly addictive game.

I’ve also been doing a lot of work on my Spiralcat.co.uk website. Spiralcat was always very much a mixed bag and I never thought I would be particularly going back to this site after starting my new Starbright site dedicated to illustration and art. The site is provided as part of Microsoft’s Office Live suite of products and although it is free, it has to be created online using their own site creation software. The last time I had used this software there were just too many bugs in it and too many compromises that had to be made in the design of the website. Microsoft sent me an email recently pleading with me to give it another go however and so I stopped by to see what had changed.

And to be honest not much has changed, it is still an unresponsive and tricky interface, but just enough had been improved for me to now decide that it is worth taking it seriously. For instance I now have control over the colour scheme of my site rather than having to chose from about seven pregenerated schemes, as was the situation before.

So I’m busy sorting out the navigation bar, changing the colour scheme and adding a favicon. It’ll be looking like a real website soon, that someone might charge money for, and that’s a good thing because from the end of next year that’s exactly what Microsoft intend to start doing.

So here is Spiralcat with all the art, good writing and entertainment it was always famous for, at least to the twelve daily visitors it has been attracting.

Index of posts on the Starbright Illustrations Blog, part 1.

By The Illustrator  |  2009/11/17 18:19 Posted in Index  |  Comments (0)

The now famous Kadar class spaceship

Just a moment ago, as I was waiting for Windose to boot up, and I was doing some thinking about blogs and blogging. My 15 minute boot up time gives me plenty of time to think, and I realized that one of the big problems with blogs is that there is often no good way of browsing the content. So what to do about that… ?

Then I came up with an innovative new way of cataloging content, I’m going to create lots of pages like this with a link to each post, and a short description of what the post is about. It’s a little low tech, quick and dirty even, but it might just work…

Hello World. – This post is the last in a series of tests and hello worlds as the blog gradually got on it’s feet. It’s also the first post to have an illustration, although it’s just a sketch of a spaceship.

Wishful Drinking. – Another very short post as I just had to mention a great book I had just heard of.

Clone Wars. – The first mention of a subject that has come to dominate this site. Computer generated 3D visuals, specially animation. This post is a review of Star Wars The Clone Wars, which I had just watched on DVD.

The Kadar Class Spaceship, a Tutorial. – A really meaty post – the first one – and an example of the sort of content that a blog really does well. I created a spaceship illustration, in 2D from scratch, and this was the first post in a series documenting it. This post still gets a lot of hits even after six months and is often searched for by name.

A 3D Red Dragon. – One of many posts for Illustration Friday. It’s a 3D dragon done in trueSpace when I was still very much developing my 3D modeling and rendering skills. I still have a soft spot for trueSpace, although I have now moved on to Blender in my search for the best, open source and free 3D image creation application.

Well that’s the first part of a complete index of the posts on my site done. Only a couple of hundred more to go.

Flying Back to Live Writer for my illustrations and posts after BlogDesk and ScribeFire

By The Illustrator  |  2009/10/11 21:42 Posted in Illustration, SEO etc, role-playing game  |  Comments (0)

flight

This is a subtle piece of art for Illustration Friday based on the idea of flight. It is a light and crystalline mechanoid which is an idea I have been playing with for role-playing games and a 3d illustration. 

I’ve abandoned ScribeFire for writing this 3d and illustration blog again because there seems to be some confusion about a "tracking pixel" being added to every post created with it. As one internet pundit pointed out this is open to all kinds of abuse and the company that created ScribeFire seem to be anything but forthcoming about what this "tracking pixel" is for. And on top of that there was no spellchecker, for me as a very visual and artistic person (read bad speller) that’s a deal breaker.

I got BlogDesk working. It was simple in the end, I just left the blog ID box blank and everything worked fine. Although it still has the Word 2000 issue BlogDesk Forum :: View topic – MS Office 2000 Setup starts with BlogDesk. But before making the switch I thought I would give Live Writer this one more try.

Of the blog clients I have been playing with Live Writer is the prettiest, most intuitive and most powerful. The only problem has been its continued inability to upload smoothly to this WordPress blog about 3d and creative stuff.

But after troubleshooting the blog with FireBug and removing pretty much all the widgets that I thought I could live without – which has made the blog much faster loading – I thought maybe Live Writer would be more successful in its dealings with the blog. Here’s hoping.

Features

By The Illustrator  |  2009/09/18 17:45 Posted in Editorial, Features, Other Systems, Review, SEO etc, Spaceships, role-playing game, spaceship  |  Comments (0)

All blogs have permanent bits outside the usual day to day business of posting and this one is no exception. I have decided to call these bits a feature section and divide it up into different themes.

Role-Playing Game Art Gallery

This collection of game related images, illustrations and renders has been made a more permanent feature of the site because this is basically the best of what I do. I really enjoy imagining the outlandish visuals of a role-playing game and trying to capture the results in an illustration.

The Mongoose Traveller Sci-fi RPG

Traveller has of course been one of the leading lights, in all its many incarnations, of table-top sci fi role-playing games since the very beginning. When I found the free to download designer’s pack on the Mongoose website I was so excited that I produced a lot of content to use in Traveller games, all in one burst of creativity. It can all be found in this feature section of the blog.

The D20 System

My musings on this game system, and more specifically, how it can be used in science fiction role-playing environments such as Traveller. I like the fact that the D20 system is popular and simple. Once I have created a spaceship illustration I like being able to generate the information needed to use it in a role-playing game quickly, and D20 is a good solution to this need.

Spaceships Gallery

My favourite subject for both 2D and 3D illustrations is spaceships. This feature section of my site brings some of the images of spaceships produced for various reasons across my site together in one gallery. These are some of the best spaceship illustrations I have produced, but they are by no means the only ones.

Lower bitrate on 3D animation equals smaller file equals faster page load time on site?

By The Illustrator  |  2009/08/29 18:12 Posted in 3D, Animation, Blender, SEO etc, Tutorials, problems  |  Comments (0)

This is what I set out to test.

With the default Blender audio and video bitrate settings, my animation was rendering as a very beautiful 3D film with CD quality sound, but it was well over a megabyte in size. While waiting for this huge file to download and be displayed people have two choices; a) go and make a nice cup of tea, or b) click away to some other faster loading site. Guess which is more likely. So because I want my pages to load as quickly as possible, no matter how many animations each contains, I dialed the bitrates on my .mov files down considerably, and this has produced smaller file sizes.

From an animation in a 1.5 MB .mov file I have come down to a 300 KB .mov file – but there have been trade offs. The sound now sounds a little like it was recorded underwater and there is a little bit of blocking in the video, but all in all I’m very happy with how much animation I can pack into such a small file size.

Now instead of fiddling about with settings I can concentrate on making the animation better and funnier. The basic idea of the animation is already there but it isn’t yet obvious that the thing the cat is spitting out is a hairball. I’m going to have to get to grips with producing hair in my 3D animation. It seems daunting to me right now, but I’m sure I’ll get the hang of it, and a hairball is probably an easier place to start than a full head of glossy Charlie’s Angles big hair.

Sudden Spike in impressions and clicks

By The Illustrator  |  2009/08/02 11:44 Posted in SEO etc  |  Comments (0)

spiralcat_view_logoI have another website beside Starbright Illustrations – what, you don’t spend 100% of your time posting to this blog? Well actually I do yes, I haven’t worked on the other site for a while, not since I started Starbright, but it does still exist and it’s called Spiralcat (it’s an entertainment and advice site). And the day before yesterday Spiralcat suddenly got about a thousand more visitors than normal. I was very happy, but of course my first thought was, is this a sudden spike in impressions and clicks or is it something that is going to happen every day from now on.

Well as you can probably tell from the fact that I am writing this on Starbright and not Spiralcat itself  it turned out to be a spike. But what caused that spike of extra traffic. As far as I can tell a page on Spiralcat which gives my top ten ideas for learning English got mentioned in an email newsletter or something, because the new traffic all came from referring sites, and when I checked my Google analytics these referring sites were a hundred different email providers, Yahoo etc.

For a moment I was tempted to put Starbright on the backburner, although I find it much easier to create content for Starbright and, with the mix of Wordpress and Yahoo Site Builder I use, I can work offline which is a great advantage.

The reason I have decided to stick with Starbright is that right now it has an Alexa rating of 2,555,143 while Spiralcat has a rank of 3,714,213. And like I said, working on Starbright Illustrations here is more fun.