Celestial Dancers

It's taken 8 hours to put the Celestial Dancers webpage up... these images are from 2004, during the time when I was painting those paintings. Silly, & fun.

I 'lost' the entire file of images in my Picasa folder on my computer, after hours of scouring two hard drives in search of them. I tried to delete one repetition and somehow managed to 'hide' the entire folder - oh, I could see it in Finder alright, but couldn't open anything, or access it in any way. Picasa finally relented when I asked to 'see' all 'hidden folders.' But by then I had two albums up on Picasa on the web and who knows what's what anymore. I'd better leave them, both with the same images but probably different URLs, otherwise images will disappear :-)

A photopoem page is now up.

My kids are at their Dad's, but will my dog forgive me? It's nearly 11pm and she still hasn't had her walk!

The photopoem page is okay, I'm not crazy about it. I embedded a slideshow, and then a selection of photopoems in a hidden table below that open out to new windows if clicked on. The table that they are in is being sticky about its left margin and not giving me enough leeway to space the photographs as I'd like. It's not bad. Servicable, as they say.

It's nice to get the ones I liked best in one place. I've tried to embed the 'poem' in the photograph "info" and Picasa kindly unfolds that in text below the image at the album at Picasa's site, but centred, which is a bit weird.

Anyway, I've been at this since lunchtime (which I forgot to eat, though I did throw some eggs in a pan for dinner), between locating the images, updating info, resizing, saving into a new file, and then trying to figure out the html - yes, I pasted all of them in the table in the html box. Way easier that way. I use "Stickies" on my desktop and find it very handy to paste URLs and codes and stuff, and that's where I worked out the html for the images.

It's a matter of keeping organized, isn't it.

It feels like I'm organizing work mostly over the last 3 or 4 years, but am finding things that go further back than that.

A kind of scrapbook of my path to here, I suppose.

'Night all! Oh, oops, doggie walk first!

xo

They may not look like much, but I spent the greater part of 2 evenings and a night composing and attempting not just to link these little navigation buttons to their respective pages, but to have mouse-over text appear too. My html was a mess! I had embedded them in tables and the tables became like little replicating viruses! They spawned more tables, secretly, until I discovered the whole webpage was within a large cell! Spreadsheets aren't called what they are for nothing, I learned.

If it wasn't for 'Liv' at Google Sites help, I'd never have managed the feat you see above. And a tech whizz called Steegle who's left very simple guides to specific html needs in perfect little web pages. Without those two, oh forget it.

Tables were all stripped. Yay! Even the big 'mother-sucker' got deleted away, sure it took a few tries but eventually it succumbed.

The NavBttns, isn't that a cute name, were touched up multiple times in Photoshop before coming to sit nicely in a row I can live with.

Yes, Google offers free websites. It'll be one of the most interesting journeys you'll ever make!

My website is coming along, yes siree, and tonight I be happy with it.

The Great Bliss Queen's Mansion of Flaming Bliss, a long tantric poem I wrote a few years ago is now a webpage at my site - a webpage that took 15 hours to create! I didn't get to bed until 6am this morning, & then up again by 9:30am to continue... it's the clash of limited html skills & my aesthetic... the hunt through the night for html that would make appear exactly what I wanted... as the sun was coming up I gave up on my quest to find anything that would work for the poem given Google's coding limitations, and fell asleep for a few hours before getting up with an idea for how to circumvent my html illiteracies and created what I sought in trustworthy PhotoShop... and uploaded it as a .jpg already stitched to the website's background that it carries with it... because I wanted an underlayer of transparent darkness to offset the Buddhist robe kashaya safron colouring of the poem's lettering.

The webpage that you see now is delicately composed in a network of hidden tables...

... Which is actually one table with many cells, of all sizes and some of which appeared randomly & mysteriously without any purpose and wouldn't delete without taking the whole edifice with them - lucky for the 'undo' key!

Where spreadsheet meets esoteric spirituality!

In the webpage; in the webpage.



Just took 'a peek' at the 'View/Page Source'
and holy tantric goddess!

Now I know what creation is.

Computer code
the incantation of our time!

Women In Summer, Oil paint, watercolour pencils, India ink on Waterford watercolour paper, 72.5cm x 52cm, 28.5" x 20.5"

I've posted a slideshow of the process of this painting before, but that was a Flickr slideshow (that I could only get to run backwards, if readers at that time recall), and this is a Picasa one (which runs forward very nicely, thank you Picasa). Apparently I did not keep the larger originals when I uploaded the series to Flickr. What. Else. Is. New. Hours spent searching on various hard drives and finally downloading what I'd uploaded at Flickr, and then uploaded to Picasa with embedded copyright info in each photo for the new Art Website.

Via an inserted 'Google Spreadsheet' I can get comments at my new Google Site art & poetry site! Sweet!

From Women In Summer - the process of painting

direct link to the slideshow: Women In Summer

Women In Spring, 2008

I've spent the last few hours locating these images between two computers, and attempting to represent the colour accurately by uploading, fiddling in Photoshop Elements, uploading... you get the idea. They are larger images than I have previously uploaded.

Hopefully in Picasa I'll figure out how to do 'individual slideshows' and then one large one since I am doing these for my new art website: https://sites.google.com/site/brendaclews/

For reasons I accept (if it's a team website the danger of images being accidentally deleted by any number of users is quite high), Google Sites does not allow you to delete images you've uploaded. So I'm going to host the images from Google's Picasa.

This painting is one of my favourites, and looks better 'in the painted flesh,' on my wall, than in the final image (perhaps I need to take a new photo of it), but I hope it imparts some joy to you.

There's a bunch of writing around it at the website on the main page.

Brenda's Art Website.

From Women In Spring - Brenda Clews

Creating a new art website. While it's just like the old one, it's not an easy task. I'm using a Google Sites Homepage, and its design seems for text-based rather than image-based websites. I tinker with html, of which I am only a rudimentary user. I re-do & upload photographs of paintings in Photoshop Elements until something approaching the original colour appears on-site, at least on my fabulous iMac screen- can't say for PCs, but you do only what you can do.

At least this website allows me to use textboxes (you all know how I love to write!), and to place whatever wherever.

Unfortunately, being hard-hit by the recession, I let my domain name lapse, thinking to move it eventually to Google, but some other company has snatched my name up and is using it as a portal to infernal advertising and no doubt is waiting for me to buy it back from them.

I don't care about it. Eventually no-one will click on it and they'll drop it and I can have it back again.

Never mind.

The old Tripod website is still up and a great site, but for an advertisement-based 'free' site, a 20MG limit, and I've reached it. Google's is 100MG. I'm giving myself a few months to transfer everything over, and add more work.

Anyway, enough blather, visit the constuction site here, but keep your hardhat on (images may come loose and fly). Enjoy!

Brenda's New (under construction) Art Website.

(screenshots using Apple's
"Grab" application)


I like the look, it's unique, or perhaps it's my strange aesthetic. Making a Google homepage site, though, is proving to be more difficult than any of the other web pages I've set up. It formats beautifully on my iMac, but the font is gone on a PC, and the page doesn't automatically format to fit a Netbook.

Also, because it's an application meant for a team website, once you upload an image you can never delete it, meaning you will run out of space quite quickly if you are setting up an art website.

Since I'm learning a lot, I'll continue. It may end up working out. Check it out and give me your honest feedback. Much appreciation...

xo

A solution to the image issue may be to upload the images to Picasa and embed the html at the Google sites homepage... I'll be uploading everything to Picasa anyway, for the slideshow option, and for glorious, delirious Cooliris.

(Google made images un-delete-able because these sites are often shared by a team & accidentally deleting images could be very problematic if you have a number of users. Which makes sense.)

Google Sites homepage: Art website