Keiser Graphics

Wow I haven’t posted in a while. That’s what a day job does, it takes all your time and creativity and then in return they give you money. If it weren’t for the fact that I like money so much I might post more often.

To the point, I just opened a store on Cafe Press. It’s pretty exciting. I have a couple items to sell, all to memorialize my dearly departed goldfish, Bubbles. I’m starting with just a few products, but I can only have one of any type at the moment. Hopefully these Bubbles tributes will sell well as I already have plans for a whole line of dead pets’ memorabilia.

To turn your car into a mobile memorial, to drink in praise, or to go as far as making your body a memorial to Bubbles, visit my new Cafe Press store at http://www.cafepress.com/keisergraphics.

My blog now looks like my website. This was difficult for me, and it may still need a little work, but I finally have a blog that resembles my website www.keisergraphics.com. The header looks very much like my business cards and I like that a lot. I really was struggling with the visual aspects of the blog in WordPress www.wordpress.org . I kept changing the css style sheet to see no changes in the way the web blog looked.

I then found a plug-in for Adobe Dreamweaver called Themedreamer www.themedreamer.com . With this I could view the theme in Dreamweaver and it would tell me what css styles were related to each bit of the pages I was looking at. Through this I found that most of the visual elements with the default theme were pictures and not css styles. I was then able to create new pictorial elements and replace the old pictures. Though looking at the css style file that came with the default theme, there seems to be a lot of redundancy and I wonder if later when I am better at coding I might just rewrite all the code in order to simplify it. I really like css styles and love it when even the visual elements are css styles making it easy to change the look and feel of my entire website in a matter of minutes.
After fixing the way the webblog worked I then needed to go through my website and add links that went to the webblog and vice versa. This was very easy to do since my site is made with templates and css styles it only took about a half hour to convert all the pages.

I’m glad I got through this. Now I have time to get to drawing, painting, sewing, knitting, and cooking. I promise to share with you my future adventures in the various art fields with lots of pictures.

Looks like I have to learn how to code this blog page. Sometimes it feels like I spend more time learning math and coding then I do drawing and painting. I’m sure I could pay someone to do this for me, but then I would have to always pay someone to fix everything. It’s better if I can learn these skills myself. Potential employers are always wanting someone who not only can draw and paint well, but someone who can code their web pages as well.

This is really frustrating for me, as coding and fine art are two completely different schools of art and thinking. I’m an artist first and a coder second, just as there are many engineers who are fantastic at writing in various computer languages who can’t draw worth a damn. Why can’t companies just hire both an artist and an engineer to get the very best coding with beautiful design. Hell, they could hire on both part time or freelance and end up with a product that not only portrays their coroporate identity well and functions perfectly.

Well I have to get back to figuring out how to code in PHP to get this blog looking pretty. Hopefully I’ll have that done by the end of next week.

Well this is my very first entry. I’m currently going to work on making this blog resemble the rest of my website so that it can all have a consistent theme. Other projects that I am also working on is my stick shift cozy knitting pattern. I have completed writing the pattern out, and now all I need to do is adjust my website to have more than one pattern at a time and then upload my pattern so that others can download it. I will also post the pattern on www.ravelry.com. So come back soon and I should have this blog up and going with pictures and descriptions of all of my artistic adventures.