Vote for Photo Abstracts!

Whew! It's been a while I know, but I can honestly say it's because I've been a busy, busy lady! I'm not sure exactly what all this running around has achieved, but run around I have. First things first. I've tidied up the blog a bit, as you can see. I think it was probably a bit too "busy" before, so I have decluttered a little. Hope you like it!

So, I guess the first and most exciting thing to tell you is that my art is now available to buy online, from two different third party sellers! They are Artfinder and Saatchi Art (formerly known as Saatchi Online.) I was kind of hoping this was going to lead to a flood of orders from around the world, but hey, whaddya know!?, that hasn't happened yet, but I'm hoping to be inundated any day now. I'm selling different work on each site as well, to see if that helps.

OK, so please do go check me out on these different sites. Both are good in their own way - I personally used artfinder to buy my husband a Christmas present (print of Hitchcock made up of all his film titles, as he's a big fan), and I think they were really good. Saatchi has the edge in terms of quality of artists signed up at the moment though, I would say. I could personally spend several thousand pounds on amazing artwork every single time I go there - I'll post some examples of some of my favourites soon. But first, me:

Artfinder: https://www.artfinder.com/hannah-cawthorne

Saatchi Art: http://www.saatchiart.com/profiles/portfolio/id/679404


I partly joined Saatchi Art as they currently have a competition running that I thought it would be good to enter, called Showdown. If you would be so kind to check out my entry and vote for it (only the top 300 as voted for by the public make it through to the next round), you can do so here. There are about 6500 entries in all, and you vote by grading them 1 (bad) to 5 (excellent). You can vote on as many as you have patience for, as once you have voted for mine (which you are going to, right?), they will just keep showing you new entries at random. The top 300 (I guess the one with the highest amounts of 5's) will then go through to the next round. It's actually pretty addictive, getting to pass judgement on loads of other artist's work. (Does that make me a bad person?) It's also just good to see what kind of work other artists are producing right now as well.
 The range of quality in the competition is pretty varied - there's lots of poor stuff, but there's equally loads of really wonderful stuff. I'm perfectly OK with the fact that I'm highly unlikely to make it through. I just hope some of my favourites get through to the next round. That's what keeps me voting, I want to have my say on as many entries as I can. And, I have to say, I think my picture holds its own, even against the best of the ones I've seen so far.


Here is my entry, one of the new batch of pictures that I have just finished editing, from my trip to Budapest last October.

That one just narrowly beat this one into second spot, and is one of several from this new batch that I'm really pleased with:

Of course, in situations like this, you might want to ask, "how do we judge a piece of art?" "Who are we to say that this work is "better" than that?" Well, give the voting a go and you'll soon get your own ideas about criteria. For me, I have my own unique mix of -  what probably aren't entirely objective, but I like to think they are so some extent -  criteria, and my own personal preferences. I'm looking for a good idea, well executed, with some original thought and creativity going into it. But for the top marks, I guess there's no denying my taste is going to come into it a lot, as I'm only giving 5's for things I really love; things I would happily hang on my wall and look at for minutes at a time. And I do have a particular brand of artwork I really like, and which might not be other's cups of tea at all. So I guess personal preference will always come into it when judging art, which makes these kind of competitions really hard to judge on, which is why I'm not too bothered that I won't win! (But maybe, just maybe....)

OK, as usual, so much more to say, but it's going to have to be another time once again! Now go check out that art competition!

New Exhibition, New Camera, New Pics!

Lots of new developments to tell you about! The main one is of course, the ongoing exhibition at Eccles Community Art Gallery. The first day that was open to the public was the Saturday just gone, so I went down there for the whole day to go and meet people and chat about my work. The gallery was pretty busy, I think mainly because one of the other artists exhibiting was a local man whose family has posthumously put on an exhibition of his work and invited down many other relatives and family friends. I chatted to several of these people, and sold a few prints to one of them, which was great! I also had a steady stream of other people who came and looked at my work over the course of the day, so as usual I had lots of nice chats about art with people, which I always enjoy. I also got interviewed by a journalist from Salford Online. I've just checked the website and it doesn't appear to be up yet - I will of course post a link to it from here when it comes online.
Ok, here's some photos of the gallery and me and my work hung in it:

The gallery as seen from the outside

The proud artist trying(and failing) to strike a natural looking pose

The work

The exhibition will be up until the 8th of February, and the gallery is open Tuesdays (10am - 3pm) and Saturdays (10am - 4pm) during that period. I will be there most Saturdays, probably just for a two hour time slot, so if you're in the area, do please come on down and say hello!

In other news…. I finally have a new camera! I haven't really mentioned it here much before, but ever since I have gone full time as an art photographer, ironically, I haven't had a camera! I dropped my beloved and much used old Minolta back in June, and as it was badly in need of replacing anyway (I'd had it for about 8 years, which in technology terms is about a century I guess), I didn't even try to get it fixed. Instead, I was planning to buy a new one myself when the sale of our house went through and we released some of the equity tied up in that. But, as regular readers will know, that isn't exactly going to plan, so luckily for me my lovely family clubbed together and bought me one as a Christmas/Birthday/You Owe Us Big Time present.
 I wasn't sure what to go for, so I bought a photography mag and scanned all the reviews, and then with a little research I found the shop in Manchester that seems to cater to professional photographers; a place called Calumet. So I went there and they were really helpful and gave me pretty good advice I think, and in the end I plumped for a Canon EOS 70D

It's not like a real serious professional photographer's camera, but I would say it's probably at the top end of the fairly ambitious hobby photographer's range, and I think that's as good as I need for the type of images I take. Because the photographs I take are pretty up close I also splashed out and got a fancy new Macro lens as well, which will hopefully add another dimension to my photography, so I'm really excited about that. I've only had it just over a week, and I haven't taken it for a good long photography session outside yet (hopefully soon!), but just in playing around with it and learning it's basic functions I've already seen how much better it is than my old camera, so I'm really excited about the kind of shots I should be able to get with it!

One of the jobs I've been doing so far this week, is editing and photoshopping the huge backlog of images I have , from way back when I went to Hungary in October. I borrowed my mother-in-law's Nikon on that trip, and took about 300 of my "Photo Abstract" images there, which I've only slowly begun to process, partly because I knew I already had such a large back catalogue of images to use for launching myself on the art scene. But I'm a big believer in keeping things fresh and challenging yourself to do new things, and now I have my new camera I can do that. So, I've made a deal with myself that I have to get these "old" photos processed before I can fully move onto the new stuff.

You don't always know until you do the Photoshop magic on them, which shots are going to turn out to be your best, and I'm not sure whether any of the ones I've processed yet are up there with my very best work, but here are some of the highlights of the 100 or so pictures I've done so far:

Maybe slightly different colour palettes than usual for me; I've noticed blue is a colour that seems to dominate my work a lot, I guess because of the nautical subject matter of some of them. Anyway, these are in warmer, and more pastel shades than is typical for me, which I like about them.
Drop me a line and let me know what you think of them if you like!

OK, there's loads more news to share, but in the name of brevity lets leave it there for now, and I'll be back soon with the rest of the updates.