Today we are launching the redesign of local painter Marilyn Rea Nasky’s website.  Her new site is done in WordPress, thus allowing her to do some or all of her own updates.  Visit her new site at lightwithinstudios.com: Marilyn Rea Nasky, Light Within Studios.

Apparently, some people love to enhance their website with artwork and illustrations taken from other people without their knowledge or consent.

My work seems to be fairly popular among online thieves.  On the one hand, it’s kind of flattering; one the other hand, I just wish they would give me credit for my efforts or at least ask permission to use the image.  I guess the fault was mine for not adding a watermark to all my images.  I am doing that now, though.  What do you bet some of these images start to come down as I add my watermark?

Here are just some of the sites that have stolen the use of my imagery without my permission or credit (WARNING: some of these links go to sites that also display imagery you wouldn’t want your kids to see):

http://www.myspace.com/deathtofascism (Comedy Central logo I created in Lightwave 3D)

http://cato-ihupani.baklen.eu/100324/ (Portfolio screen cap from an article on my site)

http://picsfire.blogspot.com/2008/10/fireplace-elevations.html (fireplace elevation, interior design illustration) – don’t visit this site; it’s infected with malware

http://aristeo.tandyr.eu/100402/p2/ (digital illustration of fish)

http://www.zhiweinet.com/jiaocheng/2008-07/957.htm (WebSphere illustration from my IBM days)

http://shaunna-shankhadhara.baklen.eu/100315/ (one of my tornado paintings)

For the record, I don’t mind fair use of my images, and perhaps the fireplace illustration above could be considered fair use.  Here is more info on Fair Use of imagery:

Fair use is a doctrine in United States copyright law that allows limited use of copyrighted material without requiring permission from the rights holders, such as use for scholarship or review. It provides for the legal, non-licensed citation or incorporation of copyrighted material in another author’s work under a four-factor balancing test.

In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include:

1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

Read more about Fair Use at Wikipedia.

Texas Wax Website

Artist and web guru extraordinaire Haley Nagy and I have just completed the design of a new website and blog for all members and fans of Texas Wax, a regional encaustic painting society dedicated to promoting the ancient art of painting with wax.

Haley and I have been members of Texas Wax since the Austin group began in the spring of 2008.  Texas Wax is composed of active encaustic organizations in four Texas cities: Austin, Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio.  As the four groups have grown and evolved over the past year+, we realized the groups had a need for a central website and blog to showcase all of our work, and to communicate with each other and with our fans.

Haley and I created the site in WordPress from a visual design that I created.  The underlying theme is based on the same theme I used for my fine art website and blog (a theme I created from bits and pieces of many other themes): Marilyn Fenn Studio.

The website features the usual stuff, but we also wanted to give all the artist members of Texas Wax the option of creating and updating their own profiles and gallery pages.  We modified the author page template with the help of several plug-ins (and some blood, sweat, and tears from yours truly), creating an artist directory that pulls their profile information into the author template/artist biography page. There’s also a link to their own gallery page.

We’ve included an events manager that will allow the regional chapter leaders to add events for their regions, and that will automatically move events from “Upcoming” to “Today’s Events” to “Archived” pages as the dates pass.  Featured on the sidebar are a dynamic Upcoming Events list and a rotating gallery of member artwork.

Member artists can add their voices to the blog and talk amongst themselves on a private member discussion list.

Fans of Texas Wax art and artists can sign up to receive blog posts as they are posted, and can sign up for mailing lists for the individual regions or for all of the chapters statewide.  We’ve also provided various contact forms.

Take a look at the brand-spanking new Texas Wax website, while we continue getting our artist members online (which is somewhat harder than herding cats!).

I just completed building a complex site in WordPress in which I combined two Blogger blogs — each with several years worth of posts — with a website that contained two existing MySQL databases of painting images and art quotes.  It is now a 212-page art portfolio site and blog, with many images of paintings, many photos, some color exercises, and a lot of postings and notes.  So it was a lot of content to gather together, organize and combine into an attractive and easily navigable site.

I spent a lot of time trying out various options and a lot of different plugins. The ones listed below are the top 20 plugins that I found nearly indispensable for this particular site, which you can see in action here: Marilyn Fenn Studio.  As always, your mileage may vary.

1. WP CSS Dropdown Menu
   A three-level drop-down menu plugin for WordPress.  It uses Stu Nicholl’s final drop-down code, which is CSS only.  You can modify the style to suit your theme, include a Home page button, and exclude pages from the drop-down menu.  I tried several other promising and not-so-promising options before finding this.  Eureka!
2. Reveal IDs for WP Admin
   In order to exclude pages in the above plugin, you need to know their IDs.  This plugin reveals IDs of pages, posts, tags, and categories, all of which I found very useful in creating the above site.
3. Flexi Pages Widget
   Allows you to choose which of your pages to display in the sidebar, whether to display sub-pages, and in what order to display the pages.
4. Different Posts Per Page
   This plugin allows you to return different numbers of posts per page type.  For example, you can show five, ten or all your posts on your Archive, Category and Tag pages, but limit them to 1 or 3 or 5 on your home page.
5. WP-PageNavi
   This gives you an attractive way to scroll through your post-pages, and really aids navigation, especially on a large site.  See the bottom of the home page on the afore-mentioned art site for an example.
6. AZIndex
   This plugin will create a very flexible site index for you with the greatest of ease.  Very nice when organizing a large amount of content, and it auto-updates when new content is added.  This is such a well-written plugin, and has the best documentation of any plugin I have tried, which I really appreciate!
7. NextGEN Gallery
   I’m sure this makes it to everyone’s list.  I did not use it on this, my design site, but found it great for my art site.  I used it to include a random gallery of paintings on my sidebar, to include thumbnails of related images in posts, and to create indices of paintings and photos.  I could have used it for my art galleries of thumbnails and large images, but did not in this case, as I have my own art image database which contains a bit more information than the NextGen plugin displays.  The developers continue to improve this plugin; they have recently added the ability to include titles.
8. Yet Another PhotoBlog
   This is a very cool plugin that allows you to insert an image once, and it will create different sized thumbnails to be displayed on different types of pages; for example, you can display small thumbnails of an image in the archive pages, another size on the home page, and another size on the individual post pages, and you can specify left or right display in all cases.  It only allows for the insertion of one image per post, but you can use the standard WordPress image upload tool to add additional images.
9. TS Custom Widgets
   This plugin allows you to include different sidebar widgets on different pages.  I found it very useful in many cases; for example, it gave me the ability to remove redundencies, such as an About Me box on the About page, or a random painting gallery on the painting gallery page, and to limit certain items to appropriate pages only, such as a blog roll only on the links page.
10. Simple Tags
    This is a very flexible and powerful little plugin for managing your tags.  It allows you to mass edit your tags, show related posts, create content-sensitive tag cloud widgets, and more.
11. Contact Form 7
    This is very nearly everything it needs to be.  This plugin allows you to create multiple instances of contact forms, using the standard form elements, and includes the ability to add a simple Captcha.  The documentation could use a little help; so you may need to read through some of the responses on the plugin homepage and do some trial and error to figure out just how it works, but once you get through that, it works like a charm.  You may also want the Really Simple CAPTCHA plugin from the same developer — it used to be included, but now it’s a separate element — or the more robust WP-reCAPTCHA that I’ve used on this site.
12. Subscribe2
    A very simple plugin that allows your readers to easily subscribe to or unsubscribe from your blog.  It sends an email notification to the list of subscribers when new entries are posted.  You can also exclude notices from being sent on selected posts and pages.
13. Sociable
    This is about the fourth social network plugin I have tried that automatically add links on your posts to your favorite social bookmarking sites.  It is very flexible and unobtrusive.  I did love the look of one called “Sexy Bookmarks,” but it caused my pages not to validate.  I am using AddThis Social Bookmarking Widget on this site, and it’s great, too.  But Sociable may offer the most flexibility in what bookmarking sites you can include, and I like the faded icons that come to life when moused over.
14. Feed Reading Blogroll
    One of the things I loved on my Blogger blog was the Blog List that showed the latest updated blogs you are following, compete with newest post title and a thumbnail.  I loved seeing my artist blogger friends’ latest images displayed.  I searched and searched for something like that for WordPress, and this plugin is the closest thing I could find.  It works well, is pretty easy to set up, but lacks the thumbnail display.  Using Feed Reading Blogroll along with Interclue enabled on Firefox, I can still see the latest paintings from my artist blog list.
15. Broken Link Checker
    This checks your posts for broken links and missing images and notifies you on the dashboard if any are found.  Very handy for keeping link-rot out of your blog.
16. Maintenance Mode
    This plugin will add a splash page to your blog to lets visitors know your blog is down for maintenance.  Yet you can continue to work on and view your blog as a logged in administrator.
17. DashBar
    This plugin adds a tiny logo in the upper corner, if you are logged in, with a two-level drop down menu bar that appears on mouseover.  It allows easy access to the dashboard or to add, edit or manage new posts/pages/links, and more.  I find it very, very handy, though the logout does not seem to work for me.
18. Akismet
    For keeping out the spam in your comments.  It seems to work very well.
19. StatPress Reloaded
    Excellent and very detailed stats displayed right in your WordPress dashboard.    You can export them out, too.
20. Google Analyticator
    Easy to use plugin for adding your Google analytics code to your WordPress blog.  Works very well.

I am thrilled to announce the launch of my completely redesigned artist portfolio website, now including my two previous Art Blogs.  On this site, you will find:

Stuff about me:

• My portfolio of paintings
• Artist information, including statement, bio, and resume
• News, event calendar, newsletter sign-up links, and news archives
• Contact information
• Blog posts about my art openings and events, such as last fall’s Fused Expressions opening
• Posts of my new work, often before I add it to the gallery pages

Stuff not about me:

• Blog posts about museum and galley exhibits, such as “Duchamp Redux” at the Norton Simon Museum
• Information about other artists, both famous and not-yet famous, such as this look at Earthworks Artists and Their Descendents
• Class notes from art school and art classes, such as Start Where You Are – Move On from There from Advanced Drawing with Barbara Rossi at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago
• How-to’s and Reviews, such as this review from a series on free online artist portfolio sites
• Interactive Color Exercises – very popular with art schools and artists – try it, it’s fun!
• Quotes on art and much, much more…

Head on over to Marilyn Fenn Studio and have a look around, and then I’d love to hear your reactions.  You can comment below or fill out this very brief survey.

Cross-posted at Marilyn Fenn Studio.