Category: ArtStart Diary

A week on more admin and housecleaning type stuff. All of the text bubbles for The Metaning have been scanned and isolated, ready to be used in digital versions – that should let me photograph the work without adding the actual speech bubbles, and then composite them in to get an iBooks as we’ll as hardcover versions done and on sale. At the moment the goal is to get the work onto the iBooks store before the Xmas break.

Thursday night I’m at an exhibition where one of my student works from ACP is being exhibited. In fact, I’m in a park typing this right now as I wait to go to the gallery – seriously loving the new iPad :)

Later on – The week ended with building a new eBook version of the Nervous Spaces book, which should be available soon. The exhibition print was the one I’d hoped would be printed, so I’ll get to pick it up soon.

This week saw the arrival of yet another piece of kit – yeah it does seem to be a repeating theme – an Adonit Jot Touch 4. This thing’s a neat aluminium bodied stylus for the iPad, which communicates pressure sensitivity over Bluetooth. With 2048 levels of pressure, it more or less turns the iPad into a Wacom cintique. So as a result, I’ve basically reduced my “carry everywhere” kit from an A4 sketchbook, 2 pencils, an eraser and a paperback book, to an iPad Air and a pen.

The other major milestone is that I finished the Nervous Spaces ebook, and uploaded it to Apple’s iBooks store. So now we play the waiting game as Apple review it for “quality assurance”.

The week wrapped up with a final photo shoot of The Metaning, using the double-polarised technique. After painstaking effort to square up the camera to the wall so all four corners of the image would be in equal focus, it finally came together. The shoot was done in a couple of hours, and next week should see the entire ePub 3 version completed, now that I’ve got the process down from the Nervous Spaces book.

This week saw processing of all The Metaning pages – adding scanned text boxes, tweaking rotation of the images, and setting up the exporting process to build the final retina quality images.

The originals of these are around 50mb out of the camera, and then converted to photoshop files at full size, with text boxes added, they come in at a round 450mb, per page. It’s a lot of process to set up, but once done the actual construction of the ePub is more or less automated.

I’m still playing the waiting game on the Nervous Spaces ePub, but hopefully that will be sorted soon. Once this is out of the way, I can get the final part of Surfing The Deathline done, and then the bulk of the final half of my grant year will be dedicated to sculpture.

A momentous week this one. My first book has gone live on the iTunes Store. This was a major achievement in terms of my ArtStart year, and means I’ve got the entire process bedded down. The Metaning ebook version continues to develop, with just a little fine tuning required to get it finished.

Another interesting occurrence this week – I was contacted out of the blue by an Australian online tablet & phone accessory company enquiring if I was interested in doing reviews of their products. There’s a bit of a bonus in that I get to keep whatever I’m reviewing, but seemingly only need to link to them, rather than putting it on their website. I’ve got drafts for pretty scathing reviews of a number of products I use, being a fairly critical person, but never quite finished them. This might give me a more solid goal to work towards, and make the other reviews more relevant and publishable.

This week has seen yet another momentous achievement – The Metaning has been submitted to the iBookstore. Hopefully it’ll be approved before the end of the year.

The iPad keyboard cover I was sent to review arrived, but not before a warehouse mess up sent me someone else’s order, a whole bunch of samsung accessories. Then, a day or so later, another package arrived with the actual review unit.

The week ended with a road trip from Sydney to Brisbane for the Xmas break. Next week will be dedicated to reviews of that keyboard.

It’s the Xmas / new year break, and I’ve done a road trip from Sydney to Noosa. Key to this was adopting a new bit of software for password management – 1password from Agilebits. This package plugs a major hole in the MacOS X / iOS ecosystem, namely the lack of a mobile version of the Mac’s Keychain Access app. While iCloud passwords seems to be the solution Apple is offering, it doesn’t address all the multitude of secure things you need to have with you, that aren’t used via a web browser.

The big news from this week, is that The Metaning is now available on the iTunes / iBooks stores. This was one of my major goals for the ArtStart year, and so it’s nice to be able to check that off the list in the final days of the first half of the grant.

The week was mostly spent on the road trip from Brisbane to Sydney, however before leaving I put the iPad through its paces in building a small single page website for The Metaning. The app I used was Textastic, which has both HTML editing and FTP uploading built in. It’s a pretty nice piece of work. Having bought quite a few productivity apps for iPad of late, I have to say that the pricing structure of under $10 makes the “full fledged” mac apps seem vastly overpriced.

It’s been a quiet week:

• my review for an iPad case went up online
• I started publicising The Metaning via twitter. The results were pretty good insofar as the Australia Council retweeted the announcement, and then it was retweeted again by another couple of organisations, with 20,000 odd followers in total. On the downside, there’s only been a couple of sales total, which has been a tad demoralising.

The plan for next week is to gear up for all the major events for 2014:

• Contact my e-waste provider, to source materials for the UWS exhibition.
• Contact steel and perspex providers to source materials for Sculpture By The Sea.
• Contact National Library and NSW State Library about exhibiting The Metaning.
• Obtain printing quotes for doing a short run of The Metaning as a large format premium print book.

I got most of the things done I had planned for this week, though sadly not with the results I’d hoped.

My source for eWaste has gotten out of that line of business, and it seems there are going to be some difficulties in finding a reliable supply for the UWS Sculpture exhibition piece. The national and state libraries turned out to be dead ends regarding exhibiting The Metaning, so I may have to start thinking of alternate options, which is problematic given the non-saleability of the works. I put in a request for a quote for a print version of The Metaning, and if it turns out to be manageable, there’s always the option of doing a short fine-art print run, and maybe thinking of doing SupaNova Sydney.

I didn’t get around to checking for sponsorships for SbtS, but to make up, I got a bunch of drawing done on Surfing The Deathline book 4. I’m going to put my nose to the grindstone on this, and concentrate on getting this done before losing sleep on publicising The Metaning.

Gear update, I bought a Copper Hill camera cleaning kit, to try to deal with the dust spots which have developed again on my Nikon D800 when I put the aperture up above f12.

Progress made this week on the eWaste issue. I may have a line with a supplier who asked me to send them a list of what I needed, and they would see what was possible up the line. Hopefully that’ll yield something.

Most of the week has been spent on Surfing The Deathine cleanups on the large roughs, which has seen a lot of progress after laying fallow for ages.