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In this episode of Nela’s Art Chat I share a watercolor & mixed media drawing and painting process that I’ve developed in recent months, which enabled me to create the kind of paintings I want with more ease and confidence. I’ll be talking about the challenges with the "ugly stage" that I’ve had before I started using this process, and how it has impacted my work since.
Self-employed creative professionals have significantly more control over our schedules than those employed in other organizations, but finding time for our own art can still be a challenge. While I was writing and editing my first book, I started using a technique that helped me keep up the momentum until I was ready to dedicate more of my time to it. Now I'm using it again with my second book. I believe this is the most reliable way of fitting self-initiated or personal creative projects into our busy schedule.
Social media platforms have helped many people establish their business, but what if you don’t want to play the algorithm game? Is it possible to find clients without social media in 2024? The short answer is yes, and here's how.
I have never used generative AI software to produce original written content, images, code, audio, or video, and do not intend to in the future. All of the art, design, photography, writing, video, and audio material published on NelaDunato.com and other websites I own have been created the old-fashioned way, without the use of AI. I do not use AI for idea generation or research. I have never given consent to my original art and content being used to train generative AI models. I do not intend to license any of my original art and content to be used for training generative AI models.
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Jack Johnson is on Rick Rubin’s podcast Tetragrammaton talking about music, film making, creativity, and surfing. At one point (~24:30) Johnson talks about his love for surfing and the beautiful flow state it puts him in: Sometimes I’ll see a friend riding a wave while I’m paddling out, and the thing I’ll see them do just seems like magic...I’ll think, “How in the world did they just do that?” And then on your next ride you’re doing the exact same thing without thinking but it’s all muscle memory and it’s all in this flow that you get into. That’s a really beautiful state to get into, to do something that feels like a magic trick, like something you shouldn’t be able to do, but all of the sudden you’re doing it. I’m not a surfer, and I can’t do effortlessly cool. But I know what a flow state feels like. Johnson’s description reminds me of that feeling when you get a little time on a personal project — riding the wave of working on your personal website. You open your laptop. You start paddling out. Maybe you see an internet friend who was doing something cool and you want to try it but you have no idea if you’ll be able to do it as well as they did. And before you know it, you’re in that flow state where muscle memory takes over and you’re doing stuff without even consciously thinking about it — stuff that others might look at and perceive as magic (cough anything on the command line cough) but it’s not magic to you. Intuition and experience just take over while you ride the wave. Ok, I’m a nerd. But I don’t care. It’s a great feeling, regardless of whether it’s playing an instrument, or surfing, or programming. That feeling of sinking into a craft you’ve worked at your whole life that you don’t have to think about anymore. Email · Mastodon · Bluesky
Bidfood Pizza Academy in Wrocław, designed by mode:lina™ studio, is a space dedicated to training and culinary workshops, where Italian...
Weekly curated resources for designers — thinkers and makers.
House of Olives is a building intended for the Association of Olive Growers of Montenegro as an administrative and educational...
Ever used a website where you toggle from light mode to dark mode and the web site changes but the chrome around the browser doesn’t? To illustrate, take a look at this capture of my blog on an iPhone. When you toggle the theme from light to dark, note how the website turns white but status bar stays black. Only once I refresh the page or navigate does the status bar then turn white. When the user changes the theme on my site, I want it to propagate all the way to the surrounding context of the browser. In this case, to the status bar on the iPhone. Like this: There we go! That’s what I want. So what was wrong? A popular way to indicate the active theme is to put a class on the root of the document, e.g. <html class="dark"> <style> html { background: white } html.dark { background: black } </style> </html> Then we simply add/remove the dark class when the user toggles the theme. But that will only change the in-page styles. It won’t tell the browser to update the color of whatever ambient user interface elements its drawing. For that, you’ll need the meta theme-color tag: The theme-color value for the name attribute of the <meta> element indicates a suggested color that user agents should use to customize the display of the page or of the surrounding user interface. So when you respond to the user changing their theme, don’t forget to update the <meta name='theme-color'> tag in addition to whatever you do to modify the in-page styles. That’ll give you the effect you want in the surrounding browser UI (for browsers that support it). Oh, and it’s worth pointing out: don’t forget the color-scheme property either. That’s what will tell the browser to update other in-page UI elements it draws. So, when responding to a user preference to update a website’s theme: Toggle some global attribute that triggers style changes for all your custom, in-page elements. Set the color-scheme property so the browser draws the things its responsible for correctly (form controls, scroll bars, etc.). Set the <meta name='theme-color'> value appropriately so contextual browser UI can adapt to your site’s styles. I wrote this post as a friendly reminder, because friends don’t let friends forget the meta theme-color tag. Email · Mastodon · Bluesky
