Grmbl

Recently I noticed some traffic to this blog from a website I did not know. Upon looking I found it to be some shady annoying "make money with writing" site.

On it, the standard story: "I've been doing this for two weeks and now I'm earning $5000 a week while still being there for my poopsie little baby", yada yada yada, you've probably heard it before.

The beauty of it all is that at the end there is a letter in which the author claims that this is NOT a shady site, because Blogger (the '.blogspot' blogs host (a.k.a. Google)) had supposedly sent a private mail to author because people had complained. But, author claims, Blogger knows it is not a scam. So you should also believe author, naturally. Since (s)he said that Blogger said that it is not a scam. The letter closes with:

 PS: Please be assured that this is all true.

Now THAT is solid reasoning!

For those who are wondering: if this is indeed a shady Blogger site, why does Blogger not close it down? Well, because it is not a site hosted by Blogger. Someone cleverly picked a private domain name resembling '.blogspot', I didn't notice this at first as well. But still, the content says enough.

However, somehow a link to my blog is on top of their blog roll. To the people coming to my blog redirected from that site: hi there, and shame on you for clicking on links on shady websites. Seriously, please don't do this anymore.

I don't feel like sending this website an email asking to kindly piss off, because that would disclose my email address to a shady site, which is of course not a smart thing to do. So now I'm just hoping it will go away soon. Grmbl...

Calendar download: March wallpaper

Phew, made it júst in time. Deadline March: check!

Also I managed to stick to my blogging intention of at least two posts a month, since the previous post was February 1st and this one is on February 28th. Hah!

Now for April, I might try something in the graphic style I'm currently practising for another illustration project. No, I'm not going to tell you about it yet because I'm pretty sure it will be finished after at least a year- if I even get to the point of finishing it at all. It's still way above my skill level when it comes to creating those kind of illustrations. But I'll just keep practising.

Okay, see you later!

Styled product pictures

Remember I told you here that I had been shooting my jewelry pictures with a plain white background because it was easier? Because shooting pictures with styled backgrounds was frustrating and stressful to the point that steam was coming from my ears and my mouth was foaming?

Okay, I didn't tell you that last part, neither is it completely true, however I'm not lying when I say it did not work. One reason might have been the fact that I had already ran ill at the time and being ill ánd utterly stressed out ánd with deadlines at the same time does not enhance your creativity and overall sanity.

Anyway, at the time it was decided (foam, foam) that my styled pictures pretty much sucked and that they were completely useless. Hence the plain white background. But this week after finally daring to open my archived pictures, I have to say I had been overreacting a little at the time. A little tweaking and well, these are the results:

 

Not entirely the super-duper-highly-professional-looking pics I was aiming for, but that was a bit on the ambitious side anyway (wow, really?). I am just a beginner after all... For now, these are good enough. Off to practising more!

Calendar wallpaper: February download

Whew! I made it, the deadline that is. The February wallpaper is finished before the start of February. I 'recycled' the valentine card because, well, recycling is good. Lets keep it at that.

Cute Cupid is eager to shoot his arrows even when there are no more hearts available. Ambitious little fella.

Once again available on the Downloads page in normal and widescreen version. Hope you like it!

EDIT: uploaded the correct versions, because February does not have 31 days and certainly does not begin on the same weekday as January. In other words, I had simply copied the calender part from the January wallpaper without changing it. Whoops...

Cheese!

Well, well, well, it seems like Valentine's day is around the corner once again. Home-blogs are already overflowing with lots and lots of plain, boring and cheesy valentine decorations and projects. Plain and boring: fine, but not my cup of tea. Cheesy: yes please! Sometimes it's just plain fun to be horribly cheesy.

So here's my first contribution to the Valentine cheesiness:

Okay, I admit, I was just procrastinating because I need to go grocery shopping. And it's cold and freezing and slippery outside. And I don't like that. But now I don't have any excuses left. Darn...