Understanding My Theme (September 29, 2016)

This week, I decided to do another Blogging University course. Although I really want to dive into the Branding and Growth course, the current course I’m taking is Intermediate Customization. I really should make some tweaks to my theme first.

As I discussed in my Blogging 101: Zero to Hero (now Blogging: Fundamentals) course, I decided to change over to the Lovecraft Theme from the Baskerville theme. I have stuck with it ever since, but I would like to do some more customization.

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A Little Bit of Levity (June 15, 2016)

I don’t care what people say, this is a masterpiece.

I’ll try to write a regular Write Anything Wednesday post next week.

Good night, everybody!

Website Wizardry (WAW)

For this week’s Write Anything Wednesday, I thought I’d talk about the work behind the scenes…on websites. Sometimes, I a website like the Art Encyclopedia and think, “Even with my limited coding experience, I would like to try my hand at improving the look of it.”

It’s a very simple design that serves its purpose.

But the truth is there is so much work that goes behind it. (That’s an excellent referencing website by the way. I would recommend it for art students.)

This week has been pretty busy for me and I am reminded of a post from the Vivid Concepts website. I had commented on that post weeks ago but lost the link. Fortunately, I was able to find it after going to The Bloggers Meetup site and seeing another Vivid Concepts webpage. You guys are awesome! And LOL at the comment from tmisseghers.

How I Came Up with My Username (WAW)

What does this image have to do with anything? I used it on YouTube once. And I would rather this be the top image.

For my second entry for Write Anything Wednesday, I have decided to share a story. This was inspired by vinneve, who asked me the question days ago.

About 7 years ago, I was thinking of a name to use for a DeviantArt account — when it was still written as deviantART — and possibly for YouTube. I wanted the name to be something unique and something that I wouldn’t mind using year after year.

Just how did I come up with Shmaltz and Menudo, though? I combined two terms that were “out there” in terms of daily usage — in my life and mainstream America. I first heard of the term “schmaltzy” when a film critic was basically panning the movie “Pay It Forward.” I had to look that up. The term “Menudo” was only familiar to me because of the now-defunct Puerto-Rican “boy band” that allowed Ricky Martin to jump into show business. I looked up both terms (for schmaltz and Menudo) before finally settling on this name.

Well, as you can see, I never used that name for DeviantArt and it took me awhile to use it for YouTube. Why is that? Snap decisions in regard to the former site and technicalities on the latter.

What I Need to Do to Improve My Art (WAW)

I meant to write a post like week for Write Anything Wednesday, but I had such a busy week. (Hey, it’s still Wednesday where I am. Forget you, Greenwich Military time!)

Anyway, I have been meaning to make this post for quite some time.

As I have stated in some posts and my “About” Page and in my Gravatar profile, I am an aspiring artist and writer. While I can see that I have already made some improvement as a writer, I still need quite a bit of work to do as an artist.

Much of that is my own fault. Since childhood, I have loved to draw and I did this more consistently, even without proper tools. But I abandoned much of it for years after reaching adulthood.

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Where I Struggle

I went back to school so I could earn a degree, but I didn’t make the type of progress I wanted to. For one thing, I struggle mightily with figure-drawing. I do have some books and references to use, but it will take me some time to get my art to where it needs to be in this area.

Building My Brand (on WordPress)

For Assignment 14 in Blogging 101, we each had to work on building our brand. In order to do this, we were given three choices:

1. Create a custom icon for our sites. This shows up on the browser tab.
2. Create a fan page on Facebook to promote our posts.
3. Create image widgets for a sidebar.

I went with the first option.

As I was working on working on this assignment, my first thought was to create the icon by hand. Either I would draw something traditionally or do it digitally. In any case, an idea would have to be sketched out.

The two ideas I came up with were: drawing part of my face; or using the letters in my screen name artistically. During the sketching phase, I liked how the letters looked. The self-portrait can still be used for another project.

The icon I’m currently using was made in Adobe Illustrator. Here’s a sneak peek:

This is still a work in progress and things might be changed later.