Making artist t-shirts

Sorry for the protracted hiatus. Lucky Blair is the one responsible for the nuts and bolts of Art Life Collective - actually handling the hardware and getting the designs from the artists and printing the shirts because ...

Since Tuesday, I have had the unique, at least to me, pleasure of dealing with an inner ear infection. For the past five days, the world has been spinning in not-so-slow circles and I have the verticle rolls not seen since those days in college when chasing everclear with vodka seemed like a great idea.

In short, I have been out of circulation. Even updating the blog has been n
early impossible - getting violently ill into a computer voids the warranty.
Anyway, though I am by no stretch 100 percent, things appear to be improving slightly. I have been able to answer emails, more or less, but if I have missed anybody, please be patient.

Vertigo resulting from vestibular neuritis may be God's way of keeping me off my new longboard - still recovering from broken arm, incident of which began with sentence: "No, kids, really, dropping in is easy, just watch."
Still, can't wait to try out new Freebord, check these things out at www.freebord.com. Riding this thing will be my way of thanking the ortho who rebuilt my wrist with repeat business. Actually, for a former wakeboarder and general water junkie, this is as close to snowboarding or wakeboarding I'm going to probably get here in central Alabama. Love the mountains, miss the beach.

Moving along, according to Blair, he is about to step up the advertising for the artwork on the site and hopefully increase our traffic, which he says is good now, but not where he wants it.

I will update this site as soon as I hear more from him this weekend.

On a positive note, we continue to attract some very talented artists who are lending t-shirt designs to Art Life Collective. Latest count puts us at 67 artists and 276 designs. I have also noticed more and more of you are posting biographical information and linking to outside sites where more of your work is available. That's exactly what the site is for, to help artists and designers promote their work, so keep at it. For those of you who are already on ALC but have not added bio information, just go to the artists page and log in. You can add your bio and statements, or modify them, even if you are already registered. Make sure to save changes.

Thanks again to everyone who is contributing to ALC.
Peace,
Graham Hadley,
Art Life Collective

Single-run art and photo T-shirts

Almost forgot,
Several people have asked about doing single-run artist shirts, such as for gifts or just to have to wear for promotional purposes or at shows. While we love to have those images uploaded through the artist section and become permanent parts of the site, not everyone wants those images displayed ... except apparently on their bodies.

We have a single shirt design page at www.artlifecollective.com that is accessible from the front page or you can go here to the Design Shirt section. Actually, I have used this feature to do a single shirt as a going away present for one of my friends here in Alabama that, while both sick and funny, would in no way be appropriate for ALC or among the work I have up on the site. Remember, aside from being an artist, being a newspaper managing editor pays the bills, and some things I have come across in my day job, while funny inside jokes, probably should never see the light of day outside the newsroom.

Anyway, hope this helps.
Graham
www.artlifecollective.com

T-shirt art and copyright issues

Art Life Collective, www.artlifecollective.com, is fluctuating around 64 artists now who have sent in t-shirt designs.
I have to say I am particularly impressed with the range of designs we are seeing, from friendly logo-style artists like Debbie Gray to the darker images of Kenneth Goff, we are seeing it all. And that's great. ALC was designed to give all artists a good venue to show off their work ... keep it coming.

A word of note, though. We have had a couple of cases of copywrighted material uploaded to the site. Unless an artist owns the rights to an image, even if it has been altered or is only part of their work submitted, it cannot be up on Art Life Collective because, aside from promoting artists and their work, we also sell it on shirts to promote the site. Now, that being said, some images are allowed in parody situations, especially photos of famous people. We have had several artists contribute politically charged images ... which I think lend themselves well to t-shirts and tend to be good sellers ... and their right to use those works is protected by a number of court cases, most notably Falwell v. Hustler, which covers fair comment and criticism (sorry, journalists have to know the legalese here, it protects us on the editorial page).

Still and all, be careful about using copywrighted images and artwork. There are a couple of other notable exceptions. Some files of clip art allow it to be used for commercial distribution. The paper I work for uses such libraries and resources when we build ads. But not all clip art and art libraries, even if you have purchased them, allow commercial distribution of the work, so read the licensing agreement that came with the service carefully.

Again, Blair and I are overwhelmed by the number and diversity of the people who are taking part in Art Life Collective. Kudos to you all.
Graham Hadley
www.artlifecollective.com

Report upload problems

A couple of our artists are still reporting problems with uploading images for shirts at Art Life Collectives. If you are having problems, let us know, but please be specific. You can either respond to this blog or to our contact page. Again, let us know what kind of problem you are having. If we can't resolve the issue or it appears to be something at your end, we will request you email us the image and we will take care of things at our end and upload the photo ourselves.
Thanks to all our contributors for your patience.
Graham

Promote Art Life Collective time

Good to be back. After a few days off, it's time to once again turn our attention to promoting our artists and designers who have contributed their work to Art Life Collective.

Talked with Blair at length last night, and we are exploring a couple of advertising options to attract people to the site who want to buy the artist T-shirts here. Generally, it is a complicated market, given that the artwork we have covers a wide spectrum of styles. Still, we are going to put some ads out there that hit the broadest market possible, preferably to people with both the taste and spending power to purchase these shirts.

At the same time - this will be especially helpful to those of the Art Life Collective contributors who have posted bios and links to their other work - we will be drawing attention to the artists on the ALC site.

This is a work in progress, and we are always flexible. If anyone has suggestions or knows of an advertising market we should tap into, let us know by emailing either myself a graham@artlifecollective.com or to info@artlifecollective.com. Remember, this is an online resource that can reach the entire country, as contributing artists, you may have a better idea how we can reach certain markets and segments of the population.

Also, we are handling the advertising, including its costs. So, we won't be hitting up participating artists or contributors for any additional cash.

Graham
http://www.artlifecollective.com

Weekend break

Topped 60 artists today who have contributed T-shirt designes to Art Life Collective. Again, it looks like we have made massive progress on the few image uploading problems that survived beta testing before the launch of the site.

I encourage anyone who had problems with images to try uploading them again. If anyone is still having problems, please email us.

Given that, it has been a busy week, so we are both taking a day off, taking some downtime and a little recreation. We are monitoring emails if anyone has a problem or a concern, let us know.

Things continue to go well for ALC, and we thank everyone who has contributed and worked on the project.
Graham
www.artlifecollective.com

A good day to post artwork on Art Life Collective

According to Art Life Collective President Blair Hadley, a bunch of our technical difficulties involving artists uploading their t-shirt designs have been resolved.

"Today, after a two-day battle with the fixing some fairly serious problems, is a good day to upload images. Tomorrow should be a good day as well….and hopefully the day after that. Sorry for the recent troubles with image uploads. All should be well now. Good luck, and let me know if any of you continue to have problems. Cheers!"

Blair

So,

Go to the site and add images. If any of you are still having problems, let us know on the contact page. To upload images or to register, go to our artists page.

Graham

Message from t-shirt art guru and Art Life Collective pres

Greetings and Salutations from the Art Life Collective!

An open letter to the artists of Art Life Collective from company president, Blair Hadley

Props and Laurels
Trying to figure out where to begin with this first newsletter is difficult at best. First of all, I would like to thank each and every artist who has taken the time to register on the site. I know for some of you it has been a trying experience, but if you are reading this, it means you are a founding member of the Collective. We at ALC all have our hats off to you. You have formed the foundation of an adventure into a new type of business model where everyone truly has a voice, enjoys the same freedoms of expression and shares in the rewards of the open market in a way that is truly equitable.

Secondly, I would like to personally thank our primary web designers, Manhattan-based Nathan Conrad (all aspects of graphic design and architecture) and Jon Kowalski (all aspects of site functionality). They worked closely with me over a period of months to make this dream possible. It has been a pleasure to work with them. In addition, many thanks to Julie Askins, a talented photographer and friend who lent her time and talent to do the model shoots you see on the homepage and the about page. In addition, I would like to give a very special thanks to Melissa Loy who greatly assisted in the development of the concept itself. Finally, thanks to my brother, Graham Hadley, whose assistance in working directly with the artists and promoting the site has helped so much in getting us to where we are today.

What the #$% is going on? I can’t upload my images! Argh!
Okay. This is the place where I’m going to address the avalanche of e-mails and complaints about problems folks are having uploading images. Many of you I have worked with directly in troubleshooting this process. This has been the source of greatest consternation, probably, for all of you. First of all, it being the first month of operations for the site beyond private beta testing, it comes as no surprise that we have faced some great challenges in this arena. Our staff has done its best to fix these issues on the fly, and many issues have already been hammered out, but let’s face it – for many it has been an exercise in patience and frustration. Some of you, unfortunately, have even given up altogether.

As always, there is not an ounce of balderdash in the way you are dealt with, so on behalf of my company I apologize to all of you for which this has been a frustrating experience. I also thank those of you who have persevered.

Dealing with the problem of uploading PNG files has been a particular source of consternation. Lots of you have complained about files not formatting properly on the Dynamic Alignment Tool (the T-shirt template). We are working to have this problem fixed in the near future. For now, I recommend saving and uploading any files you need to support transparency in TIFF format. So far TIFF has been the fool-proof workhorse of the site in terms of image uploads where transparency is required. I will let you all know when PNG is reliable enough to be used on a regular basis. We will also edit the Image Upload Guide to reflect these changes. If you are not uploading an image that needs to support transparency, use JPG format. Also, it seems that older versions of Photoshop have particular difficulty with this format, particularly PS 6 and 7. CS and CS 2 seem ok for PNG’s.

But I am using .jpg, and I still can’t get my images on the site!!! There are a number of reasons for why this may be the case. Most of the issues seem to be related to images being to large or they are not between 150 and 300 dots per inch. However, from personal experience, I know there are some of you out there with correctly formatted images that are still not correctly uploading. To deal with this issue, we have created a dummy account we are now using to test images that otherwise should upload. So far I haven’t met an image that I couldn’t make friends with, so if you are really struggling, send the image to us and we will troubleshoot it for you. Do this as only a last resort. If we are too overwhelmed with solving upload issues in this way, nothing will get done around here! Also, I have honestly found that a lot of folks are not really reading the upload guide (you know who you are!). Please, READ THE WHOLE IMAGE UPLOAD GUIDE! There are big reasons why we have set the image upload specifications the way they are. ALC only wants to provide the highest-quality textile imaging on the market. That means we need extremely high resolution images.

Another issue may be image size. If you try to upload an image that is too low resolution, the server will not accept it. Also, please make sure the images are no larger than 11.5 inches wide by 17.5 inches tall. Oversized images also will not be accepted by the server. Finally for all you folks who are still struggling, please make sure to TURN OFF POP-UP BLOCKERS WHEN USING THE SITE! The image upload status bar is a pop-up. If it is blocked, there is no way to upload your work. Finally we know there are kinks to work out on our end, and we are laboring to do so as quickly as possible. Thanks for your patience.

When do I start to make some money?
This is another question I have a feeling is on all of your minds. Well gang, here’s the deal. To those of you who’ve already reaped the financial rewards of using the Collective, congratulations. For the rest of us, let me tell you what has been taking place for the last month: We have been building the image database. Squandering our finite advertising budget before the site had a solid, varied base of images and artists would be foolish. In the next month ALC will be launching an aggressive promotional campaign to draw customers to the site and your images. There is a phenomenal variety of first-class on the site to choose from at this point, and it is time do go ahead with this phase of building the Collective. As always, you will be notified via e-mail as soon as an image of yours sells, as well as an update of your current balance due you from ALC.

Art Life Collective Version 2.0 – Make your voice heard!
As expected, this first month online has been a wild one. Although I cannot tell you how pleased we are with what has transpired, the site is going to get some serious love in the coming months to address your concerns as well as ours. Some of the things you can expect in the future are a more browsable main gallery and artist database, including adding a search engine for keywords as well as hammering out issues concerning the artist admin page. We will also be adding a feature that permits artists to use an alias or pseudonym rather than their real name and possibly, and I do mean possibly, use this feature to create multiple profiles. Also we will be adding a forum for artists to communicate with one another, ALC staff, as well as the general public. This feature will not be directly on the site, but will be linked directly to the site in a few obvious locations. Everything we are overhauling in the coming months will be geared to streamlining the ease of use for customers and artists as well. But we don’t want to guess at what we think you want. If ALC is import to you, and you have an idea you want to share, please send comments to peanutgallery@artlifecollective.com. We will listen to all serious feedback, but this account will be for suggestions to the site revision only, so do not expect a response from that address. If you have other issues or difficulties, continue to address them to myself or info@artlifecollective.com.

In closing…
I cannot tell you all - artists, staff, programmers, family and friends how much I appreciate your efforts to help create what I hope will become a revolution in the way artists share and market their work on the World Wide Web. We are really trying to do something different here, and it is your continued support, feedback and effort making the Collective real. You are all forming the backbone of this organization. The success of the Art Life Collective is a direct function of the efforts of many, not a few. Again, thanks so much for joining us.

Respect,
Blair Hadley
President, Art Life Collective, LLC
Art As Life…Life as Art!

Finding art customers

To date, Art Life Collective has been focused on building a solid base of artists. We have had a great response, with 56 talented artists and designers signing on.

But the real purpose of ALC is to promote their work. To that end, we are working on letting other people know about the site and who is displaying work there - and what can be bought on shirts.

Also to note:
Again, if you have posted to ALC, feel free to create links in your biography section and link to sites containing other examples of your work. We have a bunch of artists who have just uploaded their work without adding anything about themselves or what kind of art and design they do or how to get in touch with them. Those biography sections are an important tool for our contributors to promote your work, so take advantage of it.
Here are a couple of examples
Carolina Gallegos
Edward Ferrusquia
Jessica Lum

So, remember, this is a free service, might as well use it.
Graham

Image quality

Artists and t-shirt designers, a note about image quality.
Be sure the images you send us are at least 170 dpi and in the right format: .png (suggested), .tiff, .gif, .jpeg - see the earlier post about .png issues.

We have had to kick some images back to the artists for additional work, usually because they are too low a dpi - 72 is fine for onlie work but does not print very well and look rasterized.

Also, check to make sure your image is high quality and is not a small image that has been scaled up, again, it results in a rasterized image.

Some of these problems, if they are very minor, we can fix, but more serious problems we can't rectify and the artwork will have to be resubmitted.

Fine tuning ALC

Blair has yet to post here, but not to worry.
Talked at length with him today and he has been working on optimising the printing process to get the best art images possible and waste no shirts (he says loading shirts upside down in the press is bad, mmmkay).

Still, things are moving in the right direction at Art Life Collective. We have gotten loads of feedback from contributing artists. We appreciate all of it and Blair is working on some revisions to the site to make it more user friendly for everyone concerned. We have also updated our contact information page phone numbers.

We have had several artists ask questions about how to best upload their images. If anyone has questions about not covered in the FAQ secton of the site or in the image uploading section - or are having trouble with any other aspect of ALC - please let us know on our Contact page so we can fix the problem or post a comment, with your contact info, on this blog.

Also of note, we added two more artists this weekend, bringing us to 54 in just a couple of weeks and topping the 200 mark for pieces of uploaded work.

Thanks to everyone who is contributing and keeping ALC a growing concern.
Graham

Working on some more images

Should be uploading some more images of my own in the next day or so to Art Life Collective, depending on schedule at the paper - shy a copy editor and reporter just now. Found one of my old backup CDs with some early stuff archived on it. Remember the joy of working in Photoshop with no layers and a single undo? Still, I did some good work with the tools at hand and hope some of it will be worth a look today.
Also, got the blog listed on some directories, and they want us to reciprocate, so here goes a link to Blogarama.
Found lots of good artists links there. So check 'em out.
G

PNG shirt artwork, a few issues

In our t-shirt design section of Art Life Collective, it says .png is preferred. This is true, however, not all versions of Photoshop handle this file type the same way and older versions of Adobe's flagship are creating some issues ... we think. This is happening from either our artist upload page or our Create-your own-shirt page.

At the newspaper office, we just upgraded all editors, photographers, pagination stations to OS 10.4 and went from QuarkXpress to inDesign and Photoshop CS2. The version of Photoshop CS2 and, probably going back to CS, appears to save in png format differently than the older versions.

My version at home, Photoshop 6 on OS 9, appears to create png files that ALC's server reads as four or five times too big. It's something we are working on. But if you upload a png file and it covers the shirt art postitioning window or looks giant - images should appear proportional on that screen to the way they look once printed - it's possible your version of Photoshop is older and you have come across the same problem.

If this happens, use our contact page and let us know what is going on - we should be able to upload the image for you if you email it to us. Also, you could find someone with a newer version of Photoshop or send it to us in another one of the formats, like jpeg. The only problem with not using the png format is it supports transparencies so well.

Again if you are having any trouble in this regard, use our contact page or post a comment to this blog.
Thanks,
Graham

Shameless promotion of wife's work

By contrast, the Wife is old school when it comes to her art. She is comfortable in any medium, and often combines several at once, but does nothing on a computer artwise.
Check out her work:
http://artlifecollective.com/shop/index.php?main_page=detail&cat_id=38

She actually has a bunch more, and I am working on getting it on the site. A little more difficult, since much of it is matted and framed and must be at least taken out of the frame. I use a professional digital camera in a studio setting to capture the image. I have found it works much better for reproducing art on our shirts than if I use my flatbed scanner. Colors are richer and less rasterization of image. It's much closer to the original this way.

But it also takes longer and is more labor intensive than grabbing up my digital files and uploading them. Also, everything shot with camera requires some work in Photoshop.

Shameless self promotion

I realize I mentioned I do some newspaper editing (small-town-paper plug: www.dailyhome.com), and that pays the bills, but art has always been a huge part of my life.
Again, I love living in this area, but it's far down the food chain of progressive art hot spots. So, so long as I have the opportunity, check out some of my stuff on the site.
http://artlifecollective.com/shop/index.php?main_page=detail&cat_id=39

After years of working with pen and ink - and realizing in college an art degree was out since I despise the way charcoal feels on paper, something akin to fingernails on chalkboard - I turned to journalism and, after a brief, yet successful, stint as reporter became a copy editor - and someone left Illustrator, Photoshop and Adobe Dimensions on my pagination machine. I started doing some illustration and graphic work for the paper between making sure reporters correctly spell Alzheimer's disease and throwing pages together.

Aside from reading a few books on the matter, I am largely self taught. I tend to use a buch of software, especially combining modeling effects and Photoshop, though everything is always tweaked in Photoshop before it sees the light of day.
The nano technology creation was very tricky, especially since Ray Dream, though great in its day, has some severe limitations and gobbles processor resources, especially with multiple layers of transparency being rendered.

Still, that one is getting printed on a shirt soonest. I figure it will be my own personal benchmark for how well our press handles high-contrast images.

Blair says he has some similar images of his own, as far as contrast goes, and he had good results with our printing system before www.artlifecollective.com was ever launched.

Looking forward to seeing it.

Getting Art Life Collective started

Hopefully, my brother and I will be able to regularly use this space as both a news and info outlet for the goings on at Art Life Collective, www.artlifecollective.com , and a space for people who are involved with the project to give us feedback on what they think about our work - the site and our own artistic creations.

Most of us involved in this project have day jobs. For instance, I am the managing editor for a small daily in Alabama. My wife is an art teacher, among other things.

My brother is the brainchild of the entire thing, it was his idea and he gets all the credit for www.artlifecollective.com. Also an artist himself, he shares that with his many other talents. When he can tear himeself away from the presses, he has promised to jump in here and give everyone a heads up for what he is doing.

He is also our technical guru, both for the printing press and our computers that make the whole thing possible.

Aside from that, it is his vision that has brought so many different artists and other talent together, his energy, that is making the whole project possible.

As a newspaper editor, I am more of the PR gerbil for the affair. ... Of course, it also gives me a chance to pimp some of my work in the process. ALC is a great outlet, especially for myself, since my art would find little market here in rural Alabama.

So, as we move along, I hope to be able to keep everyone informed about what we are doing and developments with the Web site and the printing operation.
ALC also wants feedback about what we are trying to make happen here. As a self-sustaining artist collective for artists to promote their work, ALC is a great idea, but that does not mean it can't be improved on our that our new Web site may not have a few glitches that beta testing has not caught. So, let us know, here, please.
Graham Hadley,
semi-official PR gerbil for ALC.