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This is a series of paintings I worked on from 2016-2018 in which I experimented with different amounts of detail and realism in black and white portraits. These were some of my first paintings. I set out with the goal to paint a face and initially limited myself to black and white as to keep cost down. Quickly, though, I fell in love with the feel of this style.  As you can see, I really experimented with varying degrees of realism for a style that on the whole ends up feeling very surreal. Even the most photorealistic of the portraits have this surreal feeling due to the accented highlights and the lack of color.
Sleeping Beauty (seen below) is the biggest piece I've worked on yet. It is 47 inches wide and 36 inches tall. It was much more difficult to find a balance between realism and abstract in this one, but what I ended up with I think lands on the mark. It has a landscape air to it as if the viewer were a tiny person looking on these beautiful mountains.  The piece to the bottom right was the very first portrait I painted. The one on the left was a few deep. The center one was one of the last portraits I've painted in this series. What is unique about the center one is that it is tiny, at only 4" wide by 6" tall. There is a mirror behind the grey of his eye where I cut away the canvas and clued a shard of mirror behind.
I really enjoyed making these and maybe will make more in the future. It's the only thing I've painting that I keep coming back to. I just can't stop! HELP ME GATHER SOME INFO!One lucky survey entry will win a ticket to RAW PITTSBURGH PRESENTS CONNECT for WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 29TH @ 07:00PM ($22 value).
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If you’re searching for a company to help you manage your digital marketing then you probably do plenty of research on them first... or at least I hope so. About two years ago I was searching for a digital marketing agency to work for and I started to recognize a strange trend: digital marketing companies don’t keep up with their own digital marketing.  Not only was this discouraging from an employment standpoint, but I also imagined how a company or person looking to use these agencies would feel if they did their research. I'd give some examples but I don't want to effect the reputation of some very good companies. This isn't to say every digital company does this, but service-based agencies seem to be the biggest culprit. Myself included. If you happen to find yourself on Priority Digital's website (the company I work for), and go to the blog tab... you'll only find two posts. They were both from February of 2018. I made those posts when I started in my current position and my assumption was that content would be an important part of our sales strategy. It turns out I was wrong. Content is important. However, getting client-content finished is more important. When you're a small company of only a few employees and don't charge enough to outsource everything (or don't want to for service reasons), writing your own content falls lower and lower on the priority list. The only time I write articles or make videos now about digital marketing is in the late evening (like when I'm writing this). That time isn't always the most productive for me, and not only does the quantity suffer, but sometimes the quality of the output isn't up to par for what I expect either. To check in on my own content creation, I did some research. Over the last two years, I marked down how many pieces of content I created for my own websites vs. my client's websites.  This graph includes this website, videos on my YouTube that are business-related, Priority Digital's blog, and www.Sideline-Pictures.com (the movie company that Vincent Barnard and I make movies through). My client list is changing and growing constantly, but on t his list it includes 7 different websites that I currently create or help create content for on a monthly basis. It also includes the WinklerGallery.Org site that I manage. The trend wasn't as dramatic as I had assumed, but this may be due to my spurts of creative inspiration where I create content like a mad-man for a few weeks and then disappear from the internet for a few months. That same strategy doesn't work for my clients-- obviously-- so their content output is much more consistent. What are your thoughts?
Have you noticed this or disagree with me completely? Do you care if your digital marketing consultant or agency practices what they preach? Comment down below or @craiginzana on Twitter.  If you know me, if you follow me online, or if you take a few minutes to look around my website, you’ll notice that my passions are a bit all over the place. I constantly have this nagging desire to focus heavily on just a few things, but my passion for anything comes and goes in waves. I can try to force myself through it, which works sometimes, but often I just become burnt out and depressed. Some of my proudest accomplishments have come from dropping everything I was doing and working on something that popped up. That’s not very easy to build an audience around online though. It’s not very easy to make money from. It’s not easy. At the same time though, I think it’s okay. It’s okay to follow whatever is leading me outside of my paying career. There’s a central thing that has paid my bills over the last eight years and I shouldn’t forget that. For all the exciting and interesting things I’ve gotten to work on, the thing that always pays the bill is digital marketing. This blog post isn’t for necessarily for anyone to read. It’s more for me to clear my head. Maybe one of you has a similar issue and this perspective helps. I refuse to feel guilty for pursuing the passions that lead me. I just need to remind myself what pays the bills and allow everything else to be free form. DIGITAL MAKRETINGFILMSARTWORKThis tutorial shows you how to set up the two way sync between ToDoist and Google Calendar. This works great as an online planner calendar. For years I've been looking for a system that works the way that this does! Finally, a software has met this major productivity need. The calendar layout allows a clean to do list layout spaced out by time like the half-hour by half-hour bullet journal type planners I used to use. With this digital version though, it's accessible everywhere (no forgetting my notebook!) and it's easy to move things around. If you don't want to watch the video, below are the key steps to making this work. STEP-BY-STEP TODOIST INTEGRATION WITH GOOGLE:MEDIA CONTACT list for the dubois, pa areaI get asked about press contacts for our area often. Through my work with the Winkler Gallery and Art Education Center, Sunny 106, and Connect FM I've developed a list of local contacts that are worth reaching out to.
Feel free to bookmark this page and come back often to send out your press releases. Why share this list publicly? Well, first off, these are all available to find publicly if you look hard enough. I'm not really giving away any private information here. However, I understand how frustrating it is to build a list like this by yourself. I want to see more publicity about local events. There is SO much going on in our area, but it's hard to get the word out. So here you go: AN EASY, STEP-BY-STEP OVERVIEW TO MAKE BLOG POSTS THAT GET READ Blogging has become a huge part of having a successful website. Especially in Business to Business sales, having a good blog can bring sales to your doorstep. Additionally, blogging can answer those questions you get from customers and clients over and over and over again. In fact, that's how I have come up with my most successful posts. It turns out there are usually thousands of other people out there looking for answers to that question too. Follow these steps and track the amount of views your blog posts receive. You won't be disappointed. If you do really well, some of those views should turn into paying customers! Download the free checklist PDF to help you remember these steps. 1. will the topic add value?Before you do anything, make sure the topic of your blog post matches your target audience.
It helps to imagine your IDEAL customer. What are they typing into that search bar? What blog post would they click on? What topic would be most valuable to them? Can you add a unique perspective? Will this make them trust you more and more likely to buy from you? |
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