Emptyeasel has an article up detailing “vegan friendly art supplies”, and when viewed though the narrow lens of “made from animals/not made from animals”, it’s accurate. I’d say it’s also pandering to the princess sparkle-poos out there who don’t wanna hurt the animals but apparently thought that “rabbit skin glue” was just a funny bit of marketing, and a “sable/squirrel/ox hair brush” was just really good for painting that particular animal. You’d think I was making those up, but no – actual conversations overheard at Pearl Paints.

I will give a pass on the average artist not knowing where sepia ink, real shellac, or any number of organic pigments come from because the average artist is pig-ignorant when it comes to these things, and it’s not completely their fault. Art history, IMO, should cover the technical as well as the creative trends, and art students should be required to take *actual* history classes, as well as a few practical chemistry classes, and should certainly get pop quizzes on the hazmat ratings for their materials, and… where was I?

Anyway, people go vegan for any number of reasons. Maybe you’ve gone so vegan that you want every single thing you come in contact with to be cruelty free. That’s an admirable goal. However, if you’re combining your vegan leanings with a green/reduce the carbon footprint consciousness, (as Small Footprints seems to be doing) you might want to stop and think about the part where you’re promoting petrochemical art supplies over organic art supplies.

Note: The fact that I’m about to sideswipe a number of materials should not be taken to mean that I disapprove of these materials OR their synthetic counterparts. I’m a fan of the “whatever works” school myself. My problem is with the idea that merely lacking animal components makes a material animal/vegan friendly, regardless of the rest of the material’s footprint/environmental impact. It’s a very narrow, simplistic view of a very complex ethical model.

Graphite is a mineral. What surrounds it may not always be animal-free, but by itself, it is.

And it has to be mined out of the ground. It’s about as green as anything else that gets commercially mined (not much) but it doesn’t contain animal bits. Go you. Of course, animals sicken and die when their habitats are destroyed for mining, yes? Shouldn’t that matter to a conscientious artist?

Conte Crayon is made from natural pigments (iron oxides, carbon black, titanium dioxide), clay (kaolin) and a plant-based binder (cellulose ether). Damar Varnish is made entirely from a plant source.

Same deal. These materials still have to be harvested from the earth, often from areas of the developing world. The carbon footprint is not minor, especially after you factor in the post processing that must be done to convert raw materials to finished product. Most industrial process in many parts of the world are not animal or planet friendly no matter how you cut it, so I call BS on this.

Fixative sprays by Krylon (many of them, at least) do not contain animal ingredients.

Spray cans. Not animal friendly or planet friendly, and that’s before you have to worry about disposing them!

Yupo paper is made from 100% polypropylene and is suitable for all watercolour techniques. It?s good for drawing and fixatives stick to it as well.

It’s. Made. From. Oil. Things made from oil are not good for happy fuzzy bunnies.

Raw fabrics such as unsized organic hemp, bamboo, linen or cotton can all be used for supports and contain no animal products.

A cautious thumbs up on this one, but if you’re going to beat your virtuous chest on this, don’t you think you should make sure it’s free trade?

Golden?s Absorbent Ground instead of gesso. Golden?s Absorbent Ground is 100% polymer and absorbent for watercolours.

Say it with me kids… things made from oil are not good for the bunnies. Hurting bunnies makes you a crap vegan even if you aren’t eating them.

To sum up, to be a good artist vegan you have to avoid organic materials… just take everything you learned about shopping for good food and reverse it! The more manufactured and synthetic you can go, the better!

::headdesk::

I understand that you’re a struggling artist with a (very cool) niche webcomic. You’re just trying to get by, and many people have told you that the more eyeballs you can get to your site, the more attractive it will be to advertisers, and the more money you can make by selling ads on the site. That right? Did I miss anything?

Good, because you did. Depending on the tools you’re using, it’s anywhere from possible to disgustingly easy to enable the same “monetizing tools” you use on your website on a newsfeed. The part where said tools don’t do much for you unless you’re already getting a lot of traffic (like, say, Penny Arcade) is another post entirely.

Once upon a time, when teh internets were small, people would bookmark websites and visit them with regularity, hoping for new stuff. Then we got lots of websites that we wanted to keep up with, and manually checking different sites for new content got unwieldy.

Enter RSS, which lets you tell everyone when you have new content. You don’t *have* to put the content in the feed itself (though it’s nice if you do), you can just use it as an announcement service (like S*P). Without a newsfeed, you might get my eyeballs once every other month. With a newsfeed, you can get my eyeballs every time you post new work. That’s a good thing, right?

Finally, not running a newsfeed will in no way keep people from stealing, misappropriating, scraping, leeching, or otherwise doing things with your content that you’d prefer they not do. No, it really will not stop them. This is the internet and sometimes people just suck.

I get that some artists want to have “artsy” websites. Usually this is confined to multimedia offerings of various quality, but sometimes you get an artist (or possibly the artist’s web designer) who decides they want to “think outside the box”. Or possibly re-invent the wheel.

They think to themselves, “Every website scrolls vertically. But I’m an *artist* and cannot conform to the herd! My website will scroll horizontally!”

Look, you’re a talented photographer. You might even be a special snowflake. None of this will make it easier for me to actually *see* your work, as you have decided that it’s necessary for your website to bork my keyboard. The page up and page down keys? I use them to navigate up and down within a web page. I do not have a page left and page right key, so if I want to see the rest of the page I have to use the left and right arrow keys. This takes a long time. It is boring.

When I am bored, I leave your site.

If you want to design your next book, portfolio, or flier as a 3 yard long horizontal fanfold affair, go for it. I’ll be impressed and I might even purchase the book, as you are a good photographer and I am fond of pretty things. Assuming you have the time and budget, print design and layout is where you can go nuts. Website design is where it would be very nice if you remembered that my mouse, pen, and keyboard prefer pages to go up and down, not left to right.

Kottke notes two fixes for dead play-doh. The DIY method (moisten under running water and re-knead) and the corporate method (buy moar!).

In my house we just made our own. Lots more fun. Well, until I started tossing flour in front of the floor fan… then it was still fun for me but less so for my mom.

From “Stephen Sondheim and Frank Rich at Avery Fisher Hall”

…directors feel they can improve a show. They have such contempt for the authors. We (the authors) know what we?re doing and they don?t. It?s contemptuous of them.

Eh, I respectfully disagree. But I have strong feelings on the place of Authorial Intent. I also think he’s picking and choosing, as earlier he compares the role of mama Rose to Hamlet, and feels that there’s lots of room for different interpretations. Apparently, an actor bringing something new to a role is ok, but not so much for a director?

“They painted the lily. They painted it really well, but it’s painted.” In other words, “Pygmalion” did not need to be rewritten into “My Fair Lady.”

YES! Absolutely :) I found the musical first and thought it quite nice, but was utterly blown away when I read Shaw’s original. And he had a much better ending.

‘Green Grow The Lilacs’ is a very bleak play about homosexuality. Would you get that from ‘Oklahoma!’? I don’t think so.” Rich then noted, “from some productions!”

My junior high class put on an Oklahoma production with… subtext. (At least, that’s how I saw it.) For my money, that’s the way it *should* be played. Was a bit put off to see the movie afterwords and find no subtext in it at all. (But that’s 50′s movie musicals for you.)