Creative Blogger Award

It’s a lovely thing to log on to first thing in the week – a nomination for a Creative Blogger Award. Mine comes to be from Danica over at Living a Beautiful Life. Check her out, she writes about life, whether in creative writing or other formats, and tries to liven ups people’s days. She certainly has done with my day today!

The Rules:

• Nominate 15-20 blogs and notify all nominees
• Thank and post the link of the blog that nominated you (done!)
• Share 5 facts about yourself to your readers
• Pass these rules onto them

Wow, okay. So that’s a lot of people to nominate. I always have the very small worry in the back of my head that people don’t want to be nominated for things like this. Although, the last time that happened, the person just said “thanks very much, but I shan’t take up the nomination” which is one of the reasons that I continue to blog – people on the blogosphere are cool people.

Okay, so I’m going to nominate some people. I’ll see how many I end up doing, and feel free to not take up the nominations if you don’t want to! These are blogs that I feel are creative in some way, whether that’s with a creative pursuit (writing, drawing, crafting) or just creative in how they post. It is, after all, called the Creative Blogger Award.

• Zen and Pi – Love her “If we were having coffee” posts. A very imaginative way to catch up with her week on week. I know it’s not unique, other blogs do it, but I enjoys hers. (Laso loved her theme of choice for A to Z this year)
• Stephanie Ingram – I was very much enjoying her post back in April for the AtoZ blogging challenge – The Ghosts in my Attic. I do hope the ghosts haven’t taken her away!
• I Read Encyclopaedias For Fun – Okay, so being a science person myself, I love the science diversion that occasionally crop up, but the project of his that I think is really creative is Authors Answers, where he asks a bunch of different authors questions and they answer. Properly fascinating stuff.
• Alex Hurst – Fairytale connoisseur. Who doesn’t love a collection of fairy tales from all over the world?
• Disregard the Prologue – a fellow fantasy writer, it’s doesn’t hurt that she includes a bunch of dragons in and around the blog (but her writing is pretty ace too). She’s currently doing an out of season A to Z to do with her books.
• Maugryph – An incredibly talented artist, he’s got skill and I love the content of his art (fantasy monsters, dragons and pokemon all feature!)
• Brainstorm – She doodles, she writes, she crafts, she a bit of everything rolled into one very random blog.
• Somber Scribbler – Documenting her experiences with life and mental health, she doodles a lot on different subjects and I love her style.
• Rachel Carrera – A novelist who talks a lot about her life, past and present. There’s just something about the way she writes I really take to.

And that’s all the people I want to nominated. How many…nine. Eh, it could have been worse. I’ll notify all these people once I have posted this post. These people can feel free to ignore or continue on with the award as they see fit.

Of course, this isn’t to say these are the only creative bloggers out there. Oh no, there are thousands upon thousands of them out there. These are just the people that I have, for whatever reason, remembered today for their creative endeavours.

Thanks and link to the person who nominated me, was done at the start, but thank you again to Danica at Living a Beautiful Life for the nomination 🙂

5 facts about myself. Well shoot, I’ve just done a whole challenge with stuff about myself. Uhh, this might be harder than usual, at least it’s only five…

1. I am in the process of buying a new car, since my is 15 years old and falling apart.
2. The book I am currently reading is ‘Here Be Dragons’, part of the Imaginarium Geographica series by James Owen. (I am re-reading How to Train Your Dragon ahead of the new series coming out on Friday!).
3. I still don’t own a pet. I want to get a tortoise, but it’s not happened. Perhaps after I have come back from Costa Rica and want to be back among the wild turtles.
4. The hobby I am spending the most time on at the moment is colouring in. There’s a bit of a craze for it right now and I have very much joined it.
5. I had breakfast this morning, which is rare. It was a pain au chocolate and a hot chocolate from the on campus Starbucks. We’re getting a Subway for next year. This is a very dangerous thing.

There, five titbits about me and my current life goings on. I love the word titbits. Tit…bits. Hehe.

Pass the rules on. Well, if the people want to join in, they can find the rules right on this post here, which I will link to them when I poke them about the award. I just need to hit Publish, and I’ll get right on that 🙂

Today has been a good morning.

Save IdeasTap

This is mainly going out to other writers, artists and generally creative people who live in the United Kingdom.

You may or may not heard of the website called IdeasTap. IdeasTap is an arts charity that helps creative people, especially young creative people, get to where they want to be. Working with a number of leading arts organisations including BFI, Magnum Photos, Mother London, The National Theatre, Royal Exchange Theatre and Sky Academy, they create numerous industry opportunities for their members, as well as providing funding, competitions, jobs training and advice. Since they launched in Dec 08, they have awarded more than £2.3 million worth of direct funding and expert mentoring to emerging artists. With membership currently standing at over 195,000 it is clear that it reaches out to a lot of artists, and provides a lot of opportunities for them, especially those who need a little help to turn a love into a career.

However, despite the best efforts of the people who runs this amazing charity, they have recently announced that due to financial troubles they are going to have to close their doors on June 2nd. Despite repeated attempts to appeal to government or corporate businesses for financial backing, they have had requests denied, and have not been able to secure the money that they need to keep going with their wonderful work.

Considering that a report from the Warwick Commission has found that 1.7 million people in Great Britain work within the creative industry, and that it contributes somewhere in the region of £77 billion to the economy, you would think that there would be a little more support out there for organisation who help to get people into this fantastic industry. And what does this say about how we view the arts in the grand scheme of things? Nothing good that’s for sure.

Although I have never won any of the competitions or managed to get the time to attend any of the helpful seminars, I do value what IdeasTap has done for me as a writer. It introduced me to the world of competitions, and how to write to deadlines, word counts, and to follow submission guidelines to the absolutely letter. It gave me a lot of practice, and the option to connect with a lot more people out there who had the same ideas and interests as me. I can build up a portfolio on there, so in the future if people ask me for examples of my work, I can direct them to my portfolio on there. Without IdeasTap, I’m going to lose out on some of that sense of community, and access to competitions that are sometimes hard to find.

Sorry to add a bit of politics into this blog, it’s not something I would normally do. But I am immensely sad that this is coming to pass, since it has been a fantastic aid to me, even in small ways, and there are thousands of people it has helped to make a career out of creativity, and that is something we should be trying to preserve.

#saveideastap

V – Video

A rather simple one today, but a rather nice one I personally think. Today’s I am going to give you a video, which is a short animated video made by a College Of Fine Arts (COFA) student for The Annual, which showcases student’s talents just before they leave the college. They won the award for best 2D work in the 2010 annual.

Personally, I just think it’s a lovely little story, and it makes me sniff a little when I watch it.

The Butterfly Dragon, by Sushan Yue