Smashing Magazine - A Short Story About “Back to Top” Links
Second from the top in the links showcase you might see a familiar brown lump which is in fact the ChiGarden footer! Not the most inspiring thing to click on perhaps, but I love reading Smashing Magazine so am quite honoured to have my site appear in it.

We Love WP
ChiGarden was featured in the ‘Best of October 2008‘ as well as a place in the ‘We Love…’ category. I love browsing through site galleries and since I work with Wordpress driven sites a lot I’ve always found this site a great source of inspiration.

Princess Portal
I seem to be getting a lot of link love from the Princess Portal, run by the lovely Princess Skye. She even visited the Candy Cult exhibition and wrote a nice post about it and my work. Don’t be fooled by the title and all the pink - being a princess isn’t just about wearing pretty clothes and being waited on and this site has plenty of relevant articles for the modern woman (and lots of pretty clothes too!).

Core77 Gift Guide for 2007
I guess since it’s that time of year again, a lot of people seem to be coming through Core77’s gift guide from last year for my Internet Explorer Voodoo Doll Tutorial. It’s incredible to see people still liking my silly little creation over a year after creating it! I really need to write another post about where the tutorial has been appearing and what people have been doing with it. Speaking as a web designer/developer, I still agree that any geek would love this gift, especially if it was lovingly (or hatingly?) created just for them by you.

If you’re linking to ChiGarden please let me know so I can check out your site and link back!

Abstract Gourmet

Today ends Web Week here in Perth, and among the many events (sadly only some of which I was able to attend) were the West Australian Web Awards. Although I didn’t enter any of the sites I worked on myself Matt of Abstract Gourmet entered his site and won in the Blog category. The blog category is one where ‘content is king’ so I can’t take much of the credit for doing the design work, but Matt was kind enough to thank me in his acceptance speech and it’s exciting regardless!

Congratulations to Matt and all the other winners at the awards; I hope to submit my own blog someday!

Photo by Lisa Max

Good news (unless you’re sick of me posting about CandyCult, in which case you might want to leave now)! The artist merchandise, including my crafts, that was sold at the Candy Cult opening was such a hit that we were asked to sell them again at the Northbridge Festival this weekend.

I’m not completely sure of all the details, but all the stalls will be on James Street from Lake Street to William Street, and should include a really fun and eclectic range of sellers. There’s also performers around and an inflatable igloo apparently! Should be lots of fun. The stalls will be running from 1-11pm on Saturday 1st November, and I’ll be manning the CandyCult stall between 3-6pm so come say hi if you can! More details on the Northbridge Festival website.

I think something like half of my crafts and buttons are still available and there’s quite a few bits from other artists too, so please come along!

Also a quick reminder: the CandyCult exhibition is closing this Sunday, so if you haven’t already please go check it out. Details here.

Giving the category listing ‘before’ and ‘after’

I’m honestly not sure why the ability to put in what you want to appear before and after categories isn’t Wordpress by default. All I wanted to do is put those little dots in between the category items to make it the same as the archives listing - which actually does have the ability to choose what goes before and after each item.

After a lot of Googling I eventually came across this tutorial which hacks a few Wordpress files to enables wp_list_categories() to do exactly what I wanted it to. Now I (and you) can add dots, random tags and whatever you like between categories!

Removing the year from archives listing

Listing the year after every month in the archives listing wp_get_archives() seemed a bit pointless to me, especially when it’s listed horizontally the way I have it above. There doesn’t seem to be a way to remove it or change the date format, so again I had to turn to a hacky solution.

Open wp-includes/general-template.php

Around line 431 you should find the following:

See the %2$d part? That’s putting in the year, so replace with:

No more year!

Now I’m not saying that these are the best methods for creating a Wordpress template - they’re hacks, prone to problems whenever you upgrade, but the best solutions that I could find to achieve the look that I wanted. If anyone knows a better method of achieving this I’d be grateful if you could tell me so I don’t have to remember what to change every time I upgrade!

Just a quick sketch of my avatar on a popular forum site I used to frequent. A lot has changed and I don’t have the time to waste there anymore, but the outfits are always good fun to draw.

It’s strange sometimes, to look back and see how we’ve evolved - just a few years ago this forum and MMORPG’s like Ragnarok Online were my main online presence, besides my blog. Now the majority of my online presence and time online is spent on things related to design, arts and crafts - blogging, posting work, conversing with others, reading through my hundreds of RSS feed items over breakfast as if it were a newspaper. I’m not sure if I should be worried about the role the internet has had in forming who I am, but there isn’t anything to do but embrace it, I think.

Here’s what I had in the end:

I think I have the whole process down pretty well now (and have actually found a lovely satin varnish that works). I’ll be selling the left over items either through ChiGarden or Etsy, so if you missed out stay tuned!

I also ordered some 1inch button badges which arrived just in time! I couldn’t resist keeping a few of them and some were sold, but the rest will be available here soon and I’d like to get more of the ones that sell out.

When I dropped by on Saturday afternoon before the opening, I was really impressed with the setup. The curator, Karen, and her helpers had all the cutout pieces hung on the white walls with small blocks of wood to make them seem to pop out at you. The variety of work is fantastic - besides the artists being from all over the world, the different styles from cutesy to creepy to downright strange meant there was something for everybody. Karen told me at the opening that she really wanted it to be something different, something people can relate to better than fine art as well as promoting pop-art as an artform. Judging by the huge crowd that showed up and how impressed they seem to be I think she did an amazing job!

In the end I had two pieces exhibiting - the Chisa and Mojo illustration that I posted earlier, and the yellow mushroom seen here, who I decided to name ‘Mooshy’ for lack of better ideas. ‘Chisa and Mojo’ sold within the first hour or so! I was honestly expecting to buy them myself (not that I’d mind having awesome big cutouts of my characters on my walls), especially when my work was surrounded by that of really incredible artists. It feels fantastic to know that someone liked my work enough to buy it. As far as I know Mooshy is still available for sale, if anyone is interested. Most of the pieces seemed to be snapped up during the opening, so everyone did really well!

Chisa and Mojo (the girl with the paintbrush and monkey) by me!

Mooshy the Mushroom, by me

I also sold some of my crafts (which I will put in another post) and bought an adorable button badge by Studio Aiko and pranced around talking to my friends and family who showed up to support me (thankyou!). I’m going to pick up the bits that didn’t sell this weekend, so you may see an online store appearing on ChiGarden soon.

Overall this was an incredibly positive experience - possibly because all I had to do was provide my artwork, make the website and some crafty things, roles which I’m quite comfortable in. I don’t think there’s anyway I’d be able to have s solo exhibition, but I definitely want to attend more exhibitions by other artists and maybe look out for group exhibition callouts in future. This exhibition wouldn’t have been possible without the work of Karen, Lisa and all their helpers who made it easy for an amateur artist like me to participate in their first exhibition.

More photos from the event can be seen on my Flickr page, and Lisa has some really good photos too.

Candy Cult will be open until the 2nd November at the Breadbox gallery (details here) if you haven’t had a chance to check it out already. I’ll be there from 3:30 - 5pm this Saturday if you’d like to come keep me company!

The exhibition is this weekend! If you’re in Perth please join us for the opening night character party. Here is the official invite from the organiser - please feel free to pass it on and invite more people!

Candy Cult - A group character art exhibition.

Drawn from a diverse range of media including graphic design, game art, animation, graffiti,  comics, and illustration, this bright and deranged group of homicidal bunnies, homeless robots, gothic orphans, zombie schoolgirls, candy monsters and bearded mutants will descend on the Breadbox Gallery for two weeks of hyper-contrasted explosive cartoon mayhem.

Opening night + Character Art Fair:

Saturday the 18th of October from 6pm.

Where?

The Breadbox Gallery, 233 James St, Northbridge.

Gallery opening hours:

12 and 5pm, Wednesday to Friday
2 to 5pm, Saturday and Sunday
Candy Cult will run from the 19th of October through to the 2nd of November.

Artists:

Yok, Sean Morris, Jodee Knowles, Creepy, Ali J, Suspecto, Deathbot, Luke Milton, Jessica McLeod, Edward J Grug III, Peter Long, Isobel Knowles, Paul Robertson, Yui Matsubara (Japan), Lisa Max (Germany), Marco Recuero (Spain), Kimiaki Yaegashi (Japan), Stick A Thing (Germany), Ciah Ciah (Poland), Zoé Byland (Switzerland), Hylton Warburton (South Africa), Talita Hoffman (Brazil), Studio Aiko (Thailand), Maximillian Goldin (South Africa), Mr Roboto (Colombia), Dale Murray (UK), Format Brain (Argentina), Mutsuko Okayama-Everitt, John Patterson, Stefanie Bop, Tim Waters, Teresa Watts, Emma Lurie, Karen de San Miguel & Michael Lombardi.

More info:

Facebook event page
www.candycult.net
info@candycult.net

I had intended to bring Corica’s famous apple strudel as my contribution, but by the time I got there they had run out. We had to settle for a still very delicious (and sort of German!) black forest cake. Much sausages, sauerkraut, black forest cake and beer was consumed. As always, good friends and good times.

I still have to finish most of them, but here’s a few progress shots.

The only ones I did finish are these cute strawberry earrings! I only made these two pairs but I’m quite happy with them so might make a few more. Do you think anyone would buy them?