Have you spent time/money on having articles written about your chosen niches?

Interested in taking it a step further?

Using your articles as the basis for video slide shows, allows you to reach out to an audience of millions and secure backlinks from high PR hosting sites.

Here, you will find some default skins to present your information in an appealing format. If you are interested in standing out from the crowd, I can custom design a skin for you. Also, you have the option to add images and/or music to add some pep to your presentation.

NOTE!: We’ve recently expanded this offer! For the same prices listed below, we’ll also submit your video creation via ArtBot, and hand submit to YouTube, sending you the link to your YouTube vid to assist you further in your marketing efforts!

To get you started on the path, here are our default skins:

A video using one of the above skins is only $10.00.

For a non-exclusive custom skin (one we can use again for another project with a different person), add $10.00

For an exclusive skin (one that is yours and only yours), add $15.00

To add a little mood music, add $2.00.

To add some images, add $2.00.

These options allow you to custom design a video platform that’s right for you and at a price that fits your budget.

Once a decision has been made, select the package the best fits you from the drop down menu and click the Buy Now button.

Once in PayPal, on the Review Your Payment screen, you will see a link labled Add Special Instructions to Merchant. The box that will appear, once the link is clicked, is where you can tell me any details I might need to know.

Did you pick the 12.00 package? Great, I need to know if you want music or images.

You want some images in the show? Tell me what you were thinking of seeing.

Want something to match the topic at hand? Tell me what you were looking for.

Want something that is all you; something that marks all your videos as just yours? Tell me what you like, maybe a spin off your initials, or I will work something out on my own.

There are so many options here! You are sure to find something that suits you!

Please allow up to seven days for completion…we do most of this work on the weekend, so if you order late-week, you’ll likely get a fast turnaround. If you order on a Monday, we can’t guarantee that!

Package Options

Default Skin $10.00 Default – Images OR Music $12.00 Default – Images & Music $14.00 Non-Exclusive Skin $20.00 Non-Exclusive – Images OR Music $22.00 Non-Exclusive – Images & Music $24.00 Exclusive Skin $25.00 Exclusive – Images OR Music $27.00 Exclusive – Images & Music $29.00

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Looking to make your own blog, create your own website but lack the skill/ambition/time to make your own headers? Well, I am the solution!

I will need to know what your website is about; what are you trying to convey. And I have to know the size you need the header. Beyond that… If you already have an idea of what you are looking for, as in imagery, let me know. Do you have a color pallet you are working from? Already have the site up, just need a header, give me the address and I can work from that.

The design process is a living thing, changing as ideas form, causing multiple creations to happen. Your 10 dollars will get you three headers from which to chose from. Just let me show you…

So, if you’re still interested, just click on the Buy Now button to get started!

Once in PayPal, on the Review Your Payment screen, you will see a link labled Add Special Instructions to Merchant. The box that will appear, once the link is clicked, is where you tell me the dimensions you need, the topic of the page, and any other information you want to give me.

I look forward to working with you!

Please allow up to seven days for completion…we do most of this work on the weekend, so if you order late-week, you’ll likely get a fast turnaround. If you order on a Monday, we can’t guarantee that!

The problem, though, is that no matter how many you might find, at the end of the day, you’re still limited by whatever other folks have made for you if you use this approach.

For the ultimate in freedom and flexibility, your best bet is to learn to create your own!

Using nothing but free tools (both in the creation of the button itself AND in the recording of the video to show you how), in just over two minutes, Christina walks you through from a blank screen to a button that’s ready to use… enjoy!

-=Vel=-

My mother and I were talking, not long ago, about some antique spoons she had, and wouldn’t it be great if we could do something artistic with them; give them life again.

Well…one thing led to another, and I took the odd ones that didn’t match the set home and started to experiment. Rings have to be sized to each person, but a pendant – that is for everyone.

Below, you’ll find instructions and photos to help guide you if you want to try the project out for yourself!

(Note: Click on any thumbnail for a larger version of the image)

Free Beading Projects, Spoons, Figure 1

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Based on the pattern in the spoon’s handle, how much you want showing in the finished work, how long a pendant you want, and how much loop around you want, you cut off the unwanted portion of the spoon. The loop around may be small for stringing or a chain, or you may want it larger to go on a slide.

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Free Beading Projects, Spoons, Figure 2

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Take a small torch and heat up the end of the spoon to soften the metal. Once hot, you’re going to hammer the “loop end” flatter so that it isn’t so bulky against your neck and for a basic finish.
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Free Beading Projects, Spoons, Figure 3

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Hammer away! The smoother your hammer and the smoother the surface you are hammering on, the less scratches you’ll wind up with. This translates into less work for you in total, as the less scratches you create now, the less buffing them out later. (Notice, I am hammering on a brick and with an old beat up hammer).
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Free Beading Projects, Spoons, Figure 4

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Once you’ve done all the damage you can do with the hammer, your next step will be to do like me, grab a file and start filing out some of the deep scratches you just made. Art is messy. I love it!
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Free Beading Projects, Spoons, Figure 5

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I tend to put things on the buffer as I go. This just helps me to see where the really deep scratches are, so I know where to focus.
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Free Beading Projects, Spoons, Figure 6

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And the hammering made rough weird shapes on the end. You want to smooth all that out, and reshape the end to a nice round, or something fancier if you want. For this example, I stuck with a simple round end.
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Free Beading Projects, Spoons, Figure 7

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The piece has cooled off, so we are going to re-heat it to get it soft again so we can fold the end over to make our loop for our chain to run through.
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Free Beading Projects, Spoons, Figure 8

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I lack a lot of equipment. You are going to want to start your turn by hammering your piece around something. I put a screwdriver in a vice and started hammering around that. Once the turn is started, you and flip the piece and start forcing it back around. I am using a mallet here, to try and cut down on scratches and dents. You will also notice I am holding the piece with a kitchen towel, as to not burn my fingers.
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Free Beading Projects, Spoons, Figure 9

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My one nice piece of equipment is a pickle pot. It is basically a crock pot. (In college we used crock pots.) You put a special chemical (sodium bisulphate) in the water, mix it up, and let it get hot. This eats away at the oxidizing that happened while you were heating the metal. The directions tell you amounts and times and things (figure 9 shows the piece sitting in the Pickle Pot).
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Free Beading Projects, Spoons, Figure 10

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The scratches look light, so I am going to start on the buffer, see what there is to see.
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Free Beading Projects, Spoons, Figure 11

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I am using an item to help polish, you can put it straight on the buffer wheel while it is turning. The soft pads won’t hurt your fingers, though it will get your piece hot after a time – friction.
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Free Beading Projects, Spoons, Figure 12

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So, I have been buffing a while and there are two places too deep for the buffer to go. So, I have to do a little hand work.
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Free Beading Projects, Spoons, Figure 13

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It can get a little dicey here. You need the file to get to this deep scratch, but you don’t want to make more deep scratches. And you don’t want to hit the intricate pattern in the spoon. Be light handed, and careful.
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Free Beading Projects, Spoons, Figure 14

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After I have done all I dare with the file, I move to sand paper. To get something smooth, you have to gradually get scratches out. That means to something of smaller grit each time. Again, you are having to be careful with this tiny piece of sandpaper.
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Free Beading Projects, Spoons, Figure 15

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Once I think I am buffer ready I start over with the same polishing substance as before. Check the piece, looks good, so I then use an even finer polishing substance. This one I found easier to put it on the piece directly, rather than on the buffer. The amount of time you spend buffing stuff out is up to you. How shiny do you want it, in the end? But don’t be fooled. Something like 80% of jewelry work is sanding and buffing scratches. Not glamorous, but that’s the truth of it!
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Free Beading Projects, Spoons, Figure 16

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And here we are, finished pendant made from a spoon. Done in under an hour.
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Now you have an elegant sterling silver piece, that you can put on a chain, a choker, or string up with beads to make something truly unique.

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BEING creative is one thing. Almost everybody has, lurking somewhere inside them, at least a small creative spark. The trick is to draw it out and nurture it. To plant seeds to make it grow.

Now, for the overwhelming majority of artists on the planet, two things are true: Most artists struggle (the days of patronage are long gone, and it’s a rare thing indeed for aspiring artists to be taken in by the wealthy…we could debate whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing on the whole, but that’s a whole different topic, for another day), and most struggling artists don’t have a lot of money to spend on tools.

Of course, almost everybody reading this understands that by themselves, the tools can’t MAKE you creative. They can help play a role in nurturing your creativity by providing an easy outlet, and they can increase your creative productivity by making your life a fair bit easier.

So…the first of what will grow into a number of articles and essays on the topic.

Finding tools that help you get more out of whatever creative enterprise you’re pursuing.

In order to “make the cut,” the tools mentioned here have to meet two basic criterion. First, they have to help an artist create, and offer something in service or function that makes working with the tool faster/easier/better than not, and second, the tool has to have a free function (it’s okay if the tool has a paid version with even more features, but in order to be mentioned here, it has to have a fully functional free version as well).

This first essay then, will introduce you to a variety of different tools (some you may have heard of and some you probably haven’t) that do their jobs very well and meet my two criterion above. It should be noted that I am not an affiliate for, and receive no commission from the makers of any of these products, though if they offered some type of affiliation, I would certainly formally join them, as their products are outstanding and, having used all of them, I highly recommend them!

Anyway, enough about all that…on to the goodies themselves!
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Unless you have been hiding under a rock, you’ve likely heard of a company called Microsoft. One of Microsoft’s best selling products is MS-Office, which is a package that comes with Word (word processor), Excel (spreadsheet), Access (database), PowerPoint (e-mail), and others, depending on what, specifically, you buy. A great addition to Microsoft’s office package is Adobe Professional, which allows you to turn text documents into PDF’s (a PDF being one of the most widely used document standards on the ‘net today).

Unfortunately, unless you’ve got a couple hundred bucks, you can kiss these two particular pieces of software g’bye (a quick search as I’m writing this reveals MS Office ’07 on sale for a hundred bucks, with Adobe pro coming in at that same price…so, literally two hundred bucks and tax to get both).

Fortunately, if you’ve not already heard of Open Office, you’re reading this document, and are therefore about to save a ton of money.

See…Open Office has not only all the features and functionality of MS Office, but it also creates PDF’s, rolling the functions of both packages into one, completely free piece of software.

If you’ve ever used MS Office, it’ll take you about five minutes to familiarize yourself with Open Office, and in next to no time, you’ll be off and running! It is, quite simply, a fantastic piece of software, and I used it to write the piece you are now reading, to boot!

Grab your copy, free, today, by clicking here: Get Open Office!
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Image editing is a huge market with lots of big name players. Probably the best known image software is Adobe Photoshop (a search for that title reveals that it’s currently on sale and can be had for $145). I don’t know about you, but I can think of LOTS of things I’d rather do with a hundred and fifty bucks than spend it on a piece of software, especially when there’s a free alternative out there.

Enter GIMP. It’s right behind Open Office as one of the first pieces of software I download and install on a new computer, and it’s fabulous. With tens of thousands of user created “brushes” you can add strange and unimaginably beautiful effects to your digital photos or scanned copies of your art. In fact, in Christina’s Gallery (on this site), you can see examples of digital art she created via GIMP, and her color/black and white blend photography was all edited using this program).

Put simply, GIMP is a fantastic piece of software that does everything we’ve ever needed it to do, and the internet is brimming with new development ideas, tutorials, and GIMP related tools, so if you can’t figure something out, you can easily find the answers to whatever questions you might have. I mark it down as a must-have tool on every computer I have, or will have in the future (and it’s currently installed on both our machines here at the house!)

You can get it free, by clicking here: Give me GIMP!
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Audacity is to the at-home recording artist and sound mixer what GIMP is to the visual artist. Yes, you can spend hundreds (and actually thousands) of dollars on big name software titles (Adobe Audition is currently selling for $349) to do sound recording, mixing, and editing, but again…why? Audacity is a completely free, open source, full featured piece of software with amazing features and functionality, and like GIMP and Open Office, it has a large and vibrant community associated with it, and there are plenty of add ons and tutorials to help you extend the capabilities of the software beyond its natural (quite feature rich) bounds.

With Audacity, a decent microphone, and a decent place to make your recordings, you’re well on your way to producing quality audio files for almost any purpose you can imagine, so whether you’re into music, poetry reading, creating books on tape, marketing, or public speaking, you can make GREAT use of this fantastic product!

Here’s a sample of Audacity at work in the computer game Candle’Bre. Tavern

Get your free copy by clicking here: I want Audacity!
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Game Maker is an interesting bit of software, created by Mark Overmars. There’s a fully functional free version, and you can upgrade at nominal cost to the paid version, which allows you to extend the capabilities of the core software quite significantly.

Even in its free form, however, you can do quite a lot with it.

Essentially, it allows someone with no programming experience to create computer games. Fully functional, completely playable, computer games.

I didn’t really believe it when I heard about it, and just HAD to try it out for myself, and the verdict is…it’s true!

I know NOTHING about code. Didn’t when I first started playing with Game Maker, and still don’t to this day…but it doesn’t matter. In short order (and with lots of experimentation and reading on the Game Maker forums), I was able to crank out a functioning prototype of the Candle’Bre game. The ability to go from visualization to realization is both huge and fantastic. To be able to say, “wouldn’t it be neat if we could add a feature to allow…” and then turn around, and in a matter of days (and often hours) have that feature up and working…that’s beyond words! And that’s what Game Maker allows you to do.

Now granted, someone like me doesn’t generate the most efficient code, but that’s easily fixed by partnering with someone who knows a thing or two about it. The major point, however, is that you can really bring your ideas to life, and you can do so in a way you may not have considered before, because you thought it meant learning a programming language.

It doesn’t!

If you are even vaguely interested in exploring this particular avenue of creativity, you owe it to yourself to check out the Free Version of Game Maker today!
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The last item I want to bring to your attention in this segment is Widget Box. It’s…one part web-library, and one part software development.

You can go to Widget Box, create a new widget (which requires a bit of code know-how), and put it on the site for others to use.

Or, you can browse through the existing widgets (most are free, but there are some that you have to purchase to use), and find something to work into whatever creative project you’re pursing (there’s an example at the bottom of this article). There are a staggering number of widgets that perform an amazing multitude of functions, so I leave it to you to explore the site and draw your own conclusions, but if you’ve never heard of it then, a) you owe it to yourself to at least check it out, and b) you don’t know what you’ve been missing!

Go explore Widget Box today!

And congrats! If you’ve grabbed all the software from this page, you’ve just saved yourself something like $600 and a ton of headaches!

-=Vel=-

We’ve set up an image for you to play with, or you can use your own (the path for the image is: http://www.creativisms.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/Smokey-Flower-small.jpg – just copy and paste this into the widget box and click “test image” to use!)