Book Review Cher Threinen-Pendarvis:Beyond Digital Photography

I am a geek. As such I love books. My reading habit is non-curable and I peruse books on many subjects, Art and Marketing are my favorite topics and in the world digital painting every book that is published (to my knowledge) I have been fortunate enough to read. Amazon loves me.

Beyond Digital Photography is another must have book for anyone serious about transforming their photography into painterly works of fine art. This book was written by Cher Threinen-Pendarvis and Donal Jolley and published by PeachPit Press. You most likely have heard of these two well respected artists and authors. Cher is the author of the popular Painter Wow! series and Donal has been featured in many publications including The Photoshop CS/CS2 Wow! Book, the Painter Wow! Book and other publications.

Beyond Digital Photography offers extensive step-by-step information on many topics. One of the coolest things is that time is spend with Corel Painter and Photoshop. Finally we have a book that highlights the use of Painter and Photoshop together! I believe one needs to have an intermediate level of skill with the programs in order to get the most out of this book.

Many different types of paintings and techniques are covered at length. There is a great area in Chapter Two that will show you how to obtain nice flowing painterly techniques for those that are artistically challenged. If you are looking for a few nice water color techniques shoot over to Chapter 5 where Cher gives and awesome explanation on how Painters Digital Watercolors work. Take a peek at the workflow she uses to prepare an image and make it more suitable for a high key watercolor emulation.

Finally my favorite Chapter is Six. Donal shares a unique approach to utilizing layers to achieve an oil painted look that you have to try as soon as you read it. There is also an awesome demonstration from Cher of Painters Real bristle Brushes.

All in all a smoking book. The next time you are about to spend 500 bucks on a workshop…cancel your trip, hole up in your studio or a hotel room for the weekend with your computer, Wacom tablet and this book. You will be glad you did.

Digital Painting SEO Keywords part two

Finding Keywords for your art business is really not hard now days. It is actually kind of fun. There are many free keyword research tools, here are a few you can use: Google’s Wonder Wheel, Keyword Tool, Google Insights, Wordtracker’s Lab tools; and my favorite Market Samurai.

If you are going the free route, check them out and compare the results. I use the paid version of Market Samurai and it the best software investment I have made, including the digital painting software and digital imaging software like Corel Painter, Photoshop (Adobe Master Collection), Paint Shop Pro…you get the idea.

Market Samurai cost 149.00 and I use it daily for all kinds of task’s related to running my online art and information businesses. You can get a free trial at the link listed above and once your trial expires you still can you the three tools specific to keyword research, those are; rank tracker, keyword research and SEO Competition.

The best bet to learn how to find your unique keywords for your digital paintings, portrait commissions, pet portraits or whatever, is to get your free trial from Market Samurai. After you download it go through their video’s on keyword research. I can tell you I have personally spent 1,000’s of dollars for courses to learn this. Many of those courses did not have as good of training as the video series.

One thing I will talk about here that is not in the videos is what is called Geo-targeting. Most artist and digital photographers especially want to dominate their local market first and then spread from there.

To do this is really not all that difficult with your blog. With your flash website…maybe impossible. Lets say one of your studio’s primary target markets is heirloom children’s portraiture. You find a few keywords that support that and one of them is “Childrens Photography”

You can see below that there are 325 searches daily for this keyword and there are 205,000 competing pages.

Now if you live in Arizona and used “Children’s Photography Phoenix” it will narrow the searches to …not many. The good news is also narrows the competition, usually to 0. So you will begin to capture the traffic from the “local” group of potential buyers looking for Children’s Photography.

Next up-what do we do with these crazy keywords anyway?

Here is a video on using wordtracker. NOTE!!! This has music, if you are at work turn down the volume first, he he he.