Social Media – Shorena Ratiani

I’m back after a 7 month break from my art, during which I concentrated on helping my son to prepare for his university entrance exams. I am delighted to tell you that he was successful and is now studying psychology at the Georgian National University. I’m so happy for him but also for myself because I’m now free to return to my old lifestyle and start painting and drawing again!

I painted so infrequently during the last seven months that I feel I have a lot of pent-up artistic energy to release! It feels great to have a paint brush in my hand again. This is one of the first watercolors I completed following my self-imposed exile from the art world.

One of the things that I have been looking forward to is participating in the well known drawing challenge InkTober. I will be making one drawing a day for the whole of October and will post my drawings on social media channels.

Inktober is a month long art challenge created by talented artist Jake Parker in 2009. The challenge is to improve personal drawing skills and develop positive drawing habits. InkTober starts on October 1, and finishes on October 31.

Thousands of artists, even people who never ever tried to draw, take part in the challenge every year. In fact, Parker turned October into a month of continuous art celebration.

There are several rules to follow if you decide to take part in this wonderful challenge:

Participants have to create ink drawings and post them on social media – for example, on Instagram, Facebook, Tumblr., Twitter, etc. The hashtags #inktober and #inktober2020 make it easier for your art to be seen by a wide audience.

You should produce a drawing every day but you can decide when to post your creations – for example, every single day (1 drawing), once in three days (3 drawings) or once in a week (7 drawings). It’s up to you.

By clicking on the above mentioned tags you can see and enjoy what others are creating.

Before the challenge starts, an official prompt (topic) list is posted on the InkTober website and social media.

Here are the prompts for InkTober 2020.

The challenge is called InkTober so creating ink drawings is the norm but you can also make pencil underdrawings. A lot of artists add a splash of color to their artworks and I’ll do this too 🙂

What do I expect from this challenge? I’ll write about that later. Today I’m busy setting strict targets for myself to make sure that I complete the challenge 🙂 But one thing is clear – InkTober is just around the corner and I’m looking forward to challenging myself!

I honestly don’t know how my InkTober will pan out, especially as it will be my first “inking experience”. Wish me luck!

I wish you a fun experience if you decide to take part in this art challenge!

September 29, 2020 by Shorena Ratiani Categories: art, Artsy Lifestyle, Lifestyle, My Art, Social MediaTags: art, art challenge, art competition, artist, Artsy Lifestyle, challenge, competition, creative lifestyle, ink, inked, inktober, inktober2020, Lifestyle, motivation, watercolor, watercolor painting 1 Comment

Google+ will be gone later today.

Right now it’s still possible to access your account and communities but in a few hours Google will officially shut down its social network, Google+.

A statement announcing the closure of Google+ was made several months ago. However, the 2nd of April was a very painful day for active users. One of whom even called it ‘G+ doomsday’.

P. W., a longtime G+’ user, posted in the Google+ Photography community: “We will take Google+ with us wherever we go. Because we became friends here. We grew as a community. We are Google+ and nobody can take that away from us! Good luck. I will miss you all! Nothing can erase all the good that has happened here!”

The decision to shut down Google’s social network was made after discovering a bug in Google+ which exposed the personal data of almost half a million users. Shortly after, another security bug exposed the personal data of more than 50 million users.

But no one can say it was completely unexpected. Google+ was looking like a burden for the company for long time.

Unfortunately, for the 9 years of its existence, Google’s social network couldn’t compete with Facebook.

Google’s massive reach helped build a huge user base for G+, but most users weren’t regularly using the social network. Lot’s of them were just merging Google+ with other Google services.

But for artists, photographers and others in the creative community, Google+ was a very useful platform for displaying their work as it had a very comfortable and presentable layout and enabled interaction with people who had similar interests.

I was not too active on Google+ but maintained an account with the possibility to display my artworks on popular group pages. What can I say? I just feel sad, especially for people who invested much time and energy in creating beautiful collections and useful communities.

And communities on Google+ were really interesting. I was a member of communities of interior designers, writers, animal lovers, gardeners, bloggers, hobbyists, artists, photographers and had an opportunity to interact with very positive, (mostly) polite, friendly and creative people.

Google disabled the creation of new accounts in February, and will start deleting content today. According to the company’s statement, it will take a couple of months to delete all of the Google+ content. That probably means users may still be able to access it for some time.

We can’t change what has happened and can only replace G+ with some new networks.

Some Google+ communities have just stopped working but others are finding other ways for their groups to continue operating.

I followed the Google+ migration process and discovered that among Facebook, Reddit, Pinterest and several other popular platforms, there are lots of Google+ art communities and individual users who have already moved and established themselves. I will post more about this a bit later.

‘Still, nothing will rival G+’ said one ‘G+ refugee’ – it’s how Google+ ex-users call themselves.

Well, we will see. A popular saying tells us ‘when one door closes another one opens’ 🙂