Now that you created your profile page on MySpace, how do you make sure people see it?
In order to promote your music, uploading songs, providing a bio or band history, uploading photos and video of your band playing or rehearsing, and joining various forums are all great ways to promote your music. But what about those people who are new to MySpace? Or those who don’t read forums or blogs? What about record producers who don’t have time to sift through hundreds of pages looking for their next big recording star? Making it easy to find your page will help you build a fan base and get noticed by labels. The tips listed below are ways you can market your page.
Tip#1: Links are important
Linking your page to other musician pages and to your web site will help to drive traffic to your profile page. The music community on MySpace is filled with musicians who are into making different types of music. Hooking up with some musicians and swapping links is a good way to expand your marketing net.
Record labels love to find two or three bands at a time in order to save money and minimize search efforts. If they find a band they like, they will also check out who is linked to the page. By helping out fellow musicians, you will be doing yourself a big favor as well.
Tip#2: Selling merchandise on MySpace
Since MySpace now allows you to sell CD’s and other promotional items on the site, this is a great opportunity to get your music noticed. Printed t-shirts, hats, mouse pads, and other merchandise can be printed up quickly and sold in order to build your fan base and advertise at the same time. If you have some cool stuff to sell, then you will build a reputation. More people will visit your page to see new items offered.
You can also partner with other musicians and sell items together if you choose. Cross-marketing with musicians of a different genre will allow you to tap into new markets. Most people enjoy a few different types of music. Appealing to different genres of music lovers will help build a strong, but mixed fan base.
Tip#3: Add keywords to your profile page
Specific keywords that demonstrate which genre your music belongs to, famous artists you sound like or admire, or a list of songs you upload can help get your page noticed by those conducting MySpace music searches. When people are in the mood to listen to different types of music, they usually conduct a search to find artists that match what they are looking for. Keywords allow your page to come up during searches.

Tip#4: Meeting new friends
Another way to increase traffic to your site is to meet others on MySpace. These can be musicians, music fans, tech junkies, or others that are interested in the music industry. Adding friends to your profile page will increase your exposure while increasing curiosity by those who are surfing the MySpace site. Pages that are popular will be looked at more often by others.
Increasing traffic to your profile page is crucial to your success on MySpace. While there are others way to market your music, the tips mentioned above are quick and easy to use. Getting your page out there will allow you to create a fan base and get you noticed by record labels.

Does the artist make the electric guitar, or the electric guitar make the artist? I suspect the answer to that question would vary significantly depending on who you asked. A manufacturer such as Gibson, Fender, or Yamaha would probably reply that an artist can only be as good as his instrument. But a guitarist, while likely to acknowledge the importance of a good guitar, would probably want to take the lion’s share of the credit for himself. This is the “chicken and the egg” question of the musical world and one to which we will probably never know the answer. Fortunately, even without knowing it, we can still enjoy the outrageous talent that electric guitarists have displayed over the decades.
Keith Richards. My favorite quote about this gentleman comes from comic Robin Williams’s 2002 Live on Broadway performance: “I know there is a cure for whatever bioterrorism they send at us. I know that there is one, and it lies within Keith Richards, I know that. He’s the only man on the planet who can go ‘Anthrax? (sniff) Alriiiight!’” Sums it up, don’t you think? Mr. Richard, guitarist for The Rolling Stones, is a wonderful example of the rock and roll electric guitar player. He’s rebellious, scandalous, filthy rich and still going strong.
Eddie Van Halen. A poster child for the big hair era of the 80s, this man is still recognized thirty years after the release of his band’s first album, which was entitled “Van Halen.” Hey, if both the band and the album are named after you, that kind of says it all. Van Halen didn’t confine his talents to his own band, either, and he contributed a guitar solo to the song of another 80s icon. The icon was Michael Jackson and the song was Beat It. No wonder this guy is still (in)famous.
Carlos Augusto Santana Alves. No, I didn’t know he had four names either, to me he’ll always be “Santana.” This gentleman first became famous over forty years ago and he’s showing no sign of slowing down. His genres include rock, blues, salsa and jazz fusion. His music has experienced a resurgence in popularity over the last decade or so and in 2003, Rolling Stone named Santana number 15 on their list of 100 Greatest Guitarists of all Time. Talk about getting the industry’s stamp of approval.
Jimi Hendrix. There has possibly never been an electric guitarist who more strongly influenced the industry or who more perfectly embodied a generation. He has, posthumously, been inducted into both the US Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the UK Music Hall of Fame. He has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, a statue on the streets of his hometown, Seattle, Wash., and an eternal place in the annals of not only American music, but American history as well. A tremendous performer and a brilliant innovator, Rolling Stone named him number one on its 2003 list of the 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time. He remains one of the most famous artists ever to have lived.

If one were to study the history of art, he would be introduced to the top ten artists as well as the chosen style and genre of each one. Also, he would have a good idea of the supplies that were used by each artist in creating his works.

Below is a list of the ten most popular artists in history and a general overview of the supplies they used.

Considered as a monumental figure of the Golden Age of Holland, Rembrandt Van Rijn is known as an artist that can expertly capture human mood and gesture in his portraits. His most famous works involve scenes of biblical and mythological events and characters. Through his masterpiece “The Nightwatch”, Rembrandt has presented the pinnacle of his own artistic language. Being a painter and an etcher, he made use of different types of brushes, paint, and pieces of canvas.

Georgia O’Keefe, a product of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Student’s League of New York, stands as one of the founders of emotional representation through stylized representation. She is most well known for her trademark series of cattle bones and southwestern landscapes. Various types of brushes, paint, and canvas were used by O’Keefe in her paintings.

Wassily Kandinsky, a lawyer by profession, started to take up painting in his 30′s. Beginning with pointillist techniques, he then shifted to abstract representations of music as well as internal feelings. His style would later be known as abstract expressionism. In creating his paintings, he used pencils and paintbrushes and a wide array of paint.

Henri Matisse, a painter and a sculptor, is another famous artist who is best known as the father of fauvism. This term comes from the French word “fauve”, which means “wild beast”. Although considered by critics as bestial, Matisse’s work, including the popular “The Dance” showed his ingenious use of color and shape. Sculpting tools as well as paintbrushes and pieces of canvas were the common art supplies utilized by Matisse in his time.

“I am surrealism” were the famous words of artist Salvador Dali. His famous works depicted intricate and oftentimes frightening dreamscapes which had distorted figures, double images, and insects. With regard to his art supplies, aside from the brush and canvas, he made use of sculpting tools as he is also a known sculptor.

Known as the premier pop artist, Andy Warhol gained much recognition for his works which involved painting, film, and silk screening. In contrast to other artists who created images of nature and historical events, Warhol focused on making pictures of soup cans, bottles of beverages, and celebrities. His art supplies consisted of stencils, brushes, and different types of paint.

Claude Monet is considered as one of the founders of impressionism, a style which, at his time, was revolutionary. This style gave emphasis to visible brush strokes and the dominance of color and light over line. His masterpiece “Impression: Sunrise”, from which the term impressionism was derived, shocked his French fellowmen. Canvas, brush, and various shades of paint were his supplies in creating his works.

Regarded by many as one of the most universally gifted persons in history, Leonardo da Vinci created numerous Renaissance paintings. But apart from being an exceptional painter, he also showed his genius as a sculptor, philosopher, musician, scientist, inventor, and engineer. As a painter, he made use of several types of brushes and canvas. Also, he used a set of sculpting tools for his sculptures.

Creating around 840 paintings and one thousand drawings, Vincent Van Gogh is considered by many to be one of the most accomplished artists in history. He invented his own style of expressive brush strokes and vivid colors through carefully examining genres such as Dutch realism. Van Gogh utilized various paintbrushes, paint, and canvas for his paintings and several pencils and paper for his drawings.

As the founder of cubism and one of the most versatile artists in history, Pablo Picasso has created paintings, prints, and sculptures within his 70-year career. His most renowned works include Les Demoiselles d’avignon, which perfectly demonstrated his style of cubism. As a painter and sculptor, Picasso made use of tools as well as brushes and canvas.

Do you need talent to become an artist? In almost no other human endeavor are so many people so hung up on the need for talent. There seems to be an almost universal agreement that artistic painting is only for those rare individuals that are born with a mysteriously God-like ability to create art. We lowly mortals, should never even try to understand art let alone try to create it. Give me a break.

For most painters, talent refers to how easily and how quickly someone can acquire the necessary skills and understanding to make art. There is another facet of talent, (this is the one that hangs us up), that deals with creatively choosing what to paint, how to arrange the elements, what style to use and sometimes experimenting with completely new ways to represent a subject or idea.

So much of being successful with art has to do with your goals and expectations. If your goal, for example, is just to enjoy the process of learning and improving, then achieving this is more a matter of attitude and getting started then it is with having talent.

If your goal is to paint something that is good enough to hang in your house, give away to friends or to sell at a local art fair, you need to develop enough technical skills to not look amateurish. Talent will certainly help at this level but it is not yet a requirement.

What if your goal is to become a famous artist recognized the world over for transcending all works of past art with something new and great. Do you need talent at this level? Absolutely, you will need a truck load of talent. What is interesting, however, is that so much of what a master painter learns on the way to greatness involves the same set of skills that a talent challenged amateur is capable of learning. In other words, only at the very top of the art world is talent an absolute necessity.

So how do you become a good artist despite a lack of talent?

1. First and foremost, learn to see like an artist. This is the process of learning to shut down the normally dominant side of your brain that wants to identify, name, organize, filter and basically make sense out of what we see. This actually gets in the way of processing raw visual data needed to make art. Artistic vision is extremely important and yet relatively easy to accomplish.

2. Learn to paint with a child-like attitude. Do children worry that they will look silly painting? Are they saying to themselves that they must create a perfect piece of art? Do they have anxiety from fretting over what others will think? Of course not. Kids just enjoy the experience as they learn. As adults we often paralyze our natural gifts and talents with worry. Relax.

3. Have endurance. Think of becoming an artist as a lifetime adventure. There is no hurry to get it right.

4. Develop a broad knowledge base. Expose yourself to lots of techniques, styles, mediums and other artists.

5. Do not try to reinvent the wheel. Before you develop bad habits learn painting from a gifted instructors. This does not necessarily have to take place at a university. It can also be learned from a local artist that teaches weekly classes or from a top video painting course on dvd. Be sure to look for a painting course that offers a full systematic approach to learning all of the technical skills in a logical progression. Some art lessons are so narrowly focused that they will leave huge gaps in your training.

The bottom line is that you really do not have to have great talent to have great fun and be productive as an artist. Now that that excuse has been removed, shouldn’t you get started today?

Vincent Van Gogh is the greatest painter of the Post-Impressionism era and one of the most important figures in art history. In the auction business, Vincent Van Gogh is the magical name that has every collector trembling at the knees. Although a prolific artist, Vincent Van Gogh is most often remembered for his Sunflower and Irises paintings. Although Vincent Van Gogh is a world-famous artist today, he did not receive much recognition during his lifetime. Everyone familiar with the story of Vincent Van Gogh is well-aware of the artist’s mutilation of his left ear but very few know much more about his history. In this article we will dig just a little deeper into his world, influences and more.

Before the Artist

Van Gogh had many influences on his life including his family and friends, other artists, and his ill health in later life. A servant who worked for the Van Gogh family when Vincent was a child described him as an, “odd, aloof child who had queer manners and seemed more like an old man,” than the child he was. This personal account gives us a major clue that Vincent Van Gogh was a unique character, even from an early age. From the viewpoint of children in the neighborhood, Vincent Van Gogh was a curious sight indeed. As a man, unaware of his own artistic genius, Vincent Van Gogh first tried to learn the art of selling the works of other artists. Following his failure as an art dealer, Vincent Van Gogh later wrote to his sister Wilhelmina Van Gogh that the art galleries and art firms “are in the clutches of fellows who intercept all the money,” and that only “one-tenth of all the business that is transacted is really done out of belief in art.

The Artist Emerges

In 1880, Vincent moved to Brussels and decided to become an artist. As a post impressionist painter and one of the most famous artists of all time, Vincent Van Gogh has become an icon. As often with an artist of his caliber, Van Gogh’s art wasn’t understood nor appreciated in his days. Eventually, Vincent was deemed a disappointment to his mother, and eventually to his entire family, even his beloved brother Theo Van Gogh who supported him financially for the 10 years that he worked as a painter. While many emphasize the madness, Vincent had a had a deep rooted passion to show through his art the struggle for beauty and the unending desire of the artist to capture all that he loves. Van Gogh held a great deal of respect for the forces of nature and includes turbulent skies in a number of his works because the subject is so powerful and so full of artistic potential in the face of an empty canvas. Even in his later years when his illness grew, he produced some of his most famous works.

The Illness

His use of absinthe, an alcoholic beverage with convulsant properties favored by French artists of the time, appears to have played a crucial role in rise of Van Gogh’s illness. During this period he would now create perhaps the most intense paintings ever produced. Yet in Arles his illness evolved and grew to psychotic dimensions for the first time before the end of 1888. The major illness of his last 2 years developed in the presence of seizures, and its nature has remained controversial. At the height of his illness, Van Gogh became hallucinatory, paranoid, and delusional, all known to occur in psychosis due to epilepsy. He had recovered from his severe illness and was discharged from the asylum, with the support from his brother. Vincent depended on his brother so heavily for everything during this period, his career as an artist, had become seriously threatened.

Vincent Van Gogh the Legacy

Even in this short article we have learned a few pieces of a much larger puzzle that was the troubled and tortured artist, Vincent Van Gogh. Vincent is known for his chaotic paintings and similarly tumultuous state of mind. He is also famous for selling only one painting in his own lifetime and for slicing off part of his own ear in a fit of madness. Ironically, It is ironic that with all of this, he is deemed by society to be one of our greatest and most successful artists of all time.

When we are all set to plan our interiors, artworks play important role. Classic paintings and murals of some famous painters gives elegant touch to the interior of the room and houses. Tradition of the painting starts in the 12th century. In this century, Europeans brought their memories of the dark Ages to the lime light. In the same period Christianity entered a victorious and new phase of history. People during this period contributed a lot to art.

Later on many of the painters like Michelangelo Buonarroti, Andrea Mantega and Leonado da vinci put in their paintings in this treasure. These painters presented their art of painting which were worthy to get renowned. The famous paintings of these painters are the creation of Adam given by Michelangelo Buonarroti, Ceiling of the camera picta by Andrea Mantega and the most famed Mona Lisa by Leonado da vinci.

These paintings become the mile stones in the art world. These paintings are the ideal paintings and many of the painters are still learning the art according to these paintings.

Painting of Mona Lisa is the 16th century portrait and is the oil painting on a poplar panel. Leonardo Da Vincci came with this painting in the period of Italian resurgence. This painting is arguably famous in the world. Generally paintings of Leonardo Da Vincci were based on realist styles. In these paintings painters gives the actual effects of life.

Another famous art work is of Over Vitebsk, The Violinist gave by famous artist Marc Chagall. Painting style of this painter was Expressionism and cubism. This painter always tried to express some feelings about certain things. Expressionism is the way of painting in which painters used to sketch exactly as what they want to present. Some of the paintings like Crucifixion are famous because of the Surrealism. These paintings are based on the dream themes. These paintings are filled with familiar objects which are painted to look mysterious and strange. This skill of Surrealism strikes in the paintings of painter Salvador Dali.

Paul Klee produces famous paintings of Fish Magic, Around the Fish, and Landscape with Yellow Birds. Typically these paintings are based on the theme of Primitive as well as Surrealist. In the primitive style are the arts done by the children and these paintings are painted in simple or two dimensional way.

Well-known paintings like Chaple of the Rosary in Vence, The Snail, and Beasts of the sea and Creole Dancer are based on the theme of Fauvism. This theme had bright and unusual colors. Generally they were bright and wild. Unfortunately this art lasts only around four years. Famous painter Henri Matisse brought this theme in to the lime light.

Pablo Picasso came with the style called Cubism which is the modern art and is not supposed to look real. The famous paintings of this painter are Guernica, Three Musicians.

The paintings become the landmarks as they are finished with different touch of themes and expressions. These painters brought up the themes and still modern painters are using them.

Artists of miniature works have often been set aside as being insignificant, unfortunately, as a result of the larger-than-life work of their “big art” counterparts, but the art of miniatures is certainly an art form worth looking at and examining closer. Miniature artists, meaning those that work on small-scale artistic pieces, have tremendous skill and patience. With some projects being miniscule, the patient resolve of a miniature artist is truly a sight to behold.

There are many top professionals in miniature art, many of whom have likely not reached levels of fame occupied by other more famous artists. Nonetheless, miniature art is a popular field and has various associations working in support of miniature art. There are several miniature art societies and clubs that encourage and promote miniature art work through various gallery showings, auctions, and promotional campaigns. The world of miniature art is – pardon the pun – growing.

Miniature Painting

Miniature painting is often one of the most painstaking processes to imagine, as paintings that are no more than three inches wide by three inches tall can contain some of the most intricate detail imaginable. The idea of painting something so miniscule can be staggering for those with no experience in miniature art, but for a miniature artist it is simply another day at the office.

Miniature art societies, like the World Federation of Miniaturists, have highly held standards of size measurements that all miniature art must meet. For the most part, the global standard on all miniature art is that the piece may not be larger than one hundred square centimetres or slightly over thirty-nine inches. There are different size definitions for different pieces of art through different societies, however, but most specifications match art that can be held in the palm of one’s hand.

Miniature painting was said to be first popularized in the 16th century in Europe, as portrait miniatures became fashionable. Portrait miniatures were used to introduce people to one another over long distances, as large pieces of art simply would not travel well and the convenience of smaller portraits made for easier transport. Most early miniature paintings took place using watercolor on vellum, but miniatures would also be painted on ivory or various enamel surfaces.

Miniature Construction

Miniature construction is also popular, as built-to-scale models of famous buildings or architectural structures are renowned around the world. There are many examples of scale-model building around the world, from miniature versions of the Taj Mahal to the Empire State Building. The painstaking construction of these miniatures is famous, too, as the patience of the artists is definitely something to be admired.

Miniature construction comes in smaller, more basic scales as well. Dollhouses, model cars, figurine collections, and other toy items are often considered to fall under the umbrella of miniature art, too. Some dollhouses are tremendously detailed, right down to the stove and miniature fireplace within. There are many examples of miniature construction art in everyday life that draws attention to the art form and represents the true creativity that is alive and well in the world of miniature art.