How to get published at Stampington, All about Copyright, and what to put in your Book Proposal- Plus a free E-Book all about Wire!!!

I know I've mentioned Create Mixed Media to you before- it's that fabulous new website where you can learn all about the cool art mediums you've wondered about, or the artists you're curious about, or the techniques you'd like to see demonstrated I've really been enjoying it the last few months. It also has some really interesting things to say about different mixed media related topics. Recently, this article by Stampington's Editor-in-chief, Christen
Oliverez caught my eye. She wrote about the sort of things that an artist can do to catch an editor's eye when submitting artwork for publication. I'm always interested in what the publisher has to say about this sort of thing because I only experience the submission process from the position of submittee (?word). I also enjoyed getting Tonia Davenport's article about preparing a book proposal. Both of these would have been extremely valuable to me when I was first starting out and wondering how on earth to do both of those very things. In the end, I just googled both magazine proposal and book proposal before I sent my first efforts in each area out into the world. Now, having gone through the experience of submitting a book proposal, and submitting art to magazines, I read what the experts say and honestly shake my head that my poor attempts were ever given a second glance. It was definitely a God thing because it was definitely NOT a me thing, if you know what I mean. :)

Another interesting series of articles on the site were written by the fabulous Rice Freeman Zachary about copyrights. It's an area I've become increasingly interested in and increasingly confused by. What can you use? Can't you use anything that's an art material? Isn't that the purpose of people creating art materials? What kind of credit do you need to give for what materials? Honestly, it's a headache I think many of us avoid by either looking the other way, or erring on the side of caution and refusing to use anything that was artist designed. I hate to admit that although I feel like you should be able to use things I'm increasingly avoiding artist designed supplies in the work I intend to sell.

One final super cool thing about the site- they are now offering a new  e-book for free. The first e-book was titled Stitched Up and contained projects that involved stitching. Their second e-book has now debuted and is titled Wired Up and contains the Scribble Heart Project from my book, Creative Bloom. How cool is that? SO if any of these little bits of topics interest you- and how can they not- head on over to Create Mixed Media today!!!