Once you start thinking for yourself life takes a nasty little twist, not everything is as it seems. Usually bad, but very profitable things, are promoted by a lot of people. Even those you think who are trustworthy. Be careful who you offer your trust. Don’t put your creative capital in the hands of someone else. Make sure you are the one who makes the money, and not the pawn working for a big content landlord.

• vandablog
• wooster collective
• rebelart

Daniel Ashkill – Deciding not to die

It’s a rather spiritual video, a bit surreal, and has a people wearing white clothes, who don’t seem to work in a hospital. Works for us at least.

Birds playing instruments

Standing still while moving

La Puerta is a great stop motion video. Really love how they put it together.

What the fuck was up with smashill?

Smashill believes in creativity, art, writing and doing what you love. In 2009 focus was something that lacked. The development of an idea and the focus on a peer group is something that was neglected very long. Trying to make money, but not being able to make any significant amount was pretty fucked up. Doing other things to pay the bills was the smart move, neglecting smashill instead of shifting the focus was the easy way out.

2009 launch – death – rebirth 2010

It could be the story of a phoenix, but to be reborn the traffic has to increase. Creativity. That’s what it’s all about and that’s what it’s going to be.

Bypass income, or how to make a living

As smashill has not been the source of income for me yet I will create other venue streams to support my income. Smashill was a great idea: create a low traffic blog that was shooting for advertisements used all my illusions, yet burst like a bubble. It’s probably smart to start other ways of creating an income and share my path right here.

• Build up a Photographer Portfolio and start shooting Portraits, Sports, Businesses and Weddings. I have been photographing for ages and I am capable of taking better pictures than most of the photographers in my area. It’s only logical to work on this
• Get our Gallery up and running. We have the domain, webspace, wordpress template, photographed a few of our works, the logo. We have to fix the template to our needs, which is roughly about 60% done, as it looked better than it was programmed. We have to put the logo on the site and write the content. 2-4 weeks and the site should be up and running.
• Blogging. This year will be the first time to launch a german blog. The goal besides creating content and teaching is to build it up a community that strives to improve itself. Domain, webspace and template are the things that I own, content & traffic is something I have to create. Time to get going, as I have been procrastinating writing the first 10 articles since the start of the year.
• Writing. This year writing a novel is a dream. It’s about time, as three different story-lines wait to be developed and written down. Not to mention finding a publisher and selling them.
• Shirt designs. Last year designing shirts was a big goal, but about the only one that got left behind. I have my fine wacom tablet and will start to pump out a few designs and participate in a few contests to build up a reputation.
• Silkscreen prints. Having access to a great place where I can produce silkscreen prints for little money will be another outlet for my art. Printing used to be the medium of my choice, then I switched to concept, picked up painting last year, and will create a lot prints this year. Prints are a great way to create unique art that is not as expensive as paintings.
• Help other artists sell their works. Knowing quite a lot artists might be helpful in this endeavour, as we open our online gallery this year and want to add a few more artists to it. Hopefully we can pull this off and create something cool. Can’t wait to invite a few friends once this whole project goes live.
• Teach. Find a part time job at a place to teach about art/photography once or twice a week.

Seems like it’s going to be a very busy year. Loads of stuff to do, it’s time to get going.

Even though I think about creating a premium theme, I really love the stuff he is saying and what wordpress stands for. A lot of people creating themes are scared that they will get ripped off and say stuff like: Oh it’s time to switch to something else. Truth to be told, people use wordpress. The market is for wordpress. You switch to something else, you won’t even make half of what you will make when you publish a premium theme. It’s great that the basics come for free, that you can build on it, we should not be scared of the possibilities others will use our stuff.

Hopefully you can enjoy some time off and spend it with your family or friends. Take a moment to reflect on yourself and don’t be angry if you could not afford that shine bling to give away. Rather spend time with the ones you love and show them that you care. If they can’t appreciated they should be working on themselves.
Take care,
smashill