I recently did research into the relationship between movies and mobile phones. What I learned from this research is that there are three main ways in which movies and cell phones are linked:

1. People watch movies on their cell phones. More and more phones are getting advanced enough to be capable of watching streaming or downloaded movies. There have been a lot of recent announcements about this link between movies and mobile phones.
2. People film movies on their cell phones. This is just cool. Lots of people use their phone’s video camera to film movies. There are film festivals specifically for these phone-made films. I love the creativity of it!
3. The movie industry markets on phones. There are tons of different marketing ploys used by movie promoters that involve mobile phones include interactive mobile advertising.

Are there other links between cell phones and movies that I’m forgetting?

Tags: art, cell phones, entertainment, kathryn vercillo, mobile phones, movies, society, Technology, Wireless

I’ve just been writing about eclectic wall art displays over at Houzz.com where I frequently collect photos of different interior design themes that I’m interested in. I love the idea of creating entire wall displays of art that doesn’t necessarily go together but that’s made to look right together because of the way its hung, framed or complimented by the room’s furniture. The overall look ends up being one that is truly better than the sum of its parts.

I have something like this going on in my house although I’m still working on making it look just right. There are three different art displays that I’m toying around with:

1. Pinup art display. I have French doors between my bedroom and living room. Each of the doors has ten glass panels that needed to be covered up to give my room some privacy. I created a display of pin-up girl artistic prints. To tie it together, I chose a stencil of a flower and printed it on pink and grey paper to add to the display. The other art and the furniture in the room incorporates these colors as well. This is the section I’ve done the best with in terms of completing the look.
2. Postcard art on my door. I have another bedroom door that has different panels on it as well. I’ve added a couple dozen postcards to it. These are very colorful pictures that have a sort of magical theme to them although the images and designs are different on all of them. The symmetry of the layout seems to make it work well.
3. Painted magazine images. I’m working on a new series for the section over my desk. I’m taking bold images of people in magazines and pasting them on to canvas. Then I’m painting around and on the images with bright colors. These are all different sizes and I’m not happy with how it’s worked out so far but I like the individual pieces so I think I can make it work.

In addition to this, I do collage art that I hang haphazardly in my art room and it’s kind of got its own theme to the display.

Tags: art, collage, decor, eclectic, houzz, Interior Design, kathryn vercillo, wall art

I’ve been thinking a lot about art lately and about what draws me to different types of art. There are many different mediums that I like and many different styles of art work that appeal to me but I’ve been trying to see if there is a common theme in what I find myself most attracted to. Although it doesn’t hold true all of the time, I have found that I particularly like artwork that depicts people.

I suppose that people in general really fascinate me. I am interested by human emotions and human psychology and human relationships. The artwork that I’m drawn to is artwork that manages to capture those human things in images and to convey them to me somehow without words. (An example that is at the forefront of my mind right now is the work of Kenney Mencher, a San Francisco artist who is showing his stuff in the city this week.)

I am certainly attracted to other types of art at times. Mobile phone art was an example I talked about here recently. And yet, even with that, I tend to be interested in the statement the art makes about humans. I relate object art and landscape art back to the people who aren’t in the image. Is that true for you as well? Do you create stories about art that include people or is there something else in art that draws you in?

Tags: art, creativity, kathryn vercillo, paintings, people

I really adore creative things of all kinds and particularly love learning about how technology has advanced the ability of individuals to be more creative. For example, I love that there are so many people now making their own videos thanks to the popularity of YouTube – it’s a form of creative expression that the average person wasn’t engagin in twenty years ago and I think it’s great.

Another thing that I think is great is the availability of online storefronts like Zazzle. These are places where you can upload your own creative designs and easily turn them into T-shirts and coffee mugs and other items for use or for sale. This allows people to be flexible in their creativity and also to be productive with it.

I really like Zazzle and the sites that are like it so I’ve been trying to spread the word about it. I wrote a piece about Zazzle on this blog not that long ago. And I also answered a Yahoo! Answers questions about Zazzle which covered the basics of what it is and how useful it is. That answer was chosen as a best answer for the question.

Tags: art, creativity, design, kathryn vercillo, online design, questions, store, Yahoo Answers, zazzle

I am interested by almost all types of art. I’m just as happy to browse through a small independent gallery as a huge art museum, to attend a dance event or a live music performance, to fingerpaint or take a sewing class. I believe that exposing yourself to art of all kinds broadens your perspective on life and enhances your creativity.

But there are some types of art that capture my attention more so than others, of course. Found art is one of those types of art, as I’ve mentioned here on the blog before. And another is art that is combined with technology. One such type of art is mobile phone art.

There are a lot of different types of mobile phone art out there. People actually take recycled mobile phones and use them in sculptures and found art pieces, creating mobiles and structures that are visually stunning despite the ordinary-ness of the mobile phone. Other people use the phone as the means to make art, creating interactive audio and visual performances from the phone or filming videos on the phone and turning those into art.

I find this all to be really interesting. We use our phones every day but most of us don’t think twice about them in terms of their potential for creativity. As mobile phones get more and more advanced, that potential just opens up even wider. I think it’s inspiring … it makes me look at my own cell phone in a whole new light!

Tags: art, cell phones, creativity, found art, hubpages, kathryn vercillo, mobile phone art, mobile phones, phones, recycled art, tech art, Technology

Found art is a topic that I come back to again and again because it is something that I really love. There are so many reasons that I find found art to be fascinating and important and worth writing about.

A look at the bare bones of the reasons that I enjoy found art includes:

• The creativity always impresses me. I love that people can take a look at a series of seemlingly unrelated objects and then put them together in an artstic piece and make them suddenly make sense together.
• It’s green. Ultimately found art is a green art because it involves the recylcing and repurposing of objects that would likely otherwise have ended up in the landfill and which instead are used to create art. Admittedly, some artists and greener than others depending on the other materials they use but it’s basically an eco-friendly art most of the time.
• There is so much variety in this area of art. Because people are using found materials from all regions and walks of life, the pieces often differ so much from one another even in the gallery of a single artist. I love this variety.
• It’s accessible. Anyone can get into the work of doing found art because it’s all about taking what’s already around you and turning it into whatever you think is beautiful.

In the spirit of researching and enjoying found art, I’ve written an article highlighting 8 Welding Artists. I hope you’ll enjoy it!

Tags: art, creativity, found art, green, hubpages, kathryn vercillo, recycling, welding art

I had a really great time yesterday having my picture taken for a cool photo project that’s happening in San Francisco. I’ll be telling you more about that next week but if you’re interested in what it might be then you should check out the website I Live Here: SF which is the platform for the project.

What I want to talk about now is digital cameras. The photographer who came over is a very cool woman who is one of those people that you can tell is just totally herself. And just one simple example of this is that she uses a basic digital camera that isn’t some big fancy schmancy thing.

During the photo shoot, her batteries went dead. When my battery goes dead on my fancy camera, I have to stop taking pictures, take out the battery, recharge it for several hours and then (if I’m lucky) resume what I’m doing. She just popped out her AA batteries, put in new ones and kept on shooting. There’s something to be said for the convenience of that.

Sometimes we don’t need to get the fanciest new gadget out there to create our art work. Sometimes it makes a whole lot more sense to get the item that is right for us regardless of what other people are using or what others think of what we use.

I wrote an article today comparing 7 different 5 MP Cameras. What you can see just from this brief article is that there’s a big difference in the cameras that are out there even when you’re looking at the same megapixel range. There are camera phones, cute cameras, cameras with multiple shooting modes, cameras with cool zoom features … so what matters isn’t that you get the camera with the right megapixels but rather that you get the camera you want.

Tags: 5mp camera, art, cameras, choosing a camera, creativity, design, digital camera, hubpages, kathryn vercillo, photography

There are dozens, maybe hundreds, of things that I love about living in San Francisco. It’s hard to say what I like “best” about the city. But I definitely know that one of the things that I really treasure about living here is the fact that I am surrounded by really creative people.

San Francisco is anything but a boring place and the people who live here are the opposite of dull. People here live fully. They create regularly. They embody self-expression in everything from the way that they dress to the events that they attend to the discussions they have over brunch in the Castro.

And many, many, many of them work either full-time or part-time in creative careers and hobbies. Often, this is linked with the DIY movement. For example, there are tons of San Francisco based artists on Etsy, the site where you can sell your DIY crafts of all kinds in really cool little storefronts online.

I feel lucky to live in a place where creativity is valued by so many people. It is my belief that the creative lifestyle is the only one really worth living. However, living it can be hard sometimes because of the pressures of real life. Living in San Francisco, where there is so much support for creativity, makes it so much easier to stay on that path.

Tags: art, artists, creativity, etsy, kathryn vercillo, San Francisco, san francisco is sexy