Arindam Goon

Arindam Goon is working in a Fashion Bag export company in India as a Graphic and Creative Designer.
He is a self taught artist and has never tried to sell his art . Some of his works were exibited in two local exibitions. His portraits are just phantastic. For the exhibition he plans to draw portraits of the contributing authors.




- Self Portrait (Fast Portrait-Lead Pencil)
- A. Goon´s Grandma (Fast Portrait-Lead Pencil)
- Friend (Fast Portrait-Ball point Pen)
- Tagore (Dry Pastel)

Kathleen York (First Entry!)

Kathleen York is the first participant to send in 2 images for the contest. I´m so glad that finally someone dared to join in. ;)



The designer said, she was thinking of submitting these two black and white subway drawings to show her style, and would do something more specifically geared toward the topic should she be chosen.
However these two images do fit the topic too. A subway train drives you from station to station and you discover or arrive at new places. That´s somehow like reading literature weblogs, you discover new places by jumping from one link to the next.
Kathleen agreed to the idea of visiting blogs being similar to stops on a train line, connected together. There is a line that runs through how you visit/access and find new blogs, a line of communication, a line of transport if you will, transport of ideas . . .
Check out her blog and her Flickr profile. Then you could also have a look at her Greeting cards and other drawings. Thanks Kathleen!

I´m looking forward to seeing the next contributions.

A Note From The Publishers (about Pro Bono)

"Our last month’s „Competition Call for Illustrators“ caused a series of unpleasant comments as well as controversial discussions on some artists forums and polemic posts in weblogs. I’m confident this happened only because we couldn’t articulate clear enough the very nature of this book project. Sure enough the artists are irritated. That’s why I want to sum up all the important details once more in this post in order to set things right.

„spatien“ is a non-commercial magazine for prose and poetry for German readers, in existence since 2005. It is published online every six months.
Additionally the publishers design a printable version that can be downloaded for free at the same address. If readers prefer a printed paperback (real magazine style) they can order it via a book-on-demand service for the actual manufacturing cost. The low budget in money and higher budget in time comes from the publishers who are enthusiasts in literature but working in different regular full-time jobs. There is no money coming in. All authors contribute their texts knowing that „spatien“ cannot and does not pay royalties to them. They do so because they like the idea of this project or like being published in a suiting non-commercial publication that is available for free to any reader interested in it.

For the first time we are now planning to publish a book in a very similar way and on the very same restricted budget. This book will have an ISBN and shall be available via amazon and book stores. The selling price will be the manufacturing cost of the book plus the margin that amazon and booksellers claim for themselves. From our point of view this is still in the category of a non-commercial publication since we don’t earn anything and the book gets to the reader for the lowest possible price. This book will not be available online. We are planning to publish promotional abstracts of the essays but not the complete texts.

I really hope that this post could sort out the misinterpretations that caused the uncertainty and polemic responses."

Benjamin Stein
__________________________________________________________________
This note was written in response to all the negative messages I received and to various discussions which were posted around the web.
I´m happy that not all people seem to see the contest in a negative context and I´m specially grateful to the participants of the contest. Thanks!

Competition Call for Illustrators

My husband is a copublisher of a German literature magazine called „spa_tien". The print & online magazine appears twice yearly. The publishers are currently preparing a paperback book under the working title "was sind literarische weblogs?" ("what are literary weblogs?"). The book is scheduled for the 1st quarter of 2008.

„What are literary weblogs“ – this is the working title. Why do we want to publish this book? We want to present the phenomenon of literary weblogs – still a niche within the blogosphere – to a wider non-blogging and not blog-reading audience that is up to now mostly interested in traditional ways of literature publication. Additionally we want to (re-)initiate a discussion about online literature, a phenomenon that is not as widely known in Europe as e. g. in the US and offers – especially in the form of the weblog – new and interesting ways of creative writing in a great variety of fashions.

Different authors of literary weblogs will contribute their essays and sample posts for this book for free. In a way this is a community project comparable to open source software developments. The participants participate because it pleases them and because they think what they do might be of value and importance for somebody.

We are men (and women) of the word and cannot illustrate a book like this ourselves. That’s why we are looking for an artist who would be pleased to be part of this community project and has the ideas and skills for interesting illustrations. The general topic could be freely interpreted. It may be a play with associations about web-like structures. It may be variants of untraditional text representations. It could be abstract or ornamental as well.
A series of about 7 to 9 images could also illustrate motives about literature, text, weblogs, writing processes, etc.

Requirements:

• The participants should send in 2 images to show the character of the series. These two images will be rated and the winner will do the whole series of 7 – 9 pics. The illustrations, graphics, sketches, etc. have to be black & white or in grey scales with a size of approx. 350 x 175 px (Width/Lenght). For the print version the image must have a resolution of 300 dpi and the required aspect ratio of 350 x 175 px.
• Deadline: July 31, 2007
• Please send the images to this address !
  

Reward for the winner:

• His/her work will be published in a book (with a short biography and link to his/her webpage)
• A copy of the published book
• Gratefulness from the publishers and the contributing authors as well
• The artist retains the copyright on all the images and they will be only used for this project
  

Everybody can join the contest – pros and amateurs. It may be specially interesting for amateurs or illustrators who are just beginning their career.
I´ll post the entries here with a link to the artists blogs. Further all entries with a link to participant´s website/blog will be shown here on flickr!

Have fun and be creative!


Publishers of spa_tien:
Hartmut Abendschein
Markus A. Hediger
Benjamin Stein
_____________________________________________________________

While I really do understand the artists who don´t want to do this kind of Pro Bono work, I still like the idea
of this project and personally I do like participating in these kind of c0ntests.
If you feel the need to discuss Pro Bono work, then please do so in the next post (Note from the publishers).
But I´m not going to explain my point of view again and again. _____________________________________________________________

Thanks to all of you, for your suggestions where I could post about the contest and for linking to this page:
Tommy Kane
Teesha Moore
Justin Monson
Suzanne Buchanan
Karen Winters
Christine Castro Hughes
Rama Hughes
Penelope Dullaghan