Wilmer Murillo

The site will belaunching with 3 great pieces from Wilmer Murillo.

Just 20 years old, Wilmer is a freelance Illustrator from Tegucigalpa, Honduras.

His colourful, quirky and textured pieces are a welcome addition to 'I vote for art'. "Vino Paz en el Diario", pictured here, is one of the 3.

You can see more of Wilmer's work on his Virb page, flickr page, and his blog.

What will 'I Vote for Art' look like?

I think that it's about time I showed some screen mock-ups of ivoteforart.com, to give you an idea of what it's going to look like.

This first one here is the home page. Because you will be able to vote for artwork on the site (who would have guessed?), the home page displays the top voted pieces.

As well as the top voted art, the homepage will display the most recently added artworks.

Below each picture is some brief info about each artwork: the artist, the title, and the price of each piece.

Also, in the bottom right hand corner of each image is a small 'thumb'. That's where you do the voting. You can vote for as many pieces as you like, but only once. That thumb turns into a tick once you've voted for something.

The right hand side-bar is where you can login or signup, display your favourite art that's on the site, and read the latest news about ivoteforart.com

You can click on each piece and you'll be taken through to individual art pages - with more details about each piece, as shown here on the right.

On these pages, you can buy the artwork, add a comment or review about it, and of course you can add you vote here too.

So, as you can see - it's starting to take shape. I must say that the whole process has taken me a lot longer than I expected ... but it's very close now to being ready to launch.

The 'Sell' area on the top navigation bar, and panel towards the bottom of each page, is where artists can submit their work to be considered for the site. But "I vote for art' isn't going to be a free-for-all like etsy is. We'll only be adding work that we consider to be of a high standard.

I hope you like the look of it ... but either way would be very interested in hearing your feedback about it. This is only version 1, and I'm sure that plenty of things will change in the months (and hopefully years) to come.

Christopher Nielsen

OK, you're probably wondering ... why has this guy from Melbourne started creating an online art site, but there aren't any Australian artists?

Well, that's not exactly true - I have quite a few Australian artists signed up and ready to to be part of ivoteforart.com. Starting with Christopher Nielsen, a freelance Illustrator based out of Sydney.

I guess you'd describe his work as abstract ... In fact I'm not sure how you'd descibribe it beyond that. But he has a unique, rough style that really appeals to me.

You can read Chris' interview over at We are the Image Makers, or just head on over to his site to see more of his work.

One of the exciting things about launching this site is that i can choose artists from anywhere in the world to take part. Having said that, I'm always on the lookout for more local produce.

Stay tuned for more Australian artists!

Prints

Just wanted to show you all a small selection of the prints that I've had done so far. The four flat ones are from Kokomoo, Jim Bradshaw, Kendrick Marr and Ryan Snook. The rolled up one is a larger piece, Skeletal Heart, by Mel Kadel.

I'm really thrilled with how they've turned out.

In the last week I've also picked up some artists that will be selling some original pieces. Most of the artwork that will initially be for sale are prints, so it's nice to have some one-off pieces as well.