News

The illustration community at large is outraged after finding out that the book titled Colorful Illustrations 93°C has stolen and published hundreds of illustrations and many interviews that had previously been featured on the Little Chimp Society art blog.

Darren Di Lieto, who conducted the interviews for LCS, wrote a recent blog post about the whole event: how he found out, who he has contacted, and he even put up a gallery of the book so that the affected illustrators can rally together and try to get this book off the shelves.

Since the book was published in Hong Kong, Darren has run into a lot of trouble trying to contact the publisher to notify them of the copyright infringement. Sadly, copyright infringement in China is rampant and has been covered several times in the news; there doesn’t seem to be anything anyone can do about it though.

If you do see this book in a store somewhere, please don’t buy it. Even better, let the book store manager know that the entire contents of the book were plagiarized and kindly request that the book be removed. None of the illustrators featured in this book (or in the book’s CD) have been given a single penny for their work, so don’t help the publisher make money either!

It’s been a while since I last posted to this blog, mostly because I don’t have access to a scanner anymore. I’ve still been producing images, but getting them uploaded has been challenging.

In addition to drawing and painting, I’ve also been putting together several CSS hacks in order to create accessible image rollovers. Traditionally, image rollovers are created with JavaScript or maybe even Flash, so less capable browsers are crippled when trying to view a page that depends on these technologies for navigation. I’ve also been experimenting with making text links available on the image rollovers for text-only browsers or browsers that have disabled images.

Given the technical nature of the work, I was reluctant to publish them here and mess with the Visual Arts theme of this blog. However, since it has been such a long time since I have been able to scan my day-to-day visual work and upload it, I’m beginning to think that it wouldn’t be so bad after all. Plus, it’s either that or nothing at the moment.

Besides, I think my CSS image rollover hack would a beneficial read to other artists who use rollovers on their site. I’ve seen hundreds of artist portfolio sites that depend on JavaScript to function that are completely crippled when JavaScript is turned off. I bet they would be interested in an alternative that makes their content available to an even broader audience.

I’m starting a lot of new things this week. Most notable of which is my name change. You see, I got married about a month ago and hadn’t decided to change my surname, until now.

My motivation wasn’t the usual one: I just suddenly realized that Jennifer Montes is a much rarer name than Jennifer Garcia, and thus suitable as an artistic name.

No, I’m not a heartless bitch. Really. I love my husband, but marrying him would not be the sole reason I would change my name. What’s in a name anyway?

Anyway, given that Jennifer Montes is a much rarer name, I was actually able to find an unused domain name for it. So here we are.