Bicyclistic

A few weeks ago this blog was 1-year old. Here’s a quick guide to how Year 1 went.

For the most part Bicyclistic is a personal blog about cycling from a dog to a studio, painting pictures, taking photos and drinking tea.

Competitions
The most popular posts in terms of interactions are the free painting competitions where I ask a question that everyone can at least guess. Probably the one that was the most fun of all of these was the one where I asked you to Identify Those Animals that a friend’s child said he could see in a painting of mine.

Photos
It was always planned to include photos, along with artwork, but in early summer ‘09 I got tennis elbow which curtailed painting, so photos started to appear more regularly. They receive most comments on FaceBook where the blogposts are pulled in automatically. Probably the most popular photo-post was my multi-photo collage of garage doors in Dublin lanes.

Drawings
Drawings have featured not as much as I would have hoped nevertheless my drawing of Genoa done in Italy, and my left-handed drawing of Neil Gaiman remain popular posts.

The Studio
The life of the studio is threaded throughout, from the very 1st post showing the space as I moved in, to the stableyard where it’s located, to appearing on other sites, and ultimately the upheaval of the recent re-roofing.

Memories
There’s been less of these than intended, but they’ve been popular posts in terms of reaction - most of it off-blog - The Other Semi-Final and A Night in London being the most popular .

Paintings
And all the time there are paintings. As well as showing the odd painting in progress, there were also sales hosted here, 2 that followed shows, the rest exclusively online, in March ‘09, in April ‘09, in Aug/Sep ‘09, in Nov/Dec ‘09, and in March 2010 (which is technically Year 2).

Year 2
In year 2 there are a couple of regular features I plan to start, one featuring drawings and another featuring photos. There should also be a lot more photo collages - indeed I’ve taken the photos for 4 new ones already but need to assemble them. And if the roof stays on the studio, and my arm doesn’t suffer tennis elbow again then there should be twice as many paintings (with twice as many giveaways).

The bicycle and the dog are also likely to be more prominent.

Thanks for Year 1.