Island
This week's topic on the art challenge site illustration Friday is "Island". For anyone like me who is addicted to the ABC show Lost this is a very redolent and evocative title for an illustration.
Just like on the TV show an Island is an escape and a chance to reinvent yourself. ...but you don't have to be a writer or director on a TV show to create your own realm of entertainment, a website can be your Island.
This entertainment packed website is a kind of island and I as the webmaster can call it my domain. In the beginning when website design was a new subject the island website appeared very wild and frightening. But as the webmaster (me) gradually aquired the survival skills of website search engine optimisation and design however I felt like I could gradually tame the wilderness and even win enough sustenance from it (in the form of Google ads and the like) to survive.
Websites like the Illustration Friday art challenge or the Deviant Art community are like the ocean surrounding your website and you can post to them (like throwing a message in a bottle in) inviting people to visit your site.
You can show off the web pages you are particularly proud of, the areas that you believe will particularly entertain your guests, such as editorial illustrations, role-playing games, science fiction, language learning tips and all manner of entertaining content that you as writer and director of your own show have put together.
After a while you feel like you don't want to be rescued at all. You have grown accustomed to the freedom of the life of a webmaster which for me means a kind of amalgam of the roles of writer creating the content for editorial web pages for example, illustrator working your hardest to improve the look of role-playing game pages for example, animator creating that unique web content that makes a site stand out, problem solver learning as much as possible about strange subjects like cascading style sheets, graphic designer creating your own logos and all round entertainer.
Entertainment being the most important element. A page doesn't have to be laugh out loud funny but even dry subjects can be presented in an easy to read and even entertaining way. I have a few of these dry subjects on my Island but I do my best to make entertaining pages like this from them.