The EmptyEasel and ArtFlock competition winners have been announced. Well done to Rachel Ash with 174 votes and Sandi Whetzel who, rather strangely, both ended up with 174 votes.

It got pretty exciting towards the end and the lead changed hands a few times. Congratulations to all those who entered, the competition got well over 1000 voters involved!

Now it’s time to organise the prizes, with Rachel and Sandi both getting a custom designed website and domain name each worth over $600!

We will post back when those sites are live.

Fancy winning a free website for your art / craft work? You’ll have to act quickly as there are a couple of opportunities. Firstly, you can win just by uploading artwork to your ArtFlock account. Each artwork uploaded is counted as an entry so the more you upload, the more chance you have of winning! Log in to your account to get started

As if that wasn’t exciting enough, you can increase your chances of winning by visiting the Craft Boom blog. Just submit a comment to that post and you are in with a chance to win!

There’s another competition too, it’s a little late to enter, but you can certain vote for who you’d like to see win, head over to http://www.artflock.com/competition/emptyeasel/ and vote now.

After much feedback the artwork uploader has been totally modified. You can now set default settings to save adding in the same information each time. The image uploader has also been improved so that you can see the artwork as you enter its details. Uploading artwork is now very quick and easy. The error messages have also been improved so you can see where if going wrong! Would be great to hear what you think. 

Last night I got into one of those trances while creating somenew work. I sat in front of my monitor and for about 3 hours I did notlook away once. I had my iPod plugged in, phones off and drifted into aworld of my own.

It's nice when you get the chance,but after, I had what felt like an eye hang-over! Does anyone have tipsavoiding getting caught up in this? I considered setting an alarm on mymac that went of every 15 minutes to remind me to look away.

Anyway, you can see the piece I have been working on here, not quite finished yet

As you may have noticed, ArtFlock.com has quietly launched a new feature that enables artists to publish everything they have in their ArtFlock account onto their own website. It's only open to selected artists at the moment while we test everything, but we'll be rolling it out to everyone over the next few weeks.

I thought I'd share the first site here which is my own (I promise I'll add some more work soon) so take a look http://edlea.com. You'll also notice that it's possible to import your blog from wordpress or blogger.com etc right into your site, so it's a great way to get all of your online presence together in one place.