Well its Thirsty Mind Thursdays and its officially 1 week since I have finished my first Maya class. So I have decided for this weeks Thirsty Mind Thursday I will be focusing on CGI images that inspire me. I do not have the skills it takes to make these great images yet, but hopefully with time I may come close. So here is this weeks Thirst Mind Thursday:

Title: Brain Tower
Name: Kazuhiko Nakamura
Country: Japan
Software: Photoshop, ZBrush
My thoughts: The bizarre that is happening in this picture is unreal.

Title: Girl on a chair
Name: Alexander Tomchuk
Country: Ukraine
Software: 3ds max, mental ray, Photoshop, ZBrush
My thoughts: Brilliant. Its so nice to see some realistic women in some 3D work. Too many times its humans in CGI are too perfect or have no flaws.

Title: Young girl
Name: Viki Yeo
Country: Korea (South)
Software: 3ds max, mental ray, Photoshop, ZBrush
My thoughts: This is another one that I can barely believe that it was made in 3D. The eyes are so realistic and the hair and skin work is excellent.

Title: Kitchen in a big house
Name: Stanislav Orekhov
Country: Russia
Software: 3ds max, Photoshop, VRay
My thoughts: The lighting of this old fashioned room blows my mind. Beyond realistic.

Title: THE RETURN TO ABALAKIN :: PART I
Name: Alexander Preuss
Country: Germany
Software: 3ds max, Photoshop
My thoughts: My favorite piece from this week's TMT. Such an amazing idea of what the future could be like for us humans, and I love the way the tube has the center channel for water and how it continues as far as they eye can see.

Well I hope you were inspired in some how by this weeks pieces. Props to CGS society. Have your own inspiration that you want to share? What were you thoughts on this week's TMT? Share your thoughts below in the comments!

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Well its Thursday and I am taking the day off to go snowboarding with some family. I will keep this nice and short. I found this video and its nice little production. Hope it helps inspire you. Happy Holidays!

JOYEUX NOËL from UnitedFakes on Vimeo.

I have just finished my first year of freelance designing. It was about 2 years ago I had the realization that I did not want to work for other people the rest of my life. Now while I have not completed the full transition from 9-5 to full time freelance designer it has been nice to have some bills payed off and a little extra money coming in each month. I am no where near I would like to be by any means, but like any other business out there you have to put time and dedication into ideas and attempts before they blossom into dreams.

I am going to enlighten you with information that sometimes may not be what you want to hear about the freelance world you are anxious to pursue, there are times when money is scarce because you haven't been able to find any freelance gigs, and there are other times when your plate is so loaded that it may slow your drive to get tasks taken care of.

The Beauty of Being your own Boss.

You call the shots. When you are your own boss your word is the bottom line, there is not hierarchy of authority to request approval. If you have an idea you can instantly put it to practice and either reap the the rewards or suffer the consequences. You choose your salary. There is no one above you that gets to determine how much your being paid. Now its not like you will be jumping right into 7 figure income, but with hard work and the right marketing the sky is truley the limit. No one complaining that the way your dress isn't professional enough. You get to sit in your underwear reading blog posts and updating your facebook status all while working hard on your current projects on hand. You get the privilege of choosing your hours. No more being tardy to work and no more driving like a maniac to the office just to get your head chewed off because the goody two shoes Brian in the corner gets to work 15 minutes early each day. No more public restooms! Lets face it, sometimes public bathrooms at the workplace are a scary site. You wonder in wondering why it smells like a skunks tail. Being a freelance designer means your own personal throne is just that, at least if its not clean (which I hope it is for your sake) its your own filth your sitting in.

The Ugly of Being Your Own Boss.

You have to find work. You can't claim you have a home office if you don't have work to do in that home. It is not always easy and chances are you will never have what is considered 'steady' work coming in as a freelancer. At times work is piling up so quick you have to decline work when only 2 weeks later there is no work in sight. Income is anything but steady. I have come to find that some weeks I feel like I am raking it in. I will get a few checks from clients all pour in at once and then I can go a whole month without a single check. You are at the mercy of your deadlines. Deadlines are tough in the design world. Mentioned above is working your own hours, but that means you may be putting in 60-80 hour work weeks when you have 3-4 projects approaching their deadlines. You have to deal with the small stuff. Every business has the nity gritty details, whether it be taxes, payroll or anything like that. Its up to you to take care of all the small business details.

Plan on Ups and Downs.

Much like the roller coaster at Disney Land there are going to be highs and lows when it comes to freelancing. From what I have experienced and what I have learned about other freelancers is the fact that there is not much that is stable in the freelance world. Imagine work like the waves of the oceans, it will come in quickly and swamp you only to disappear back into its abyss just as fast. This requires some strategical planning if you want to have constant work (which I have failed to achieve thus far in my freelance career). This means that when work is somewhat scarce be sure to take time to do the things you love, spend a little extra time with your loved ones or your boys at the bar, because you don't know when the next wave is coming in to swamp you for 2 weeks.

The same principles apply to revenue created from freelancing. You must be smart with your money. I have had weeks where I get 3 checks from clients come in and am sitting happy because that week I made $2,000 dollars. Then the next month I won't see a check at all. Just because you made $2,000 dollars that week you can't start spending money like you make $100,000 a year. Creating budgets and planning ahead of time is a must, this will help you avoid falling into financial trouble.

Clients can make or break you.

Now that you are a freelancer its up to you to find your own stream of income. This means you will have to be going out there, marketing yourself, and making contacts with people. You have to realize ahead of time that the future of your freelance business has a lot to do with how you interact with your clients. If you make the client comfortable and enjoy working with you then they may be able to feed more work your way as well as come back for repeat work. If you are constantly impossible to get a hold of, ignore what the client wants and are not reasonable then you are not only hurting your reputation with that client, but the reputation of the business you are trying to grow. Friends and family will most likely be your first few customers and then word to mouth will begin to market your services, make sure there is only good to say.

There are certain clients that are great to work with, while other clients may try to make your life hell. For more information the profiling of clients there is a great article over at the FreelanceSwitch called 12 breeds of Client and how to work with them..

Be Patient

You can't expect to be a good snowboarder if you've never seen snow. Freelanceing, like everything else in life, will require time, dedication, drive, persistence and the right attitude. Put quality time into projects. Dedicate yourself to your clients. Let the feeling of being your own boss drive you to a freelance career. Be persistent and don't give up when everything is not going the way you want.

I hope this information can help you understand what it takes to be a freelancer. Use it as you may and keep chugging on for another day. Have your own experiences that you would like to share? Have you thought about jumping into freelance design yourself? Please share thoughts in the comments below.

Hello friends. Its free file Friday. I found this lying around the old computer and decided I would add it this site as a free download. I was created these for a website that needed office supplies, this is a nice little pushpin.

There are few separate files here for your benefit:

• Photoshop Brush, just select the color you want, and brush it on!
• PSD file, this has individual pushpins that you can drag onto your own creation

So use it at will, use it for whatever you may need it for. Be sure to check back often for more free files. I will be adding a tutorial on how to create this super simple pushpin soon. Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss the tutorial when it comes out!

Download Pushpin

Adding a 'Share This' widget to your site is a great little feature. It will make it easier for followers and readers of your blog/website/whatever to share your information across their social networks, blogs, emails and many other digital formats. You have probably seen the little icon a thousand times, and never really noticed anything other than a popup when you hover the mouse over it. In that little popup there are many different ways to share the information your reading, including facebook, digg-it, myspace, stumpe-upon and many many many more!

I was recently creating a new site called Residual Bacon and when adding the Share This widget I came across a slight problem. I had created certain pages that I didn't really want to be shared and others that I did want to be shared with the share this widget. The default options for the Share This widget has only 2 options. "Add Share this to posts" and "Add Share This to pages". I needed it to be on certain pages and all of my posts. So I did my homework, found the solution, and am here to share it with you.

Get the plugin & the code

First thing first. We are going to need to get a Share This code clipet & a customized icon. Head over to Share This and up at the top there is a link that says get the button for your site. Click it! Now you will be presented with a tabbed set of options (Step #1). This is just customizing your button for your website. Go ahead and use the button you would like. I myself chose the 'Rotating Icon' version. Next click on the header tab. Here you can add a header to your button if you'd like. I left mine alone. At the bottom tab (services) add which services you would like to be displayed. I chose defaults. (Step #2) Finally make sure you click the wordpress logo under 'Choose Your Service'. This will let you download the plugin. After that click on the 'Get ShareThis Code' submit button at the bottom of the screen.

It may ask you to fill out some quick information, its quick and doesn't require validation so just fill out the info and submit it. This should bring up Step #3 which is install. The first step says "Download the plugin & expand it." This is the Wordpress plugin that will be placing the the ShareThis button on your posts and pages. Don't close your browser yet because the code snipet that you see that the bottom of the page will be needed in a few later steps. Download the zip file and extract it. It should have expanded a folder called "Share-This" to wherever you extracted it from. Now your going to have to drag this folder onto your wordpress' plugin folder. It should be under /wp-content/plugins .

Activate and Setup the plugin.

Now you will need to log-in to your Wordpress site. (I hope you know how to do this.) Once you are logged in click on the left hand side where it says Plugins. A screen with all of your plugins should pop up. Look for the ShareThis plugin and click 'activate' underneath the name. After you click activate the grey box around the plug-in should change to white, and the word activate should change to deactivate.

Now look to the right at the description of the ShareThis plugin. In the text field there should be a "Configuration options are here" link in the center of the description. It looks like this.

Now you should see the options for the ShareThis plugin. Go back to the webpage with the code snipet and copy and paste the code they gave you into the text field. Leave the 'Automatically add share this to your posts?' set to yes. Now change the 'Automatically add ShareThis to your pages?' to NO. Finally click the Update ShareThis Options button at the bottm.

Now if everything is working correctly you should be able to view your blog/website and any posts you have submitted there should be a ShareThis button at the end of each post. Before we go on to showing you how to create the custom page template lets review what we did.

• Went to the ShareThis website and setup our button.
• Downloaded and Activated our ShareThis plug-in.
• Copied the code and setup the ShareThis plug-in.

Seting Up Your Custom Page Template In Wordpress

So now that we have our plug installed and working on our posts. We are going to want to setup a custom page template that we can assign to certain pages of information that we want to be shared. In my case I have a big list of articles that I have written that I want to be shared that is a page on my wordpress blog. I want to share this, but I don't want to share every page, because no one is that interested in my About section and I don't really want to share this anyhow. So lets get started.

If you are not familiar with the Wordpress hierarchy I would give a quick glance at the wordpress codex hierarchy so you have somewhat of an idea of what is going on. Its not as complicated as spelling the Hierarchy, I promise! Basically we are going to create a template page that we can assign pages to use the code from the template rather then the ordinary and default page.php that your usual pages use created through Wordpress. To start lets download your current page.php from your theme folder. If you have not installed any custom themes for your wordpress then you will most likely be using the default theme (based on Kubrik). To see what them you are currently using click on 'Appearance' in your Wordpress dashboard. At the top, directly below 'Manage Themes' it should say 'Current Theme' and it will give the name, the author and a nice little peice of information 'All of this theme’s files are located in: themes/foldername'. In my case, since I have created my own wordpress theme, its in the folder themes/tytheme (as you can see below).

This folder name is where you are going to find your themes 'Page.php'. We are going to download this file, copy the contents into a new PHP file. Add a little bit of code, and save it as our template. It may seem somewhat intimidating, but its easier then clipping your fingernails, I promise! Here is an image of my wp-content folder, here you will see I don't have a ton of stuff in my theme, afterall its still being developed. Under 'tytheme' you can see 'page.php'. Lets grab that file and open it with our favorite coding program. If you don't have one thats fine, you can open it with text editor or notepad, any simple editor will do.

Open up page.php. We are going to be doing 2 things here. First we need to add a small amount of code to the top of the page to let Wordpress know that this is going to be a page template for other pages in wordpress. Here is my wordpress page.php before I have done any editing.

Now in order to make wordpress know that its going to be a template we need to add the following code at the very top of the page.

<?php
/*
Template Name: ShareThis
*/
?>

So it looks like this.

Where name says 'sharethis' you can change that to whatever you'd like. This will be what it is named inside of wordpress. Since this is going to be for pages that are using the ShareThis plugin, I called it ShareThis. Now we need to add a nother sniplet of code to the bottom of our page content loop. It may get a little complicated here, since every loop is not the same. Usually they end the same. Here is my current loop code that brings in the page content.

The grey parts are greyed out because those are comments explaining what is going on. Look for a piece of code on like 34 that looks like this:

<?php the_content(); ?>

This little piece of PHP code tells Wordpress to pull in content. Now we are going to be adding a piece of code right below it. The piece of code we will be adding will be :

<?php if (function_exists('sharethis_button')) { sharethis_button(); } ?>

This little piece of PHP looks to see if there is a ShareThis plugin installed on wordpress, if it is installed it will add our ShareThis button right below the content of our page! Here is an image of all of our code now with the sharethis code added.

As you can see on line 35 there is our newest code added, and you can see at the top lines 1-5 is the code we added earlier. Now save the files as something OTHER THAN PAGE.PHP. I chose to save mine as sharethis_template.php.

Uploading your template and adding pages

Phew, we are almost done. Now we need to upload our template file and add pages so wordpress knows which pages to have the ShareThis button on. First upload your newly created PHP template to the same directory as the PAGE.php. Remember to not overwrite your page.php, you need to be uploading your newly created file, in my case its sharethis_template.php.

Now login into your wordpress site. Click pages on the left hand side and click on one of the pages you want to have your ShareThis button on. You will notice a new item on the very right hand side of the window. Under attributes on the right hand side there should be a new item called 'Template'. This item only shows up if you have uploaded a template file into your theme. If you don't see this on the right hand side of the screen under attributes then you may have forgotten to upload your template PHP file.

Under templates select the template page you would like to use. If you followed my instructions there should be a Share This drop down. Go ahead and select it, then click 'Update Page'. Click the 'Preview Changes' button and make sure you see your new ShareThis button below your content!

Lets some up our final actions here:

• Downloaded our page.php from our Wordpress theme.
• Added in code at the top to declare the theme.
• Added in code to insert the ShareThis button under our content.
• Saved our new document with a new name and uploaded.
• Logged in and added pages to our template.

You have learned a lot today! If you have had any problems be sure to leave a comment below and I will respond. For more information on template pages and the ShareThis check the links below. Finally be sure to SUBSCRIBE to my blog so you don't miss any other important design related posts. Adios! And if you are trying to put a sharethis button on your Wordpress site and are having issues feel free to drop a comment below and I can help you get things working. Cheers!

• More information on template pages.
• Infomration on positioning your ShareThis button.
• ShareThis Official Website