Friday 30 May 2008

Color Mixed Brushes

Brush set for Adobe Illustrator by celithralia . "The colors shown are the base colors for the brushes. You can change the line color at any time to experiment with different color hues. Bolder color choices seem to work best. You can always drag the brush icon out onto the main board and edit the colors, then create a new brush if you want a specific color combination." Download

Business masterclasses for illustrators

The Association of Illustrators (AOI) has announced a business management course aimed at illustrators setting up on their own. The 11-session course starts on September 3; the AOI is offering a discount on the course cost for those who book by July 31.
Through a series of practical workshops, the courses aims to equip illustrators for self-employed life. Workshop themes include self-promotion; bigger markets for profit; copyright, licensing and contracts; pricing your work; persuasion and negotiation; portfolios and agents; money management; keeping abreast of technology; and tax and bookkeeping.
Read more Digital Arts Online

Monday 26 May 2008

Elastic

by Silvionix

Outlining Strokes

There are different cases when designers need to convert strokes to filled objects. Outlining strokes in a vector logos may prevent print problems with uneducated clients. In Adobe Illustrator strokes are measured in points and usually when you scale an object (up or down) , the stroke weight stays the same but the rest of the artwork gets unproportionally distorted. By outlining the strokes before you hand in the logo file to the client you can be sure that if he desides to scale the logo, the strokes' visual weight will always match the rest of the logo.
Menu command : Object>Path>Outline Stroke

THE BOOK OF FLOWERS



Nearly 1,000 years ago, Lambert of St. Omer summarized all of human knowledge in a book called the Liber Floridus (Book of Flowers). Lambert spent 30 years filling his book with fabulous illustrations of beasts, plants and subjects "biblical, chronological, astronomical, geographical, theological, philosophical and natural."







The Liber Floridus even explains how the world will end: when a descendant of the Emperor Charlemagne climbs Mt. Zion, the antichrist will appear and do battle, triggering the Second Coming.



This is where I first learned that the antichrist owns a pet, the antidog.



Today, a modern equivalent of the Liber Floridus is being compiled. The scientist E. O. Wilson is working with the Smithsonian Institution to compile the Encyclopedia of Life, a database of all knowledge about the world's 1.8 million known species of plants and animals (including several hundred species of ants).



You may note that the illustrations in the EOL look different from those in the Liber Floridus. Rather than painting illuminations with gold leaf and pigments from crushed precious stones, the EOL has decided to go with digital photography. (Another damn market that illustrators have lost to photography!) The EOL also uses new mashup software to combine multiple sources of information, including genetic code and the latest scientific data bases.

A comparison of these two magnificent accomplishments shows how our perception of the world has changed. The mechanical clock and the magnetic compass eliminated much of the mystery in the world by making time and space concrete. Other instruments of precision have similarly brought the world into sharper focus. We have rolled back the domains of folklore, magic and astrology that were so central to the explanations of the world in the Liber Floridus.

Today it's safe to conclude that the EOL is more "true" than the Liber Floridus. But we should keep in mind the warning of the great H.L. Mencken:
Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits nevertheless, calmly licking its chops.
As we distract ourselves by inventing increasingly accurate ways to measure time, time inexorably continues to chew up our brief lives, undeterred and unimpressed.


Which brings me back to the abiding message of the Liber Floridus. Lambert had 30 long years while he was working on his encyclopedia to think up an appropriate title. He chose to call it the Book of Flowers rather than the Book of Truth or the Book of Facts. It seems that Lambert was less concerned with what the clock indicates than with what eternity indicates. As a result, even after the Liber Floridus ceases to be factually true, its beauty continues undiminished.
___________________________

PS-- for those who enjoy illuminated manuscripts as I do, I cannot recommend highly enough the great BibliOdyssey blog.

Saturday 24 May 2008

Spacecraft Custom Shapes for Adobe Photoshop

A collection of custom vector spacecraft shapes for Adobe Photoshop by retoucher07030. Those are just outlines but I'm pretty sure someone will find them useful. Note if you're a CS3 user you can export and use the shapes is Illustrator (select + copy in Photoshop and paste in Illustrator) Download link

Wednesday 21 May 2008

Scaling and transforming in Adobe Illustrator

ONE LOVELY DRAWING, part 19



The legendary Will Elder passed away last week at age 86. He had a long, glorious career as a founding artist for MAD Magazine, TRUMP, Humbug and Little Annie Fanny. Working from these platforms, he made a deep impact on the youth of America (especially teen age boys).

For me, Elder's great contribution to humanity was not an original style or a sensitive line or brilliant designs. His work offered no profound insights into human comedy or tragedy. Instead, his strength was slapstick. Note how Elder equipped the menacing space creature with a glass cutter to get access to the space cutie:



Look closely and you will see that her helmet is also a gum ball machine. Elder's unruly imagination wouldn't have been effective without the technical skill to draw so convincingly. Yet he never gets bogged down in the detail; his gags never interfere with the fluidity of the picture.

Here you can see Elder's craftsmanship close up:



In order to keep a consistent value on the girl's thigh, he painted out and redrew individual dots. Was it worth the effort? All I can tell you is that those legs were extremely important to boys all across America who would have noticed if even a single dot was out of place.

Many of those boys were motivated to become artists just so they could draw girls the way Elder did.

I speak from experience.

Monday 19 May 2008

Scatter rubbish brushes for Adobe Illustrator

The pack contains 8 scatter brushes:
1 bubbles brush
3 rain brushes for background rain both light and dark, one for visible raindrops
4 night sky brushes for nebulas, for dense groups of small stars, for twinkling stars and for fireflies
Thanks to maddama DownloadNote: The brushes were made for working with mid-to-high resolution images. If the effects come too big you'll have to expand them, select the whole lot and resize it with the transform tool.
Note2: If you want to make your scatter effect more subtle and less expressive, select the curve and lower the opacity value. Window>Transparency

Sunday 18 May 2008

Illustrating Fashion Tutorial

Another great digital art publication from Computer Arts Magazine's website. This tutorial might be of use to beginner digital illustrators and fashion designers...

"Follow Cybèle as she develops a sketch for a spring 2008 accessories collection into a completed fashion illustration. When working on a fashion assignment, it’s important to dress the characters not in what is being worn at the time you create it, but what will be worn when the illustration is published and afterwards. So it’s essential for fashion illustrators to keep up to date with the current and upcoming fashion collections and street trends..."

Click on the images below to see full size screenshots. Download tutorial (pdf)

Rush Hour



I've started a sister-site to Little People called Inner City Snail, utilising the humble snail shell as a medium for 'art'. No snails were harmed, they just had their homes vandalised.

I am also excited to announce that a Little People book will be out soon, titled 'Little People in the City - The street art of Slinkachu'. It will be a chunky little hardcover packed full of my photographs from this site over the past two years, shots that have appeared in various magazines and exhibitions and also a lot of new unseen stuff. It will be published through Boxtree and will be out on the 5th of September at all good bookstores (and some rubbish ones). A pre-order page is up on amazon now, if you can't wait for the remainder bin. And its only £10! What are they thinking?! (No, seriously, what are they thinking?! I had dreams of a yacht...)

Saturday 17 May 2008

Less art


At times it seems the smaller the intervention, the better.
No, I do not mean to follow a minimalistic path, at least not now.
Minimalism, to me, has a lot to do with purity, that is, starting from a point of nothingness and adding just the right touch.
What I'm thinking is more along the lines of accepting the impurity - starting from a point of overwhelming reality and accepting it. Then, the right touch is really just a point of focus, a frame. Was it Oiticica who walked around with his admirers and made art by simply pointing at objects, thus giving them their artness? Still, even this gesture seems like too aggressive, too intrusive. Is it the art-element that makes all tools (all ways of dealing with what appears to us) seem bulky and outdated? Or is it the over-confidence we have when pointing? Isn't this the pleasure of all the YouTubes and darling amateurs? The certainty of some basic form of humbleness?

At times it seems the smaller the intervention, the better.
Yet, I often wonder where does this leave me as an artist. Once I admit a view of some apparently insignificant piece of reality can be a more enriching experience than any work of art, how can I claim anything about my own work, other than the "need" to do it? Doesn't that reveal the horribly narcissistic character of art? But what if I do not want that? If I actually wish to be in harmony with my own tastes? Where does that leave me?
All the above pictures are by Will Simpson at Loshadka, and are part of the You Are Healed series.

(via)

Lima (vector, photography and brushes)

Photomanipulation by whisperingsmith

Thursday 15 May 2008

THE BREATH OF ROBOTS

Henry Reuterdahl (1871-1925) painted this lovely illustration for one of the earliest science fiction stories:



Just months after the Wright brothers made the first airplane flight in 1903, Rudyard Kipling wrote "A Story of 2000 AD" predicting a world of huge flying airships. In this scene, a ray of light strikes an airship over the ocean at night: "She falls stern first, our beam upon her; slides like a lost soul down that pitiless ladder of light, and the Atlantic takes her."





Reuterdahl worked in an era when artists still painted machines as if they were a new kind of flower.


Turner's painting of an early locomotive: " Wind, Rain and Speed"

But the world was changing. The scientific revolution had spawned the industrial revolution, which would soon lead to the technological revolution. The breath of robots was beginning to be felt across the world.

As machines became more familiar and less mystical, they lost much of their organic beauty in the eyes of artists. With a few exceptions (such as the late lamented Stanley Meltzoff or John Berkey) illustrators soon depicted machines with a sharper focus and a harder edge.



Fifty years after Kipling, the great poet Peter Viereck was no longer mistaking machinery for a new kind of flower:

During the fourth and fifth world wars, the tanks
Will still obey, still seem to serve their humans...
The sixth war they will serve more sullenly--
And suddenly will know their day has come,
The birthday of the Prince of all the tanks

And then will humans all be jitterbugs,
Migrate like locusts from their dance-hall doors,
And sing with insect-voices metal-shrill:
"Our god is born!" and roll to him like grapes
Till all their frenzy begs His metal treads:
"Love us to death, love us to death," the day
Creation's final goal, Prince Tank, is born.



Some people will be tempted to look back at Reuterdahl's early concept of science as a naive moment before childhood's end. That would be a mistake. These lyrical images continue to retain an important wisdom of their own.

Wednesday 14 May 2008

Beirut Melancholy


Of course, of course, no art is ever new. Of course, of course, there is more beauty behind us than we will ever see. Of course, nothing can ever compete with harmony. Yet of course, harmony seems never enough.
Of course, there is a time for mourning, and yet of course, the harmony in the mourning chant outcries the cry.

found here

Monday 12 May 2008

Phantasm CS Designer/Studio Adobe Illustrator plug-in review

With such a range of Adobe Illustrator plug-ins on the market, it’s rare to come across one that excels to this extent. Phantasm CS adds Photoshop-style adjustment tools and functionality that seamlessly integrates with Illustrator’s native features, including standard gradients, meshes, filters and effects.
Furthermore, Phantasm CS is fully compatible with Illustrator’s Actions and Live Effects, which can potentially speed up your workflow. Read full review PCAdvisor.co.uk

TIME AND CHANCE HAPPENETH TO THEM ALL, (part 2)

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The artist's dilemma: you can't accomplish anything without compromises, but compromises distort what you hoped to accomplish.



One heartbreaking example of this is animator Richard Williams' 25 year struggle to bring his masterpiece, The Thief and the Cobbler to the screen.

Williams was the artist behind such films as Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and A Christmas Carol. An uncompromising perfectionist, Williams set out in 1964 using his own money from commercial assignments to make a complex and sophisticated animated film based on ancient Arabian stories. As one web history reports:

Williams had a fearsome reputation for doing things his way, more so now with a pet project designed to showcase the intricate possibilities in hand-drawn animation. He was ferociously dedicated to his dream. Each and every element which could be animated would be animated. And he was ruthless with his newly-expanded crew, hiring and firing incessantly. He had a vision and only the very best would be employed in its creation.
Williams' funds soon ran out, but in the 1970s he obtained additional funding from Prince Mohammed Faisil of Saudi Arabia. After years of delays and editorial disagreements, the Prince withdrew funding. A few years later, Williams found new funding from Warner Brothers. However, the studio made him sign a guarantee that he would complete his film in 18 months.

Williams could not resist perfecting his project and missed his deadline.



To make matters worse, while Williams obssessively worked and reworked his drawings, the Disney corporate machine beat him to the box office with its own animated Arabian stories, Aladdin. As one commentator notes, Disney's heavily promoted feature "vacuumed up the market for animated Arabian adventures."

With only 15 minutes of material left to shoot, Williams' investors confiscated his masterpiece and turned artistic control over to a Completion Bond Company. The Bond Company re-dubbed and re-cut the movie, adding songs and bringing in new voices that sounded more "American." When the flawed version was finally released by Miramax, it sank like a stone.

Now, grieving co-workers and die-hard fans are like beachcombers salvaging remnants of a shipwreck that have washed up on shore. Fragments of Williams' original vision, lovingly reconstructed, can be found all over youtube and the blogosphere. They give us a glimpse of Williams' brilliance and tantalize us with what might have been.



So much of art today is a corporate effort, dependent upon teamwork, institutional funding, and an electronic infrastructure powered by utility companies and implemented with hardware and software from multinational corporations. Each new element has the potential to add new dimensions to art, but each requires fresh compromises as well.

Many of the talents required to complete this type of art are not artistic talents. That is why, time and again, I find myself returning to the mark of a humble pencil on paper to find the essence of an artist's talent.


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Sunday 11 May 2008

How to draw vector flowers with Adobe Illustrator

A basic, but eye-opening image tutorial from lord-angelus. While learning how to draw vector flowers, will also have the chance to explore the main usage of: The Rectangle tool, Punker Bloat Transform Effect, Elipse tool, Rotate Tool, Blends, etc...

Feel free to post questions and links of the flower illustrations that your come up with.


Friday 9 May 2008

Aviary's creative suite

A demo video of a Aviary's new browser based image editor software and a part its review from webware.com
"I finally got a chance to catch up with Avi Muchnick, the CEO of Flash software maker Aviary and of the art contest site it spun out of, Worth1000 (a Webware 100 winner).Aviary is an ambitious project to create a full suite of online applications for creative professionals. The first application, the image editor Phoenix, is now in private beta (read to the end of this post to get an early invitation). The second, pattern maker called Peacock, was recently added.Coming up after these applications will be Toucan, a color swatch program for designers (like Kuler on steroids), a 3D-sketching program and modeler, a vector-based editor, and a smart image resizer." Click here to see the full video review.

Thursday 8 May 2008

Sun Vectors

A collection of abstract sun vector shapes thanks to GreenGirl. To use the vectors open the pdf in Adobe Illustrator. Download

Wednesday 7 May 2008

Monday 5 May 2008

REPIN

One reason to take a second look at the great Russian illustrator Illya Repin is that art critic Clement Greenberg didn't think Repin was worth a second look.




Scene from the underwater adventures of the Russian hero Sadko

In his famous essay Avant-Garde and Kitsch, Greenberg sneered at Repin's art, explaining that an "ignorant peasant" prefers Repin while "cultivated" people prefer abstract artists such as Picasso:
[W]hen an ignorant Russian peasant... stands with hypothetical freedom of choice before two paintings, one by Picasso, the other by Repin....[i]n the first he sees, let us say, a play of lines, colors and spaces that represent a woman.... He turns next to Repin's picture and sees a battle scene.... Picasso [is] austere and barren in comparison. What is more, Repin heightens reality and makes it dramatic: sunset, exploding shells, running and falling men.... Repin is what the peasant wants, and nothing else but Repin. It is lucky, however, for Repin that the peasant is protected from the products of American capitalism, for he would not stand a chance next to a Saturday Evening Post cover by Norman Rockwell....
I must be a peasant, for when I saw Repin's originals in the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg, I found them staggeringly beautiful.


The Volga boatmen


Cossacks writing a mocking letter to the Sultan of Turkey


Raising Jairus Daughter


Portrait of Tolstoy

Greenberg's essay has been described as "one of the important theoretical documents of 20th century culture." Greenberg proceeded (over the bodies of excellent painters such as Repin and Rockwell) to become the primary cheerleader and intellectual architect for abstract expressionism.



Me, I like both Picasso and Repin. I even like Clement Greenberg, who was a brilliant writer and theorist. There's just one little problem with Greenberg's argument...



As Svetlana Boym of Harvard notes,
Greenberg's example of kitsch is Ilia Repin's battle scenes which, he claims, merely imitate the effect of artistic battles.... however, the fact is that Repin never painted any battle scenes. Possibly Greenberg is confusing Repin with another painter or rehearsing someone else's cliches...
This is the kind of careful analysis which led to "20th century culture." Greenberg concludes his criticism of Repin this way:
Repin predigests art for the spectator and spares him effort, provides him with a short cut to the pleasure of art that detours what is necessarily difficult in genuine art. Repin, or kitsch, is synthetic art.
Apparently, the "difficult" part of art does not include bothering to look at the pictures you criticize.

Saturday 3 May 2008

Comments on the dirty logo

I'm not a big fan of TV Shows or for that matter TV at all. The logo of FX's television show Dirt, starring Courtney Cox from Friends impressed me though. I researhed feedbacks about the logo around the web and I found pretty interesting comments about it. So here are some post quotations from the forum of a typographic website typophile.com"any thoughts on why the “i” is upside down?"

"exclamation mark"

"To make it something more memorable than plain text.

To create an ’exclamation point’ recalling the sensationalism of tabloid press.

Interestingly, the ’i’ is shifted down, putting the dot below the baseline, perhaps a metaphor for something buried or underground, reinforcing the dirt. I was pondering this already, thanks to heavy advertisement featuring ’Digging in the Dirt’ by Peter Gabriel."

"I could swear this is a play on a British tabloid. Perhaps someone can comfirm. I see it as an exclamation point as well. In the media nothing can be big enough or bold enough. So, of course, they use lots of exclamation points thinking this is another way to emphasize the point."

"The negative eye, looking for the bad stuff, punctuating the dirt—Upside down as in “Down and Dirty” You can check the whole discussion here : http://www.typophile.com/node/30281

Friday 2 May 2008

Grunge Borders Tutorial

This morning I came across this tutorial in Layersmagazine. It covers the use of clipping masks and brushes in Illustrator and Photoshop. Very useful if you're trying to create an organic grungy frame for your artwork.

"There has been a surge of "grunge" effects lately that have been created using Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. So here's one more effect for your arsenal of grunge effects. In this tutorial, we'll show you how to create a custom brush and use it to create a really cool border mask in Illustrator, allowing you to apply it to a photo or graphic without affecting the original image. You can then take this mask and use it with any graphic that you want. It's simply a matter of getting used to working in mask mode." Full tutorial

Summer

Some people say summer comes after the last month with the letter "r" in its name (months with R are supposed to be cold January, February...December.)

Well, its May, so... Happy Summer folks, close the browser window and go have some fun. Artwork by darkshadowmagus.