“Build a Bridge and Get Over it!”
It’s funny where your mind can go when it is allowed freedom. I created this image in Bryce 6.0 and Groboto. Actual size is 12×36 with a render time of 14hrs 6min.
The red high heels read as danger yet safety, strength with distinct feminine qualities, answers that create additional questions. This is one of the more fun images I have created this year. It is hanging in “The Eclective” right now and it is most interesting to hear comments made by visitors. Each of them attempt to define the meaning of this piece, each of them completely sure their interpretation is the correct one.
Actually, my intent was to leave the piece open for interpretation. I wanted to create an image that would beg each viewer to search for meaning.
Its interesting the the compositions you find exploring . I have spent the last few days covered in a layer of introspection. I have been trying to give credit to where I have been so I can continue to move forward. Like many artists, I don’t always see the value in my work as much as others. But there are some images that I always enjoy.
Looking back on things I have painted and things I have drawn- it is my digital art that always gets me jazzed to continue to create. I have only been a digital artist for a few years, where as I painted for a lifetime. But my digital art is a much more complete body of work that truly represents directions I am moving in.
This particular image is one of my earlier fractals. I use that statement loosely as I have only been creating fractals for a few years.
There are a whopping 11 layers that create this composition. This is a fractal created from the Mandelbrot set of complex numbers. I have tried my hand at tinkering with many public formulas but Mandelbrot still remains my favorite.
“Egyptian Haze” full image size is 24×36. And it prints beautifully at full size and smaller sizes. Most of my images have an organic feel, but this one appeals to me because of the hard lines of the geometric shapes that create this composition.
Created in “Ultra Fractal” Render time 18 hrs and 47 minutes.
To be able to create beautiful visual designs, you must first learn about the elements and principles in designing. What are design elements and principles? Elements refer to the basic units of a design, while design principles comprise the structural characteristics of the design’s composition. Both elements and principles are applied to all disciplines of visual designs, they may even sometimes overlap. There are many fields of visual design, to wit, fine arts, graphic design, architecture, industrial design, among others.
A design is basically a structured display of various design elements and principles. It is made in such a way as to serve an intention.
There is a wide variety of design principles. They largely depend both on the beliefs of the individual designers, and the many points of view of different art groups.
Design Elements
Let us first learn about the design elements.
- Space
Space alludes to the part you will use for your design. Space could be two dimensional- that is with a height and width; or three dimensional with a height, width and length. It also involves a foreground space, middle ground space and a background space. It could also mean areas or distances within, between and around components of a piece.
Space is of two types: positive and negative. The space that holds the subject is called the positive space. While the space between and around the subject is the negative space.
- Line
Line as a design element refers to any unbroken movement of a point on a surface. For example, a brush or pencil stroke that forms the edges of shapes. Without lines and curves you cannot create the forms and shapes for your design.
There are different kinds of lines such as horizontal, vertical, curve, zigzag, diagonal, wavy, dash, parallel and dotted lines. Each line is characterized by its thickness, length and direction.
- Color
Colors are grouped into primary, secondary or tertiary. Colors on opposite sides of the color wheel are called complementary colors. These are usually employed when you want to create contrast in your design. If the colors are adjacent to each other on the color wheel, they are referred to as analogous colors. These are useful in making harmony. Monochromatic colors, meanwhile, are different hues of one color. Red, yellow and orange shades are classified as warm colors. Cool colors, on the other hand, are shades of blue, green and purple.
You can see colors by light bouncing off of a surface or by using light sources with colors. You may use color, specifically contrasting color, to put focus on a particular point in the design.
- Shape
Shape is basically a space that stands apart from its surroundings due to a boundary set around it. This boundary could be explicit or implied. Boundary could be made by drawing lines or curves, of by contrasting colors, texture and value. Shapes can be organic or geometric.
In design, shapes can be used to define perspective by overlapping them. Shapes in interior design and house décor are used to define the style, theme and interest. It really depends on the function of the object. Natural shapes such as wood and stone patterns improve the visual appeal in interior design and decorating. In landscaping, natural shapes like trees can be used in contrast to geometric shapes like houses.
- Texture
Texture refers to the quality of the surface. There are two kinds of texture in art- tactile texture and implied texture. Tactile, or real, texture refers to the actual feel of the surface. Real texture can be felt on rock, fur, tree bark, cotton, sand paper and the like. Implied texture, on the other hand, alludes to how the surface seems to feel, visually. This kind of texture is employed by artists in their drawings or paintings. They can create objects that look like rough, gritty, fizzy, even if they cannot be actually felt.
- Form
Form refers to any object that has length, width and depth. The dimensions of a form are measurable. A form can be organic (a.k.a. natural), or geometric (a.k.a man-made). You can make a form by joining at least 2 shapes. Forms can be constructed into 3D creations or they could be drawn. Forms can be modified using color, tone and texture.
- Value
Value is also known as tone. It refers to the balance or contrast of dark and light on an object or surface. It enhances form as it provides depth and perception to the object.
Principles of Design
The principles of design administer all the elements used in an art work. They put to order the composition of the work. A good visual design is able to achieve the artist’s intent with the use of both design elements and principles. There is no set of guidelines or rules in using them. The right combination of elements and principles depends on the artist’s purpose.
The following are the design principles:
- Unity
Unity renders the work complete and unified. It refers to a feeling that everything in it are truly in their right places. By using repetition, harmony and/or balance, you can achieve unity.
- Contrast
Contrast makes use of opposing elements, such as size, value, color and others. It is important in drawing attention to a focal point in your work. It adds interest.
- Variety
Variety, or alternation, utilizes different elements to create distinctiveness and fascination. In interior design, variety is applied to prevent monotony. For example, by placing a painting on a wall or adding color to a house décor to enhance beauty.
- Emphasis
This is also referred to as dominance or focal point. Emphasis guides the viewer toward and out of an image. This is accomplished with the use of varying levels of focal points, such as primary, secondary, tertiary focal points, and so on. Emphasis, thus, means not giving all objects in a work the same treatment. One object is more dominant than the rest. You can give more emphasis to an object by any of the following: putting it in the foreground, increasing its size, making it more intricate or sophisticated, and others. Emphasis makes the art work more organized and gives it direction. Remember, the biggest emphasis should be given to the primary focal point in a design.
- Balance
Balance gives the art work a feeling that the dominant focal points are not placed in any one part of the work. You could employ symmetrical balance, asymmetrical balance or radial balance. Balance in a design could be accomplished by strategic placing of things, varying sizes and volumes of objects, and different colors. You can balance bold colors by adding lighter, neutral colors. While light colors can be balanced off by dark colors.
But how do you define composition?
Pattern
As there are patterns to be seen everywhere, this is a good subject in art. You can achieve stunning images by focusing on these patterns. Highlighting broken patterns is also good.
Symmetry
Symmetry could go both ways. It could be good if you have a symmetrical view with an amazing point of interest and great composition. The key here is the point of interest. If you have a weak point of interest, or none at all, your photo could be boring. It is advisable to capture both situations to judge which one is better.
Texture
You can make your art come to life by adding texture. Texture can be achieved through strategic positioning of lighting. This way, the two dimensional piece could have a three dimensional effect.
Depth of Field
Depending on your depth of field, you can either separate your subject from the surroundings, or you can integrate your subject with the foreground and background. For the former, you can use a shallow depth of field, while the latter requires a larger depth of field. Depth of field, hence, will largely affect the composition of your art.
Lines
Lines can be used to lead the viewer to look at crucial elements in a picture and establish the feeling depicted in the image. Before capturing a scene, you should first be aware if there are any horizontal, vertical or converging lines covered in the shot. If there is, you should utilize it.
Average computer users and even professional photographers, publishers and digital artists believe that they could depend on their equipment to give the correct color hues for their images. But this is not so. The color that you see largely depends on your monitor or output device. For instance, the monitor displays dark blue, but it does not follow that your printer could create the exact same hue of dark blue. The color is subjective.
Here are some tips you may find useful in making sure that you and your device get the colors right.
- Calibrate and profile your monitor monthly. Calibration and profiling are two distinct operations. In calibration, you are setting the standard colors for your device. You are basically telling your monitor what the color is by adjusting the settings of the color channels. You are defining for your monitor what “dark blue” is, for instance.
Profiling, on the other hand, is just illustrating your device’s discernment of colors.
The created profile will then be able to convey to the graphic design software or image editing applications what the specific combination of color channels are for that device.
- Apply “Softproof”. “Softproof” is a tool in image editing software, such as Photoshop, that lets the user determine that the colors seen on the output device will be, more or less, the same when printed. Softproof is not a hundred percent guarantee, but is close enough. With it, you can expect less wasted resources like ink and paper.
- Set the gray first. Before proceeding to edit your photo, you should select the gray balance first. This is done by choosing a neutral gray from your picture and setting this as your tone. In Photoshop Elements or Photoshop, for instance, what you have to do is go to Levels or Curves Tool, then from the dialogue window, choose the grey eyedropper. Finally, set this tool of the neutral area on your picture.
- Lastly, do not set the saturation levels so high as this may result to more prominent mistakes in color hues. But when you are certain that your colors are accurate, you can be confident with your image even if the saturation level is up.
The popularity of Adobe Illustrator is constantly rising. More and more digital design artists prefer the Illustrator because of the flexibility it provides and its ability to export high quality digital arts. Graphic designers employ Adobe Illustrator for a wide variety of tasks. The following will show how designers make use of Illustrator.
- Creating icons.
The Illustrator’s features, such as the potent grid system allows the user to make icon graphics accurately. Plus the align tools and snapping feature is very useful in drawing icons.
- Drawing and editing maps.
With the aid of the pen and line tools in Adobe Illustrator, you can draw shapes and lines in with ease. Making and editing maps will seem effortless if you have learned how to use the Illustrator.
- Making Info Graphics.
Info graphics are employed in magazines and newspapers to effectively show trends, figures and statistics. Making pie charts and graphs is made easier and faster by the Illustrator as you only have to encode the data. It will automatically make the graph or chart of your choosing.
- Creating realistic things.
The mesh tool and the gradient tool featured in the Adobe Illustrator can render your drawing a more realistic look. The aforementioned tools allow you to make smooth and realistic shadings
- Making cartoons.
With the use of the Pen tool in Adobe Illustrator, you can easily make shapes and color them as well. To make your cartoon drawing more appealing, you can utilize the gradient tool to add shades. If in case your client, or even yourself, is dissatisfied with the color palette used, you can easily replace the colors.
- Creating logos.
While majority of professional logos are made with vector programs, having the EPS gives you fine looking and well-defined logo heads. You can choose to separate the logo from the background so you can easily paste the logo in advertising materials and company profiles.
In making digital figurative works, there is one application that is found most useful- the Poser. Poser is user friendly and has a certain degree of flexibility, thus, it works beautifully with Photoshop.
In creating a scene, we will utilize different kinds of posing tools, camera views, lighting set-ups and props to make a wide array of people and items needed for the scene. In this specific set, we will use only one male figure then adjust his pose to make various poses.
With Poser, it is recommended to begin with the pose at hand, and then make modifications. Poser provides you with a huge number of pre-set poses from which you can choose. Whatever pose you have in mind, Poser most probably has it, or has one that is really close to it. Explore the Library Palette and you will understand how easy and quick this task is, thus saving you a lot of time.
When you have built the scene you have in mind, you can use the Poser cameras to check how it looks from different angles. You can turn and spin the cameras at the middle of the scene. There is no need to worry that you might upset the content you built, since what you will be seeing is the same scene but from different vantage points.
The following are some of the advantageous features of Poser when used in combination with Photoshop.
- You can use Photoshop to make the background. After which, import this to Poser to give the figures the fitting lighting and angles for the scene. When this is done, add the finished renderings back to the Photoshop background. The resulting scene will look much more natural.
- You can start modifying how the figures appear even while still in Poser. In this case, some of the body parts were removed and replaced with props. As you can see, the sea creature on the right has indistinct body parts, while the skin color was transformed to gray before rendering was conducted.
- There is no limit to what you can create with Photoshop. Whether you want to do simple illustrated works or very complex and intricate designs, Photoshop will make everything easier for you. You can color various layers, and then with the aid of tools like Brush and Gradient, you can add highlights and shadows.
- From the figures you created on Poser, you may or may not choose to integrate everything into your composition. You may just even select certain parts, and then with the use of Photoshop, you can make creatures that exist only in your imagination.
No matter what type of artist you are the issue of copyright will come up eventually. It doesn’t matter if you are using image editing programs or just painting it is important o understand these issues and how they apply to you.
Copyright protects original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression. Copyright gives you exclusive rights to an image allowing you to sell it reproduce it and make derivatives of it.
You own the copyright the moment you create anything in tangible form. The copyright lasts for your life plus 70 years. You cannot copyright an idea but as soon as the idea is executed into a work of art that copyright is owned by you. It is the way you execute an idea that holds copyright and not the idea itself. You do not need to register for copyright it automatically exists. But in the case of copyright infringement than registration makes it less tricky. You can register for copyright here:
http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl115.html
If you sell a work of art you still own the copyright. Unless the agreement is to sell the copyright with the work. A good way to make sure that this is clear is to include paperwork with your art sold that states that you retain copyright. That includes commissioned works. Owning the art is not the same as owning copyright. You can create prints and derivatives of the original.
A copyright symbol is not needed but it does make the copyright clear for those who are not familiar with copyright law.
In the case of derivatives; if you are using another artist’s work as a derivative you may do so and claim copyright provided that you could hold the two images next to each other and clearly see that they are different. Your end result must be completely different than theirs.
You may not use photos taken by another person as reference for a work of art that you are creating unless the photographer has stated that their image can be used in its entirety. However information within the photograph can be used as knowledge received and then used in your own work. For example: texture in tree bark or the shape of butterfly wings etc… Just be sure hat you are using the information as reference and not copying the image. In that case then your work is a derivative of the photo and not a copy of the photo.
You cannot create works based on copyrighted characters such as cartoons or superheroes. Those are owned copyrights.
Copyright law covers collage. The easiest way to stay out of copyright issues is to use elements created by you or purchase elements created for this purpose. If you were to purchase collage sheets from Michael’s you do not own the copyright to the sheets but you do own the copyright of what you created using the collage sheets.
In general if you can see it can become part of your art.
You are within your rights to make use of public building in works of art. This includes schools, churches, office buildings and such.
You can photograph private property provided that you are standing on public property. Privately owned venues such as movie theaters and concert halls are still public.
You can also include in your work public figures, people at the park, and cars in the street- provided that these are in public areas. If someone from a privately owned public venue asks you to stop taking pictures they can do so but they cannot ask you for what images you have already attained.
But publishing or selling is not the same. If you have a human figure in your work then you must get a model release to commercially publish this work and claim copyright. Newspapers are not required to do so but it is a needed step for artists to take as a lawsuit is possible with out a release. With that in mind it is a good idea to obtain a release when including private property in your work also. That also goes for painting/ drawing people. You may do so but if the work is intended to be sold then obtain a release from the person to avoid a possible lawsuit.
There is no international copyright that will protect you.
What is a tablet? Basically, it is an input device that can be used on its own or in combination with any pointing device such as a trackball, mouse and others. A tablet is also known as drawing tablet, graphics pad or digitizing tablet. A tablet has two parts: a smooth, level surface for drawing and a stylus or pen that was set to work with the tablet. Some packages also include a pen holder and a cordless mouse that can be used on the drawing surface. Even ordinary users can use the tablet. They will discover that it is more ergonomic, thus preventing injury due to recurring strain.
The following are some things you should know about tablet.
- Tablets come in different sizes. Depending on what you will use it for, there is a variety to choose from. For regular users and hobbyists, the 4 inches x 5 inches or the 6 inches x 8 inches will suffice. If you are a graphics artist, CAD user or illustrator, you should opt for the bigger size. Take note, that the price is directly proportional to the size.
A bigger size does not necessarily imply that it is better. Many individuals prefer the smaller surface area to avoid too much movement of the arm. But for digital artists, wide sweeping motions feel more natural since they are used to it when they paint or draw.
- One more thing that you should note about tablet, is its given dimensions only refer to the surface area that you will be working on. The actual size of the whole unit is much larger. For bigger-sized tablets, for instance, the actual size is about four to five inches more than the input area. You should remember this when planning on buying a tablet and deciding on the best place to put it on.
How do they differ exactly? Before proceeding, it is best to understand the definitions of both fine art and digital art.
According to the dictionary, fine art is an art form created with aesthetics as the foremost intent, and not practical application. Fine arts take the form of sculpture, paintings, music and others.
Digital art, on the other hand, is defined as a contemporary art form where art works are created with the application of modern computer technology.
Based on the aforementioned definitions, a stunning sculpture is considered a fine art. With fine arts, you can enjoy the art pieces not only through your sense of sight, but also through your sense of touch. You are able to feel how smooth or rough a sculpture is, you can run your fingers on paintings to feel the intricacies of the brushstrokes.
Digital art, on the other hand, seems to be less substantial. Digital artworks are often found displayed on computer screens. Many, thus, wonder, if digital is a true art form.
It is a common notion that digital art is worth less than fine art. This is because fine art is considered unique and cannot be replicated, while digital art is made with the use of a computer and can easily be reproduced. This situation is comparable to photography. A photograph can have infinite number of copies. Digital artists have learned from photographers. That is, they do not mass produce their creations, they just offer limited editions.
Digital art and fine art also differ in the way audiences interact with the artworks. With fine art, it is basically a static experience. Of course many art pieces can induce strong reactions from the viewer, but that is about it. Digital art, however, could be interactive. Digital artworks often have sounds, video, multiple images, transitions, video cameras and touch screens integrated into the work, thus enabling it to respond to the viewers’ actions accordingly.
They also differ on where they are put on display. Fine arts are usually found on shelves, pedestals, walls and other places where they can be viewed. Digital artworks can be found on computer screens, digital picture frames and flat screen televisions which, by the way, are just recent additions to modern technology. If the digital art is static, it can be printed, framed and hung like a painting.
Now that the differences between digital art and fine art have been laid out, we then go to the question, “Is digital art real art?”. To be able to answer this, you must look at a digital art. If it evokes emotions from you or if you believe it is beautiful, then indeed, digital art is real art.