Tutorial: Painting from your Imagination

If you're interested in painting at all, you'll love my tutorial on acrylic painting from your imagination at WideCraft.

This tutorial is the first part of a two part tutorial. The first part goes through the basics. The second post will focus on painting from a concept drawing. Let me know if you have questions!

Wide Angle Perspective Techniques in Your Artwork

Ever notice that in one point and two point perspective that a supposedly square tile can look pretty strange in some of the more extreme areas? You can compensate with carefully thought out vanishing points. However, there are limits as painter Rob Adam's explains in his Spherical Perspective tutorial:

"So here we go… We might assume from what we are taught about perspective that this is the way we actually see. But it’s not. In the outside world there are straight lines, so we put them that way into our pictures. We have developed complicated schemes of geometrical rules to guide us. We take photos with cameras that have lenses that carefully distort the world to make it fit with the expectation that straight line should be straight. But visually they are not.

Have you ever tried to draw that really large checker board floor? Somehow at the far right and left it goes all stretched. Do the same thing with circles on the floor and it gets really wild."

My own understanding of spherical perspective, quadilinear perspective and cylindrical perspective definitely needs some expansion. If you're like me and have trouble wraping your head around it, Rob's tutorial can help.

Spherical Perspective (treeshark.com)

40 Guidelines for Composing a Landscape Painting

When creating artwork, finding the flaws in your own work can be difficult.  Furthering your understanding what works and what doesn't can make this process far less frustrating.  The tutorial on art destination site and forum Wetcanvas has demystified the most common problems. From the article, by Johannes Vloothuis:

"I have put together a series of “ rules” (I’d prefer the word, tips) of composition that when used properly should reduce the flaws in your landscape paintings. These are a compilation of what appears in most books on composition plus some of my own ideas. A word of caution; do not allow these to hinder your work. They are to help you out when you are in doubt on where to place diverse elements in your work. Rules are made to be broken, in which case you should at least know what rule you are breaking and why and not err due to insufficient knowledge. There are 23 pages so get a cup of coffee and prepare yourself for a long haul."

Landscape Composition Rules (wetcanvas.com)

Designing Your Own Custom Shoe

With the launch of Zazzle's custom Keds print-on-demand shoe line, it seems like a good opportunity to talk about all of the different custom shoe options online. In addition to Zazzle, companies including Converse, Vans, Nike and others offer configurable customized shoes.

Zazzle has teamed up with Keds to provide a fully custom printed shoe . Every surface of the shoe's fabric can be printed so you can use your creative spirit to make all kinds of designs, patterns and effects. They only have kids and women's shoes right now. If and when they introduce men's shoes, I'll definitely want a pair for myself! They currently cost between $50 and $60, not bad at all.

Zazzle's custom shoes allow for printing on all sides of the fabric.

As blogger Sam Woodfin mentions, it's not 100% clear how the design changes with different sizes. On their t-shirts, the design stays at a fixed size for different shirt sizes. That wouldn't work with shoes. The product images seem to update with the different sizes, so I hope they are accurate. The FAQ seems incomplete; I'm left with questions answered like if they have plans for men's shoes. Still it looks like an exciting announcement and hopefully these questions will be answered in time.

Converse has customized shoes with a number of options and shoe styles. While it's not as fully customizable as you might want, they offer enough options to give you more unique looks than their off the shelf shoes. You can select different sections including the stitch color. Select colors/patterns to make unique combinations in the end. Some parts have more options than others with the fabric pieces having the most options. You can also have text stitched into part of the shoe. I have leather shoes in a customized brown and yellow with the back sitched with "SKETCHEE". Canvas shoes are $60 and leather styles are $75.

Custom Vans' are similar to the Converse customizations, but with fewer color options and with fewer pieces to customize. There are currently only two choices to pick from.

NikeID also gives a few custom color areas and allows you to search their database by color for preselected combos. Depending on the style of shoe, you can print a laser engraved repeating pattern of text or even switch out some fabric parts for leather although not a full leather shoe like converse.

A fairly ugly custom shoe I came up wth to illustrate the NikeID shoe.

Check to see if your favorite shoes have online customization options by visiting their website. More and more brands are doing it.

12 Social Websites for Artists & Designers

[[Social network service|Social networks]] aren't just great for connecting people with their friends and family. They're great ways to find content. Myspace has been a great platform for connecting bands with their fans and fans with musicians. The power of social networks is being harnessed to help artists and designers come together in new ways. Community is one of the major features of a social network. People go to where the people they want to contact are. So if you want to meet designers, these niche sites might just be great tools for it.

If you've used any of these sites or know of any that I didn't mention, please post your comments!

Design Float

Not unlike the more generalized social rating site Digg, Design Float aims to help the design community share websites of interest with each other. It's especially useful if you're looking for specific topics such as photography. Digg has a more generalized audience.

The Outer Post

The Outer Post is a nice and friendly site where you can create art portfolios featured in your profile. In most other ways its like a lot of other social networking sites. The community is uniquely artists and that changes the landscape of how you can really use the thing.

VIRB

VIRB takes your interests and turns them into a more visual experience. The keyword and list oriented profiles of myspace and facebook are contrasted by VIRB's focus on sharing your generated content. So basically, you post up your photos, link up your blog, post your videos. There is a ton of art, design and photography featured to look at. The best thing about it for me is that it aggregates your rss feeds into your profile if you don't want to have to do everything a million times like on other sites.

DeviantArt

DeviantArt has been around for a while. The community is large and the site is fully featured. It's a great place to just look at art and what people are doing. There's just so many people posting there that you can see tons of stuff. The site puts the artwork in the forefront. The profiles really showcase the art and you can just look at someones profile or go to the art with very few clicks. Some of the other sites take a bit more work to actually see a full sized image: clicking through to searchs, profiles, albums and then finally artwork. While the size of the community can make for problems of its own, I think its still a leader in this space.

Graphic Design Network

The name might imply it or maybe not, but this site has a strict focus on building a community of designers and web developers. It's based on the Ning social network development platform and is built its user base around the existing Estitica Design Forum community.

Amateur Illustrator

Amateur Illustrator takes a the simple and effective approach of putting up art galleries and forums letting you immediately access great content. Like Digg, they've moved away from the importance of the profile. You can still see the artist's information and look at their forum posts and galleries. They let the art speak for the artist. It makes sense.

Sabet TV

Sabet, "a community of hyper-talented folks", gives a feed approach similar to Facebook showing users recent activity and a flash slideshow of works. They also have videos and galleries. There is a lot of content types here meshed together

Pixel Art

Hey why not. It's a community of pixel artists. It's funny that now any type of community platform is now considered social networking. It's strange how terminology suddenly defines something. The best of these new "social networks" are the ones who are less concerned with what they are and more keyed into what they're trying to do. This site does just that. They love pixel art and want to bring together its creators. They showcase the sites best content and make it interesting even to people who didn't know this stuff is cool.

Urbanseeder

While it's in beta right now, it's worth a mention. Urbanseeder is truly social networking. It allows you to connect with people you've met in a sandboxed environment. It's a pretty creative concept, you'll have to look at it and

myartspace

What makes this site interesting is that it connects artists with curators, collectors and others involved in the arts. They also have a blog of interviews with artists on various levels.

Artlog

Artlog aggregates art news, an event and exhibit log, news, museum information and a social layer into what turns out to be a promising product. The focus on the real world of art brings it above the self-love of user-generated profiles. Although they have those too, of course

Digg.com/Design

Users like yourself can rate stories using Digg's interface. The ones which are rated highest end up more visible. It's a simple concept integrated with social features such as profiles and comments. The ease of participation makes it a pretty good place to start.