Creating two dimensional artwork with a computer is far easier to get started in than three dimensional art for several reasons. First, far less computational power is required, second, the tools are more mature and intuative, and 3rd, its a lot easier to sit down and draw something than to create an elaborate 3d model.

This book review for David-Lewis Williams 'The Mind in the Cave' will explain it all. Altered states of consciousness, and its various stages, are FUNDAMENTAL to the religous experience. Read and learn for yourself. Just read it all before you judge. I have done independent research to varify these results.

Another infoshop meeting!

This Thursday, Jan 10, at 5:30 PM

As the SB Infoshop/Empowerment Headquarters

421 Alisos St., Santa Barbara, CA 93103

For planning space layout, opening, running of the shop, food not bombs, etc.

Bring food or food to cook since we really like eating.

sbinfoshop@gmail.com

Tonight some friends and I went to the local (denver) art district to walk the galleries.  The first friday of every month, the galleries on Santa Fe open their doors to the public.  It was a great exchange of culture--there were live bands, dj's,  wine and cheese and other snacks, street performers, and so many different types of art. 

Events like this can be great for gathering inspiration, opening the doors to new art and artists, and can also be a fun way to meet other like minded people in your area.  

I think that communities and strong community ties have become quite underrated by society on the whole.  Festivals like this can be powerful.  If you get a chance, you should experience this sort of thing in your own community.   

Collage - Mixed Media

A Collage is an artistic creation made by assembling different parts (or media) into a new whole. Kind of the salad of the art world.

Use what you've got

One of the wonderful things about making a collage is the lack of rules or forms to follow. Chances are, you've got a ton of stuff available with which to build new expressions.

Stickers, newspaper clippings, old photos, drawings you've made, letters and notes, product labels, and on and on... There is a virtually limitless supply of stuff, with different colours and textures, meanings and connotations, and it's all fair game.

Just look around your house (with an open mind) and you'll be amazed at the treasure trove of creative media you've got to work with.

Use what you find

Many wonderful things can be had for free, simply by keeping your eyes open. As the old saying goes, one man's trash is another man's treasure. Sometimes, an object's beauty and relevance is not evident until it is combined in a creative way with some other object or background to provide new context.

Junk yards, yard sales, flyers and signs, objects found lying on the street, trinkets from thrift stores, you name it. Some of the most powerful artistic expression can come from so-called normal, everyday objects. (I mean, look at Worhol, right?)

Tools of the trade

The right tool for the job is the one that best gets the job accomplished. Collages are no exception to this rule, and luckily we have plenty of good tools to express ourselves with.

Adhesives - There are a number of different adhesives out there, some stick some things together better, and others are more suited for other materials. When choosing an adhesive, you'll want to consider a few things, such as the meterials being glued, the way the objects are being attached, the humidity and temperature where the resulting piece is likely to be stored, etc.

Cutting devices - Pretty self explanatory. Some times you'll need to cut a piece loose or trim it so it fits into your collage. Again, different tools are better suited to different types of cutting.

Digital compositing - Digital tools have recently exploded in power, and now offer several useful methods of combining media. In fact, some collages can be strictly digital (e.g. combining multimedia sources into one collective presentation). Conversely, the computer can be used to synthesize a part which will then be included in the collage (e.g. combining images, or doing image processing, then taking the output (printed image) and using that in your project).

Media playback devices - Actual playback devices can be included in a collage project to provide dynamic or interactive qualities (e.g. embedding an lcd screen into your collage, so as to provide a video loop, thereby making part of your collage animated).

Sky's the limit

The Collage medium provides a break out from the bounds of traditional media forms by combining them into new items.

Mixed media can allow you to present your ideas and emotions on a variety of levels, or can simply provide a new take on more traditional presentations.

New textures, new formats, new channels for expression.

Digital Image Editing

Like they have done with virtually every facet of society they've come in contact with, computers have exponentially increased our ability to store, process, share and manipulate images.   Here, I'll briefly cover some of the functions, methods and techniques which can be used for creating and editing images of various digital formats. 

Vector versus Raster

Computer graphics come in two flavours--raster and vector.  Raster graphics are traditional bitmaps--a grid consisting of an x axis and y axis, the intersections of which are individually coloured so as to make a two dimensional array of dots, which can be coloured into a picture.  Easy, right?  Higher the resolution (the more dots that make up the picture), the smoother it'll look, and the further you can zoom in without making it look like a NES game.  

Vector graphics, on the other hand, can be zoomed indefinitely.  That's because they are rendered (or drawn) each time they're displayed.  Instead of saving the info about what colour each dot on a grid is, vector graphics store the mathematical information required to generate the shapes which make up the picture.  So, if you've got a vector-based picture of a circle, it really is a circle.  If you zoom in again and again, it's still going to draw that curve the same way.  

Vector graphics don't have this inherit limitation of resolution that raster has, but we're still not quite perfect at making these vectors do what we want them to.  Raster graphics are much easier to implement, and not only that, but all of our inputs are sort of cutting things up into dots anyway.  

Think about it--when you pull out your camera and take a picture, the light is coming through the aperture, being focused by the lens onto the sensor array, where each individual element records what colour of light it is perceiving.  All the dots grab their colour, and the whole thing's collected as a bitmap.  Even film and our eyes have a resolution (in film, it's called grain, and with your eyes, the resolution is limited by the number of cells there in your retina, picking up light).  

Consequently, we (humans) tend to use a lot more raster graphics than vector, so far, but they both have their purposes and vector techniques are getting better all the time.  

Colourspaces

Another concept most people don't often think about is that of colour spaces, or the number of possible colours which can exist, be perceived, or be represented in some sort of number system for encoding.  

Most people have three kinds of colour sensing cells in their eyes (called trichromats).  Since nobody can exactly count and report how many colours they are able to perceive, people have done experiments and estimates putting people on average, about ten million colours or so.  

It has been put forth that some people, have an extra colour sensor cell in their eyes (called tetrachromats), and can see exponentially more colours than average humans.   

Anyway, one of the most common colourspaces is 24-bit RGB.  You take 2 to the 8th three times (one for red, one for blue, and one for green) and mix the values into different combinations of colours.  About sixteen point seven million colours.  

Image Formats

Compression

Over the years, many different formats (or rules on how a certain image-type works internally) have developed.  The internet (and other influences) pushed some of these formats into smaller and smaller packages to end up with less data to transfer.  Many of these compression technologies are known as lossy (because they cause overall image quality degradation).  The most famous of these is probably JPEG.  

In a given image, there are likely colours (in that colourspace) not being used as well as colours the average human eye cannot perceive.  So, to make the file smaller, these extra bits of data are just thrown away.  This is how so-called lossy compression works 

Transparency

Transparency is basically just what it sounds like--certain image formats can have transparency.  A transparent piece of an image shows whatever is below it (e.g. when you change the background colour, all the corners of the icons on your desktop still show the correct background colour).  Transparency is nice for a variety of reasons, but primarily because it 'plays nice with other content'.  

Layers and Opacity

Some image formats actually hold more than one image, which sort of get stacked up into layers.  Using transparency or opacity (opacity controls how translucent something is), certain parts of images are able to affect  those above and below.  The whole image works together as one, but is made up of different pieces, all stacked up and blended together.  

It's important to note that these formats typically are for the development process.  To become a bitmap, the layers of the image must all be 'flattened'.  The actual resulting image after the flattening process is basically a snapshot of how all the layers looked together.  

Animation

Some image formats also have the ability to display multiple frames in order to create animation effects.  One of the first popular formats for images on the Web was GIF, which (through its variations) had the potential for both transparency and animation.  

Some Common Formats - (By File Extension)

BMP - OS/2 / MS Windows Bitmap

JPG/JPEG - Joint Photographic Experts Group - Lossy compression, pretty good for photos

GIF - Graphics Interchange Format - Compuserve Bitmap - Supports transparency and animation, up to 256 colours

PNG - Portable Network Graphics - Lossless compression, transparency, created as a replacement to GIF

MNG - Multi-image Network Graphics - Extension to PNG which supports animation

TIFF - Tagged Image File Format - Not really an image format itself, TIFF is a container which can hold other images

XCF - eXperimental Computing Facility - XCF is the native file format for GIMP (a free image editor) Supports Layers, Channels, Etc.  

RAW - Higher end digital cameras can save what's known as a RAW file - This is the data received by the sensors, not yet processed into an image format.  This is analogous to a negative in a film camera, and provides more flexibility in altering the image.  

Image Editing Software

Modern image editing software provides a number of tools which work similar to real-world counterparts.  Some examples include the Paintbrush tool, which creates fuzzier strokes similar to that of a paint brush, Pencil tools, which create hard, sharper lines, Shape tools, such as rectangle and ellipse, and on and on.  

The wonderful thing about doing this on computers, however, is that the tools don't have to follow the rules of the real world.  Good image editors will let you go under the hood of the image and start changing some of the rules which make it up--i.e. the levels of colours, brightness, contrast, etc.  

Many image editors also have a sweet feature called filters.  

Filters

An image filter is a mathematical process to alter the underlying image.  There are a number of filters out there which provide an astounding variety of results.  

Blur - self explanatory, blur mixes the values between neighboring pixels

Sharpen - just the opposite of blur

Warp - warp effects can be used to stretch and distort an image, add waves and ripples, etc.  

Lighting Effects - add light sources which interact with your image

Colorize/Colorify - alter an image so it's all done in shades of a particular colour

Colourmap Rotations - take a certain range of colours in an image and replace it with another

And on and on and on...  New filters are created all the time, and many can be combined in new ways to create a plethora of effects.  Filters can be used to enhance an image, to make it look more hand-drawn, or cartoonish, or to clean up a photo, etc.  

Some Software

Adobe Photoshop - Photoshop has become basically the standard for commercial image editing, it comes in a variety of releases editions with prices ranging.  Supports most formats, several colourspaces, and many advanced features, including support for third-party filters and plugins.  

GIMP - GNU Image Manipulation Program - Free as in speech (and beer), GIMP is a wonderful tool both to learn on, and to do professional work (depending on what you're doing).  GIMP has many features similar to Photoshop (such as layers, filters, scripting, multiple file formats, etc.), GIMP lacks support for some of the more advanced color spaces, so in some circumstances will not work (but 9 times out of 10, you won't need this for starting--when you need bigger colourspaces, you'll know).  

Paintbrush - Microsoft Windows basic image editor--compared with the above two, it is a joke, and I include it here only to provide some contrast between the classes of these type of programs.