I Found My Brushes

Posted on September 18, 2011 by SusanG

I’ve recently started using Photoshop as a painting program and instead of really familiarizing myself with all the tools I just jumped right in and did what I could with what I could find. While I’ve been able to Produce at least one cool piece it was challenging.

What was really frustrating was that I knew there were more brushes and tools there than what I was finding. I was sure I had run across them before and I had read about people using them. So it was quite frustrating to try to create something when I couldn’t find what I needed. Like finding a good blending or smudge tool. I found the smudge tool but it sure wasn’t behaving like when I would smudge the graphite in a pencil drawing or the charcoal in a charcoal piece. It was more like trying to smudge an oil pastel on paper using an eraser.

Sometimes, though, being handed a lot of work can force you to find a better way. That’s what happened for me. I was talking to an author/publisher who likes my manual art and had already asked me to do some other art for one project. That was the first piece I managed to complete in Photoshop. Anyway, this person has asked if I would do the pieces for another project and there’s now a deadline. This is on top of some website development work I’m doing for this same person. Oh yeah, remember, I work full time and have a whole host of other projects I’m working on.

Admittedly, I prefer to have a whole stack of things to do. I get so much more done that way. And I don’t put off finishing something because then I won’t have something to work on. No, with lots of stuff to work on I make a list of everything so I don’t lose track and so that when I can’t think of what to do I look at the list and get started. Still, with all I was just handed to work on, I was a little mind blowing. Especially since I am still learning Photoshop. And now I really need to find those brushes and tools so I can make this easier and get even better looking pieces.

The first thing I did was to pull out some digital art magazines that come with CDs of ‘free’ resources such as custom brushes and filters and models, etc. I found one with that said it had some watercolor type brushes and decided this was as good a time as any. To figure out how to get them into Photoshop and maybe that would help me find the other ones. This worked. I got the brushes in the folder they needed to go into and started Photoshop but couldn’t find them. Then I figure out that you have to load them. And Photoshop includes some brushes in it’s library already that aren’t loaded by default.

Ok, sure, I could have read the help, or tried to, or even looked it up. As I’ve said I just dove right in. Yes I could have gone to a forum to ask but seriously, this just seemed like a no brainer to me. They should be right there, I really thought I’d seen them before.

Photoshop CS5 has different default layouts for your workspace. I had been using the Essentials layout. Since the problem I was having was related to painting I swathed to the Painting layout. It helped. It made the brushes and the accompanying tools that much easier to find. I took a little time on a blank canvas to try the all out to see which were more transparent than other and which gave a chalk look and a felt marker look and all of that. I found a couple that will be great for hair and even one for grass. This is going to make all those art pieces I need to do a lot more fun.

To try out these new toys I opened up a project that I’ve been working on. I have a version of it nearly done but halfway through it I saved it off to another name. So I open up the partial version, save it off to a different name and go to work on this one. I knew from the other one that I needed and wanted a more saturated look so the first thing was to darken up and tighten up what I already had. Fortunately, the different colors were still on separate layers. That made it easier to pick out my colors and go to it. I am not near enough to done with it but I am much happier and excited about the work. As I worked on areas I thought about how I would come back after getting all the main color down and blended and then add in the detail of the creases and scuffs.

I finally found my brushes and it’s going to make all the difference in the world. And painting in Photoshop a lot more fun.

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Is It An Original Piece of Art?

Posted on September 15, 2011 by SusanG

That depends on your point of view.

So what the heck am I talking about? Well the question and the answer could apply to a couple of things, probably more, such as music or visual art. For now, I’m talking about digital visual art. Mind you, the question isn’t if a picture created in the computer is an original piece of art or even art at all. I have no question that a picture created in a computer is art. I’ve seen some stunning pictures that were created digitally. It takes talent to render that regardless of the medium. Pixels, paint, chalk, or pencil, if you can use it to render a picture, it’s art.

I’m more specifically discussing the technique of using a photo of something as a guide and reference. Not like if you were drawing or painting from the photo. Instead you take the photo and scan it or just import it into your drawing program of choice as the background layer. On subsequent layers you trace the outline of the main subject(s) and on others you fill in colors sometimes using the photo as color source as well.

Kind of makes it sound a little like paint by numbers doesn’t it. It’s not that easy. There is much more skill and talent involved. Starting with the tracing of the outlines. Unless you converted the photo to line art first, there aren’t always well defined outlines. There are edges of objects and you have to pick them out just right. And it’s not the same using a mouse or stylus to trace as it is with a pencil and tracing paper. With pencil and paper tracing you see your hand, the tip of the pencil and whatever you are tracing all in the same frame. That’s not what happens when using the computer. You may have your cursor right on top of where you want to draw but your stylus may not be close enough to the tablet for it to register. Sort of like drawing a line in the air. The trick is to get the stylus on the tablet right where you want it. But you can’t see your hand in relation to the picture so you can’t tell if you’re at the right angle to stay on the line or edge you are tracing. While drawing with a mouse can help with the lines in the air problem, it tends to be more cumbersome and less comfortable. Not that using a stylus on a computer doesn’t take some getting used to. It definitely does. If you’ve never tried it and want an idea of what it can be like, try drawing with a mirror. Sit in front of a mirror with pencil and paper. Draw something on the paper by only looking at your reflection in the mirror, don’t look at the paper directly.

Now that your brain has seized up and popped a cog, it’s easy to see that there is skill and talent needed just to get the outline done. We haven’t even discussed filling things in, applying color, creating the illusion of texture, filling in shadows and blending to create the illusion of 3D and mass. Knowing what colors to use, which point and how much pressure to apply for how long, and what direction or shape the stroke should be, all that comes from skill, talent, and experience. And there’s also the composition to consider. Are you drawing a photo in its entirety or are you leaving bits out  because it makes for better design and composition?

With all that goes into creating that picture digitally even when starting from a photo tracing, it’s hard to deny it being art. As to its originality, that may be the most subjective part of the question. There are a couple of situations where I think it’s correct to call the art original without hesitation. Those are when the artist using the photo, actually took the reference photo themselves. The other is when some one else took the photo for the project being worked on and with the understanding that that is how the photo is being used. I think the grey area is when the reference photo is some random picture out of a magazine, book, or such that some one else took the picture to be its own piece of art. However, I think the courts may already have addressed this. I believe they determined that something like that would be deemed a derivation of the first art and as such it is perfectly acceptable as an original piece of art as a derivation and it stands on its own.

That just leaves the purists who think it’s only art if it came from rendering a live model or scene, or straight from your imagination. No photo references allowed. They probably don’t consider anything created on the computer to be art anyway. There’s no winning an argument with them. Just sit them in front of your computer, hand them the stylus and let them try it. They will soon learn that with  all it takes to create the piece of work on the computer, that, yeah, it is art. And it is an original piece of art.

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If Reading Were Cool, I Would Be Cool Too.

Posted on September 12, 2011 by SusanG

I like to read. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t like to read. Even when I’m in a low reading phase I’m usually still reading something. Sometimes it’s magazines or web sites, or the shampoo bottle but I usually read, something.

Driving around new places can be dangerous because I read the signs. I read the signs on the buildings when I’m at a stop light, or the billboards along the freeway. That’s even when I’ve read them hundreds of times before. They are letters that form words that are meant to be read.

I don’t doubt this comes from my parents. I remember going to the public library once a week as a kid. Ok, it was movie night and it was free. So were the books. We never got there only just in time for the movie, always early. And rarely, if ever did we leave right after the movie. My parents were attending college as adults and they often had research to do, so we were there until they were done or the library closed. Most of the time we were all taking home books.

Libraries are great places. You can learn so much there. More than once the library has been my regular ‘baby sitter’. When my parents were attending community college they had one night class. Rather than leave my sister and me at home to sit and play or watch TV, they decided spending one evening a week on a college campus, in the library would be a good experience for us.

A few years later when living with my other family, the library again became my periodic ‘sitter’. They had a weekly bowling league they participated in as did my grand parents. Sometimes I would go with them and sit there waiting for them to get done. Other times they would drop me off at the library and pick me up when they were finished.

From libraries we moved to used book stores. Not sure why except perhaps because the books were inexpensive, and you could find cool stuff like the leather bound copy that I have of “The Taming of the Shrew” by William Shakespeare. Not only is it leather bound, it is also the size of a credit card though a bit thicker.

At some point we moved on to new book, book stores. I’m not sure when that happened. I suppose some of the first ones were the ones in the malls and maybe that  one that friend, Betty owned in the desert.

I think the most enticing and intoxicating were the big chains with rows and rows of books, a cafe, and bathrooms. Like a library with food. Well, sort of. When these places first became a big deal they had the attitude that people should come in, stay for a while, read some of the books for a bit. People should stay as long as they like. And they didn’t keep bankers hours. I had a friend in college who would, after class, stop at the bookstore for a while on his way to work because the bookstore was open late. Class let out just before 10pm and he didn’t have to be to work until after 11pm. Every night he’d go there, pick up the same book and start reading where he left off.

I’ve gone back to the library at times as well. It’s a little easier on the wallet, especially when it is nothing to leave there with 3, 5, 8 books at a time. I do this with bookstores too. The advantage of the library is that you know what you are doing with the books when you are done reading them. You are taking them right back to the library. With books you purchase, you have to decide what to do with them once you’ve read them. Donate them, keep them. More than once I have lamented the lack of shelf space, usually right after the trip to the bookstore where I have purchased a big chunk of my summer reading.

So what’s the point of this trip down memory lane via book stores and libraries? I use it to encourage others to support your library by using it and support the book stores by frequenting them.

Unfortunately, though my family are big readers and therefore supporters of libraries and bookstores, it seems we are in the minority these days. If we weren’t, major book stores wouldn’t be closing. Seriously, we’ve spent enough money and time in one book store that if we had moved away, they might have gone out of business long ago.

Reading needs to be encouraged.  Not just so our kids grow up reading and loving it. We need to encourage our friends and co-workers to read as well. My family often watches TV through a book, and we take books to the movies so we have something to do while we wait for the movie to start. I think it would be cool to walk into a restaurant, or lunch room, or bar where most everyone had their nose in a book, magazine or newspaper. Or a movie theater where, instead of fidgety kids and impatient parents, the kids had a book or comic and so did the parents.

What if having a whole bunch of books that you had read was as cool as the high score in some video game or the latest gadget or the fancy sneakers? Yeah, sadly, the chance of that happening any time soon is less than slim. But wouldn’t it be cool

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My Limitations with Photoshop…for now.

Posted on September 9, 2011 by SusanG

I spent a little time recently trying to get to know Photoshop and do something productive with it. I miss paper and pencil.

I know Photoshop is a powerful and robust program. Not only can you touch up photos, you can freehand paint and draw, and even create and import 3D objects. And it probably does a lot more. And yet, for starting out with it, with little to know instruction, it feels limiting. Part of that comes from lack of familiarity with the program and tools and part of it comes from my lack of patience with re-learning how to create art on the computer.

I’ve tested some other art programs that have options for chalk, water color, color pencil, marker, and spay paint as well as oil. They also had blending and smudging tools that worked really well and felt more like traditional art. I keep looking for these sorts of tools or behavior from Photoshop and I’m coming up short and frustrated.

I suspect, to get some of the tools I’m looking for, that I need to work with some settings and presets and perhaps even some custom brushes. I haven’t really taken the time to do this and I don’t really know how to begin with it. And, I’m probably in too much of a rush to get to a finished product. The one thing I do understand, at least a little, is the layers thing. We used layers extensively when I was learning Autocad. They are very handy for being able to isolate what you are working on. Though I get the concept of layers, they are a lot more powerful in Photoshop and allow for sublayers with particular properties and such. Yet, I continue to use them like I did in Autocad.

The experience hasn’t been entirely for naught. My first attempt at the piece of art was fairly dismal due as much to the composition as to the lack of skill with the program. My second attempt has seen some improvement. I got some help with the composition and tried another approach. I found an air brush/spray paint option. It works much more like an air brush that spray paint. It allows for softer and more gradient color and differences is saturation. I’m using it exclusively for this piece of art.

I am also making use of layers and probably not efficiently. I have a whole lot of them because I started out trying first to separate my outlines from  my fill, and second I trying to separate the different fill colors so I could adjust the transparency of each. Now I’m lost in layersville.

The good news is that the piece of art is coming along and looking good with a high resemblance to what it is supposed to represent.

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Hactivism, Are We Missing the Point?

Posted on September 6, 2011 by SusanG

I was reading a book that has a quote in it that is attributed to historian Charles Austin Beard. The quote is: “You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence.” The quote is used at the beginning of a chapter on Hacktivism. My first thought was how relevant that is to so many other things, and then I had a realization about Hacktivism.

In general I have mixed feelings about Hacktivism. I, like everyone else find the inconvenience of dealing with a website I can’t get to annoying. I don’t like the idea that some website I have done business through has been hacked and now I need to change passwords, and get a new credit card and watch all my accounts even more vigilantly than I do. This is personal inconvenience and just like a lot of other people I can get down right selfish and self centered about it. And the media plays on this.

On the other hand, sites that are that easily hacked, specially those of larger organizations, need to really sit up and pay attention. How lax was their security and policies that it allowed the hack to occur and why wasn’t some one paying attention. In many companies the I.T. (Information Technology) department is considered a necessary evil that adds little or nothing to the bottom line.

And now, a different view of Hacktivism. It is today’s version of the  ‘sit in’ or the march on the Capitol. At one point in our history we could stage a protest through a ‘sit in’ or get a group of people to march on some entity be it a government seat, a corporation’s headquarters, or a public meeting. These things would get coverage by the press and the activists could get their message out and then the general public, informed of the issue, would become involved and there was potential for change. Sadly, these forms of protest, while still happening, don’t always get the media coverage they used to and when one does make the news, the issue is often secondary to the disruption it causes. (Note that the recent protest in Egypt is an exception to this trend.) As a result of the nature of the coverage the general public may only be superficially aware of the issue; ‘oh, some workers were protesting about something.’

The truth about Hactivism is that it’s become the best way to get wide spread coverage and get the word out about whatever the issue is. Unfortunately, it is subject to the same foils as traditional protests and it seems that the Hacktivist’s message or messages are being diluted. This may be, because they don’t have a specific issue or target, the media has chosen to bury their message the way they do with traditional protests, or because there have been so many Hacktivist ‘attacks’ that the public has become immune due to over saturation. Add to that the tendency of government and media to make Hacktivists into villains who are only intent on perpetrating evil so no one bothers to ask “why”. Why did they do it, or what was the protest about?

At the time of our “founding fathers” things tended to be bleak for a lot larger percentage of the population and so a lot more people had nothing or little to lose by upsetting the status quo and pushing for change. Today, while just as large a percentage of the population would benefit from change, there is a lot larger a percentage that feel change would threaten their position on the socio-economic scale. A large middle class, ill-informed population is one of the biggest hindrances to progress and change.

As middle class, we don’t want to give up what we have worked so hard to get. We have worked hard for our houses in the suburbs, two car families, more toys, games, electronics and diversions than we know what to do with, and we have very little to fall back on or to help us weather a storm of change. We as a middle class don’t like and fear Activists and Hacktivists because they threaten all that we have worked for, and the media and government know this.

Maybe it’s time we start asking the “why” and “what for” questions of the protesters. Maybe we can find out if they have a reason and if it’s a good one. What if the reason for hacking a company is to protest their use of some chemical or component in an every day product that is making every one sick. What if, hacking a site shows just how undeserving of our trust an entity is because they take their position so lightly and leave our personal or financial information so vulnerable to the misuse of others.

A complacent, compliant, unquestioning public is the darling of government, media, and corporations. A questioning, non-compliant, insistent, and informed public is the bane of government, media and corporation and the only way to effect change. The Activists and Hacktivists know this. Maybe it’s time to ask ‘why’ and consider joining them.

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