Some art, and where I'm going for now.

Next week is SGC (Southern Graphics Conference), the largest printmaking convention...probably in North America. Big deal. Lots of neat artists, lecturers, panels, demos... very excited, me. This will be the second one I've attended. The last was held at the University of Madison, Wisconsin. This one will be at VCU (Virginia Commonwealth University) in Richmond. Very close to home for me, and also close to my little sister, who's going to William & Mary, and whom I hope to see while I'm down there.
In any case, I'll be gone from Wednesday morning (early) through Saturday night (veryvery late.) What I'm going to is probably much more interesting than the fact that I'll be gone, so I'll be sure to make an account of what I found there when I get back. For one, I'm looking forward to a little springlike weather, in counter to the wintery deadlock that Cleveland has had to offer thus far this year.
Before I go, here are a few items I've been working on. The one up top is a sketch of a little hybrid critter that's part squid, part goat and part thorn bush. Just something I doodled in my notebook whilst awaiting the arrival of Nancy Stahl, the lecturing illustrator I went to see last Wednesday night, during the snowstorm. It was very informative, she is very famous, and more about that at another time, as well.
At the bottom are some sample enamels I've been working on, just to practice technique. The larger ones are photo transfer, done in different colours and baked at different lengths. The little ones are just experiments with flux and opaque enamels.

That is all. Happy Easter and Purim and Vernal Equinox (belated) everyone.

This is the world I want to live in

A gnome is terrorizing a small Argentinian town. A tiny person, with a pointy hat, who is seen shuffling sideways along the street at night, scaring the bajeezies out of children.
A group of Argentinian youths managed to get a little videophone footage of it. Holy crap.
Yes, it is the sort of thing that would send me running if I saw it on a dark street at night. Just watching this video, imagining it out there, is frightening. So why am I so happy that is exists?
Obviously, there are no known little people inhabiting the town, so this is either a nocturnal vagrant midget hobo, or something even more bizarre.
Reported on BoingBoing.

And from Ectoplasmosis, I just had to post this here. Including the work of Richard Kirk and Raf Veulemans. It's a gallery exhibition called "Labyrinth...And we shall all die trying" taking place in Berlin right now.
This show is so achingly beautiful that it almost makes me question continuing to make art. Never had that happen before, but seeing that something so close to what I want to make exists already in the world.... amazingly beautiful. Go look.

The pictured image is "Searching for the Breadcrumb Navigator" by Richard Kirk.

I'm going to post some of my own artwork later tonight. This is just too inspiring for words.

-Li

And I do love critters.

The Japanese Culture blog Pink Tentacle just posted a fascinating array taken from a 16th century book of Japanese medicine. Apparently, while we Westerners were whining and aching about vampires and bad humors in our body, the Japanese were a little bit closer to the truth of the matter, blaming a whole bestiary of bizarre tiny monsters for their illnesses.
Read the article here.
Some of the very illnesses are astounding! Is dizziness and the sound of clashing rocks in one's ears such a problem for people that a whole disease is ascribed to it? Is a dark complection and the want of oily foods?
Very interesting. Very adorable critters. I mean frightening.
No, adorable. Giant Microbes have changed my views on disease forever.

Illustrator ahoy

Via Drawn!, I've stumbled across the amazing, Gorey-esque artworks of Julie Collins Rousseau. Beautiful pen and ink drawings, with subtle and effective colour, and deliciously bizarre creatures.
Another SCAD graduate, as well. When I was applying for schools, I remember hearing that SCAD (Savannah College of Art and Design, for the uninitiated) was a very poor program. My art teacher, Mrs. Monroe, practically shot steam out of her ears when I mentioned that I was considering it. Anymore, though, it seems that I've been coming across some pretty impressive talents among its graduates. I know its sequential art program is its prime (if only) draw... is it possible that all of the bad press I'd been hearing was prejudice on the part of 'fine artists' asked to review a school mostly concerned with illustration? Has the program just suddenly made a drastic improvement in the last five years? Or have the artists I've been looking at just been such great talents that even a crummy school could not corrupt their work?
I'd love to hear an account from one of them.

Some tips for artists dealing with digital files

It seems like I see this a lot, even with very skilled and experienced artists.
Most art schools have digital production programs nowadays, but these might not necessarily be very comprehensive. Nor do all artists attend art school, of course.
So here are a few tips for artists scanning their work to manipulate digitally.

-Standard print resolution is either 150 or 300dpi. The higher the dpi, the better the quality of the print but also the larger the file. In Adobe Photoshop, resolution can be adjusted under image>size. Always start your images at 150-300 dpi, and work on them at that size.

-I'd recommend scanning everything at a minimum of 300dpi. You can always reduce the size later.
The basic formula is: something at a high resolution gets reduced, it looks even better. Vice versa looks terrible.

-Standard web resolution is 72dpi. That's just the optimum number for display. Posting something at a higher resolution won't make it look crisper, it will only make your image really large and make it easier for people to steal your work (72dpi is, obviously, far too small to achieve a decent print.)

-Keep a backup of your file, with all of the layers, saved at full resolution. Even if you never plan on printing your image.

-Save everything as a tiff or psd while working on it. Tiffs and psds are loss-less files. This means, they don't discard any information when they're saved in order to compress themselves. They're the most flexible of the loss-less files. Jpegs and gifs are not loss-less, which means that every time you open one to edit and then save it again, information is discarded again. Your image will get pixel-y and crappy looking every time, the colours will be off. They're the perfect format if you're just saving something for the web, because at that point you never plan on opening and editing it again, and if someone steals it they'll run into the same problems you would.

-If you're working on an image to submit to a client or for a competition, always send in a 72dpi image without layers for the previews. If you win/they pay you, then send the full resolution file (though again, unless it's in the contract they don't need the layers, just a flattened tiff, pdf or jpeg.)

-If you're trying to save an image with a transparent background, save for web>save as a png is the way to go.

-Images don't generally like being enlarged. If you want to enlarge something, scan it at 1200 dpi, run a threshold on it in photoshop (under filters) then go into image size and bump the resolution down to 300 or 150, while increasing the size (preferably by 4x or less, the less you enlarge it the crisper it will look.)
Another way to do this is by opening it up in Illustrator and vectorizing it, by going to object>live trace>options. I'd preview everything before finalizing it. Vectors can be enlarged endlessly, but the very process of vectorizing will screw with your image a bit, and totally mess up gradients. Be sure to play with it and see how close you can get to the original. Especially good for line drawings, though.

-Scanning in some line art, and want to clean it up really well? Not have to deal with that haze of white around your lines? An easy way to do this (that I discovered by accident).
1.) Bump up the black levels, to get rid of any grey that might have shown up in your lines during scanning. (another thing: brightness/contrast also discards information. It's better to adjust those settings by going into levels.)
2.) Make your background layer into layer 0. Make two new layers underneath it. Fill one with white, and the other with black (or whatever other colour you'd prefer your linework to be.)
3.) Go to Select>select colour range. Click on the white in your picture, and bump the fuzziness all the way up.
4.) Click on your black layer. Hit delete.

You now have your linework. It's a surprisingly clean looking method, far far better than the magic wand tool. Now you can clean your lines up further by vectorizing them in Illustrator, or just use them as is.

That's all. If you already knew this, yay! If not, I hope it helps.
I only learned the danger of jpegs just this past September. Boy am I kicking myself about that!

Slideshows, like miniature automated museums

The very prodigious Anuj has created a slideshow of the works I've posted here on my blog. You can view it on his blog, 'Cool Slideshows'.
While you're over there, be sure to browse some of his other work. It's very engaging, completely open to the consumer (he encourages appreciative audiences to post his work on their blogs) and represents what, in my mind, is a fascinating new curatorial trend in creativity exclusive to the internet.

If this blog weren't already overloading my poor old Mac when I view it, there would certainly be some on here!

The bizarre and wonderul anatomies of Walmor Correa

I first read of this fellow in a book about modern Cryptozoological art. His work is so wonderful I have trouble forming the words to describe it. He creates great, medical anatomy charts for various mythological and cryptozoological beasts, showcasing various peculiar vascular, skeletal or reproductive features for each. He make little Wunderkammern-esque domed cases containing dancing bird skeletons of improbable structure. He paints invented beetles, and then traps the drawings beneath collectors' pins: as if fearing their escape.
And more. I seriously suggest devoting a bit of time to browsing his personal website.

The art of Walmor Correa