ARTIST FORUM

I think forum and thread got confused.

That, or I can’t see the artist forum.

Yeah, I’m going to have to agree. Any idiot can make a thread. Not to make any connection because he isn’t, but ehalcyon already has an absolutely fabulous thread for beginners and there are many others like it.

There is plenty of room on the stylesheet between everything but woot and the pm envelope to add a new link. I can’t think of any reason the coding to add a new forum would take more than maybe a few hours.

Threadless’ artist’s forum is called it’s whole forum. People can talk about art, or specific designs, or put up critiques, or whine about how boys don’t get them, or whatever.

There are sub-forums at Threadless, but there are sub-forums at woot, too. Unless there was a totally new sub-forum posted, “world of woot shirts” is basically no different.

Of course, there’s also the fact that this is still woot. The people who give the most artistic guidance around here aren’t exactly trustworthy sources.

I know of one for the PC but for the life of me I can’t remember the name of it. I think it was this Artrage one though it no longer seems to be free.

I’m sure there’s one out there though, anyone else?

Oh Bassanimation suggested Sai Painter as well. So I thought I’d post the link here as well.

I wish Painter classic still worked on modern machines. I really love that program even without the layers.

thanks guys! some web searching also turned up an open source drawing program at http://mypaint.intilinux.com/. i’ll prolly try it out and see how it goes.

My two cents on the digital vs. traditional divide, from here:

I’ve seen both sides. I drew a bit as a kid traditionally, but I really learned most of what I know on a tablet. If you watch some of my old tutorial videos, you’ll hear me wax poetic about my love of digital art.

I started to hit a few semi-local art meet-ups hosted by my friend Charlie Athanas featuring the likes of traditional heavy weights like Dave Dorman. I asked questions about traditional art supplies and the same curiosity that urged me to learn more about digital art kicked in. I didn’t even know what the gradations of pencils meant. Asking Dave Dorman what a 4B pencil is is sort of like asking Lance Armstrong what a pedal is. To he and Charlie’s credit, they fielded some pretty obvious questions and never made me feel stupid for asking. Dave recommend I read George Bridgman and Charlie really helped me on the art supply side of things. About that same time, I started a dialog with Coop of all people about traditional inking. Those guys are passionate about their methods and that sort of thing rubs off. I was hooked.

I learned that a five dollar synthetic brush and a two dollar bottle of ink was more accurate than my $5400 worth of MacPro and $2000 Cintiq. I was making prettier lines traditionally in a week. I felt good about my progress when Michael Cho (a fantastic illustrator and kindred spirit when it comes to all things linework) told me that most guys take years to get that level of traditional control. I was flattered. The digital practice carried over towards traditional skills. That’s my only explanation. Muscle memory is muscle memory. A stroke is a stroke, be it via stylus or brush.

I cut my teeth on digital. I see its uses. I still employ it here and there. It’s fast. But I’m pretty sold on traditional art. More accuracy, more life in the lines. They’re both tools. Learn both. Each has strengths.

Just a question of whether using a paintbrush setting is the same as downloading someone else’s created paintbrush. I’m of the impression that it is better to create ones own. Other people are of the impression that it doesn’t matter where you get one from, or what sort of brush it is.

To me it’s sort of like how jimiyo, when he first came to woot (and possibly still, I surely am not keeping track) used to make vector art available to people. There’s no reason to not make these things available if you so desire to, and it certainly doesn’t detract from ones own work if you use clipart or brushes you make yourself, even if you also sell or give them away. But to me, if you were to buy a jimiyo vector pack, or a frenden brush, and try to profit off the use of it, it simply feels like the work of the user is cheaper than the work of the originator.

My first interaction with “digital art” was probably when I was quite young, with Mario Paint. Which was overall a pretty silly game to own, but I digress. You could, in the “game”, either use a pencil tool, which had settings you could use to change the width and such, or set it to airbrush, etc etc. Or you could use a stamp, and just stamp cats all over the place, or draw a continual line as if the cat was the tip of your pen. Were we to extrapolate this to photoshop, or a similar real graphics program, there is the basic pencil analog, and with it you can alter thicknesses and pressures and whathaveyou, and there’s a brush, which does similar, in a more brush-y way. But you can also download the equivalent of the “cat” brush, and just paint cat-lines. And if that is one’s goal, I personally don’t understand why they wouldn’t just make their own cat brush. Using someone else’s is, to me, a bit cheap. Art is for everyone. But it shouldn’t be about shortcuts. The more you can do yourself, the more proud you should be of your art. Seems simple to me.

Ditto here.

On another side of things, I used to be a very big traditionalist in regards to art. When I was in high school I was diagnosed with a muscle disorder. It struck my hands and arms literally the weekend before I left for art school. It has made working with traditional media exceptionally hard for me, as I don’t have the steadiness I once had. I also can’t work on art as long as I used to as I need frequent breaks. Digital media has literally saved my ability to do art.

I would never recommend a budding artist jump right to digital. Learn the pen and paper and marker ways to do things first. Digital media is just another brush, but you really need the real, natural tools to bring out your natural ability first. :slight_smile:

In closing, I must say, as someone who still fails daily with my own (digital and traditional) art trials, the misconception that digital art is “easy” or “cheap” really burns my toast. Digital art has it’s own grand challenges just as natural media, and believe me, the programs do not do it all for you. Art takes skill, no matter what style, or what brush, or what medium. It’s all a pain in the keester and takes practice, patience, dedication, and love. (sappy, I know, but it’s true)

About brushes/textures. Five people can download the same brush from a website, and I guarantee you each of those five people will turn out something completely different using the same brush. It’s not about the brush, it’s about the final piece of work. You know, the human aspect of art. It remains, no matter what tool is being used.

And now…pizza.

Digital art is not automatically easy or cheap. No good art is. And plenty of good art exists digitally. What I personally find to be true is that the pure-digi-artist is more apt to not know how to self-edit. When I think of digital art, I think of frivolous glow, neon light-swooshes, over-filtered messes. I think of mass-produced crap. I think of slick without soul. And while these things exist in all arts, I think it’s something which digital art lends itself to easier.

It’s like playing guitar. If you own an acoustic guitar, your flaws are obvious. Every missed chord, missed note, off rhythm… you can hear them. you know they exist. get an electric, plug it in, put a wah-wah pedal on it, get a fuzz-box… everything gets muddled. Sometimes it sounds great muddled… Hendrix was partly Hendrix for his distortion profile. But for a true amateur, the fuzz “forgives” a lot. And digitally, people see that glow and such and think “oooooo shiny!” and are fooled that there’s not much substance there. It’s not just a woot thing. I’d say there are at least 5 designs competing at Design By Humans right now for 10K that are incredibly sloppy but just glowy and colourful enough to fool people.

For me, it is all about, as you say later, the human element. But the fact isn’t a matter of giving 5 people the same brush and getting 5 different pieces out of it. It’s about giving anyone a canvas and having them build it into art. It’s about feeling a human factor. And the more you break it down to the basic elements, the more human it is. Digital art can certainly be pure. But it also exists to mask flaws and perfect imperfections. It’s not easy, necessarily. But it can certainly be easier. And the more specialized a tool you use, the more robotic it’ll feel. Give 5 people a pan and some bacon, and you’ll probably get 5 different plates of bacon, despite the simple, identical items. Replace those pans with a BaconWave, though, and you’ll get 5 identical, rubbery, slightly radioactive servings.

Ideally, we’d all have our own personal chefs cooking our bacon and artists painting the individual designs on our shirts with plastisol. Of course, our rulers might be able to buy one or two shirts with designs per year, maybe. The truth is that we don’t live in 900 AD. We have modern tools available to allow us to express our vision; without them each design would take forever to make, individually typing in the hexadecimal code for each pixel of the print file.

no1 wanted a free program that would give him some of the capabilities of the $1200-2500 software that is so widely used among graphic artists in the 2010s, by the very people whose art you purport to respect. Here’s an artist on this site asking for help trying to improve his ability to express his vision, and you criticize him for that? You ought to be encouraging him to become a better artist, not bitching at him for the attempt.

I guess, for me, my question would be not “what tools do I need to make my work look like this,” but “what techniques do I need.”

I don’t think that, in an ideal world, we’d all have people doing everything for us. That’s dull and pointless. Sure, I’d love for someone to do my laundry and my dishes and trivial necessities like that, but I enjoy creating to what minimal degree I can do so in any given medium. So if I was to be cooking, I would want a recipe where I’m handling as many ingredients as possible from start to finish, because then I can figure out what works and why, and use those tools without a recipe some time in the future. I don’t want to be reliant on someone else’s tools. I want to learn more and more and build up.

I am all for people improving their art. But a $2000 media suite or equivalent isn’t what you need for that. Practice and discipline do that. It is pointless to improve your repertoire of imitable techniques if your basic execution is still highly flawed. Again, musically, if you sit around saying “I want to sound like Eddie Van Halen,” learn to finger-tap, and build up your speed and accuracy. Don’t go scouring for an effect pedal that makes your tone sound like his. You still aren’t an improved musician. Just a bad one with Van Halen’s tone.

And when you do strengthen your basics, it’s always better to find a tutorial and learn than go seek out an easy fix. If your friend had said “hey, I’ve been trying to learn halftones, but can’t figure it out… does anyone know some good tutorials?” that is a matter of wanting to learn. You read, you process, you experiment, you figure it out and can do it on your own. Asking for a program that halftones for you? That’s lazy. Learn to do it yourself and you can truly understand how to properly use the technique. Asking for brushes to simulate other mediums, to me, is asking “hey, I don’t know how to simulate mediums. Anyone have a shortcut?” You click, you download, you’re done. Buying an analog paintbrush is a tool. But a paintbrush doesn’t create the effect of different mediums. Your hand does that. A brush that does it for you simply doesn’t exist in the analog world. But they do in digital. I question why someone would want to use any tool that only does one thing, when they could learn the technique that another tool could use to do the same. But hey, that’s just me, apparently.

I really see both sides of this. For one, yeah, get the initial skills - be able to create something with your hands. There is no substitute. Watch me refinish wood some time. Brush - hell! I’m rubbing in oils with my hands.
But then - there’s the timeframe for derbies, the common mass’s appreciation for the clever pun, and for the ‘shiny’. There’s the expectation that digitally wrought art will be crisp, clean, clever (even if in a mundane sort of way), etc. There is no way for the artisically talented or trained but graphically challenged to compete effectively. And while mose of us - me and no.1 included - are looking for help/advice, tools -it’s not to truly circumvent the process of artistic creation, but just to [I dunno] help leel the playing field with those who do this as a daily matter of business.
I only just leaned how to create a halftone after a lot of trial and error. But if someone offered me a one-step tool, I’d take it.
At the same time, if I wanted to render a smoky look, without having first learned how to do it manually, I’d still jump at the chance for the sake of learning the tool and being able to use it. I’m quite sure I’d still be interested in knowing how to do it myself, though!
I see no shame in learing techniques - or tools.

/edited to add an apology for not proofing my mad typing skilz :slight_smile:

Well good heavens, I picked up a QP somewhere. I hope it was for something particularly pithy I said… :slight_smile:

imo there’s also the conflict between “too many things to experiment with” and “not enough time left before i die to experiment with everything.” my motivation in asking for free software that imitates natural media was to try it out before i decide if this (meaning digital pastel- and charcoal-like brushes) is something that gets added to the queue. as someone who doesn’t have that much free time to experiment with art, i have to prioritize to narrow the possibilities to areas in which i have the most interest.

I have actions set up to do all of my repetitive tasks such as halftoning. If you have the full version of photoshop, there are several halftoning actions you can download from the internet to act as a ‘one-step tool.’ Once the action is imported to photoshop, a single click can halftone a layer. I only really discovered actions about a month or two ago and they’ve saved me a lot of time.

Ooooooohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. @_@

As someone who struggles with halftones, I would love a way to speed that process up. Nothing says fun like it being 5 am, and there you sit, just you and the ‘convert to bitmap’ dialogue box open, staring miserably at eachother…

Haha, photoshop at 5 am does not sound fun; I’m artistically challenged enough during the day. 5 AM would probably reduce me to struggling to draw stick people. Anyway, the halftoning action that I use is from a user on threadless:

halftone action

It allows you to do a quick conversion or bring up a dialog box to set parameters every time and drastically reduces the amount of thinking required, which may be good in the wee hours of the morning.

Lordy thank you so much. If I manage to get derby entries in on time, it’s because I am sitting at my desk at wee teeny hours of the morn finishing up. =_= Usually the tones are the last piece I do, and it always takes at least a few tries to get them right. Thank you thank you for your glorious help! :smiley:

Sqeeeeeeeee! I feel like a kid with a new toy! Bring on that next Derby - I have halftoning to practice! :slight_smile: