Go Make Something » Digital Artwork

One Approach to Digital Collage

Lisa Vollrath — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 00:15:17 +0000

Here’s one of the finished pages—there are ten in the set, which was one reason I wanted to do this digitally. I get bored very easily, and rarely take on projects that require me to do multiples of the same piece. If I can do some or all of the design work on my computer, and spend less time at my work table doing the same steps over and over again, I’m happier with the process.

I guess I should talk about my approach to digital collage pieces. My plan of attack is usually to design the piece on screen, then turn that finished design idea into the pieces and parts I’ll need to make it in real life. I’m designing my own elements to assemble—which, really, is what I do for a living most days. This is different than creating digital artwork, which I print as a flat, single piece. Hmm, maybe this will be clearer with a few visual aids…

Here’s my digital mock up of the finished piece. I was staring at Peter Max artwork while I was designing this, for color and design elements. Stars, flowers with faces, and the bright color palette all come from his work, but the design is something I created myself.

In the back of my head as I work on this is how it might be assembled. I want to print my own backgrounds, and then float some elements on top of those backgrounds that will be cut and glued in place.

From the finished mock up, I create a print sheet. I work in PhotoShop, and build everything using layers. I can usually split out all the pieces and parts directly from the finished mock up, and turn them into the print sheet, which is what is shown at left.

Starting at the left edge, I have a background for both the front and back of the book page. I sometimes do a background that will be stamped or altered once it’s printed, but in this case, what you see is what I used, with no adjustments. Next, I have the pieces for the flower—the gold center face, magenta middle, and orange outer pieces. In my head, I thought I might be able to get some depth from this section of the piece by using some mounting tape, and bending the flower petals forward. Also shown are the letters for the tags. I’ll use purchased tags, and hand color the letters as I go.

All right, the design is done—now it’s time for the drudgery. First, everything gets printed on appropriate stock. In this case, all the elements were printed on cardstock. Sometimes, I’ll split a print sheet up, and print elements on different papers.

All the pieces and parts have to be cut out. I do this in front of the television, and usually halfway through, I’m wondering why I signed up to do so many pieces.

For this piece, I left the front and back backgrounds attached, and simply folded them back to back, with the fold line on the outer edge. No gluing yet, because I’m going to use the back to hide some uglies that will show up during assembly.

The flowers have three pieces. I started with the centers, attaching them to the pink flower petals with double stick mounting tape. This will give the finished flowers some depth, and also act as a spacer to keep the petals from being mashed down flat.

The petals were all folded upward against the edge of the face.

I glued the center back of the pink petal section to the center of the orange, let them dry, and then did the same folding upward.

I colored the tag lettering using Sharpies in bright colors. I like to combine hand coloring with digital printing, but in a very vivid graphic piece like this one, it was hard to find a place to work too much of that in.

The letters were glued to purchased tags. Each set is colored differently, and will have different brads attaching them—so, the pages are the same design, but not completely identical.

Now I can arrange the pieces and glue them in place. The flower was glued down to stay, but the tags were just tacked in place with a little glue.

I used an awl to poke holes for the brads through the holes in the tags. The brads were flattened as much as possible on the back side, to keep the page from being lumpy.

I opened the folded pages, and glued the heck out of them, pressing them flat with the back side down. This will make for a very flat back. When the pages were dry, I checked them for any white areas, and trimmed them square if necessary.

Just to add a little more dimension and sparkle, I glued three star shaped rhinestones to each page.

Here are the ten finshed pages, ready to be wrapped and mailed off to the swap hostess.

What is Digital Art?

Lisa Vollrath — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 23:34:34 +0000

Very simply, digital art is any artwork created in digital form, usually using a computer. In general, digital artwork comes in several flavors:

Completely computer-generated artwork includes any work that begins with a computer, and does not draw on non-digital sources. For example, a fractal created by using software that generates images, or a vector image drawn by an artist using graphics software and a tablet or mouse.
Images that begin with a non-digital source. This might include a digital collage created by scanning photographs, then weaving them together using graphics software. Although the final work has been created digitally, the piece draws on non-digital images.

In my daily world, about half the artwork I create is digital. I use a digital camera to take my photographs. I create almost all the products for Ten Two Studios using Adobe PhotoShop and a scanner. I also incorporate quite a few digitally created elements in my work. For example, almost all the vintage images I use have been scanned, color corrected (or sometimes completely recolored), and resized using my computer, then printed on one of my three printers.

It always surprises me when someone says, “I don’t like digital artwork”, because at this point, virtually every magazine, ‘zine, patterned paper and sticker is created digitally. There are very few items marketed to mixed-media artists, aside from original vintage ephemera, that are not created using a computer.

Equally surprising is the proclaimation that “digital artwork isn’t really art”. Last time I checked, there was no Make Art button in PhotoShop. Creating digital artwork takes the same time, energy and practice as any other type of art. There are endless books and magazines dedicated to this art form, aimed both at people who create digital art, and those who enjoy viewing it. Digital photography and prints are now presented by major museums and galleries, and many are now beginning to include digital art in their permanent collections.

Discovering Art Money

Lisa Vollrath — Sat, 14 Oct 2006 00:12:40 +0000

This week, my aimless surfing for interesting ideas led me to art money. I ended up at the Bank of International Art Money, where artists from all over the world have registered as official BIAM artists.

The BIAM Basics
Art money can be made in any media, but like artist trading cards, there is a size restriction—12 x 18 cms, or roughly 4-3/4 x 7 inches. For official BIAM artists, there’s a list of items that must be on each piece of money: the address of the BIAM web site; a serial number that contains the year the bill was created, and its number; the artists, name, nationality and signature. Surfing through the galleries, I found it interesting to see how each artist dealt with these elements and integrated them into their composition.

BIAM also asks that each piece of money show a visible sign of the artist’s physical work. So, for someone who likes to work digitally, there must be some work on the money after the bill is designed and printed.

BIAM money is worth a set amount the year it is created (today, about $25 US), and increases in value each year for 7 years, when it matures, and keeps that value forever. There are all sorts of businesses around the world that will take BIAM art money in exchange for up to 50% of the cost of their goods or services.

Why This Interests Me
The idea that art money has a specific value from the moment it’s created really appeals to me. I’ve been debating the whole ATC vs. ACEO thing this week—about all art being equal vs. art having a market value. I’m coming down on the side of not allowing the market to set a price for all art. I love that artist trading cards are swapped one for one, having equal value no matter what the artist’s skill level or popularity, so the idea that art money is worth $25 immediately, no matter which artist created it, appeals to me.

I’m also in a phase of viewing everyday objects as art. I’ve been wandering around my house (and my neighborhood, much to the dismay of my neighbors), photographing things like cracks in cement and manhole covers. If I can make art from everyday objects, is there art in those objects individually? Art money takes one of our most basic everyday objects and asks us to treat it as art. I like that very much!

Naturally, I had to give designing some art money a try. You can see an example of one of my very un-official pieces above—they’re missing some of the items on the BIAM list, since I’m not a registered member. There are a few more in the galleries. I took a digital approach, thinking of the look of the big, colorful bills I saw when I was in Europe. Surfing through the BIAM galleries, there are as many approaches as there are artists. Some look very much like pieces of money, and some are simply paintings or collages.

So, what would money look like if you could design it?

A Quick Faux Postage Lesson

Lisa Vollrath — Fri, 14 Oct 2005 00:09:02 +0000

For about two years now, I’ve been getting requests for a lesson on how I make faux postage. Now that I also sell faux postage stamps, those requests have increased to a level I find sort of offensive—after all, I’m selling my faux postage stamps to support myself, and this predominantly free web site. Asking for a lesson on how to make something I’m selling seems a tad rude, doesn’t it?

I’ve long deflected requests for this lesson with the explanation that I use a $700 software package to make mine, so it’s not really fair of me to write a how-to that will immediately be impossible for many readers to follow. Sadly, the requests for the faux postage lesson have now risen to demands, so here it is, if only to give me a little peace.

Before you continue, please read these huge disclaimers:

Don’t say I didn’t warn you—this will be virtually impossible for anyone who doesn’t own Adobe PhotoShop to execute easily. Please do not email me complaining about this. You’ll have to either spend the money for the software, or find someone else to teach you their method—and last time I checked, there were painfully few lessons on making faux postage floating around out there. (So if you’re a faux postage artist, get off your butt and write a tutorial on your method, already!)
Please do not email me asking for instructions on how to do this using any other software. I use PhotoShop, and I’m not interested in exploring other software. You should find someone who uses your software to help you out.
Please do not email me giving me instructions for how to do this using your software. Again, I use PhotoShop, so I’m not interested in how it works in other software. If you know how to make faux postage stamps using tin foil and duct tape, feel free to post those instructions—don’t send them to me.
Mostly, please do not email me asking any other questions about making faux postage. This is what I know, and what I’m willing to share. If this doesn’t do it for you, please work it out on your own.
Last, but not least, this is NOT the method I use to make the faux postage stamps I offer for sale at Ten Two Studios. Those are created using a different sort of template. Please don’t email me asking how I make that happen—it involves some expensive hardware, a talent for calibration, and about ten years of PhotoShop experience. Beyond that, I’m not sharing.

OK, now that you know my mood, let’s get down to work.

First, you’ll need some sort of stamp template. How about the one I posted last January, in my article on artistamps? Look, here it is! Click on the stamp at left, and a larger version of it will pop up. Save the larger version to your hard drive in a place where you can find it. I reccomend starting a new folder, because you’re going to need some other image files to make your first stamp. Why not store them together to make your life easier? I have a folder of artistamps on my computer, and subfolders for each stamp set—that way, all my art is stored together where I can easily find it. I’m a subfolder kinda girl—do whatever works for you.

Now, this is actually a huge stamp—like, over five inches high. Nobody needs a stamp that big. It’s also a low-resolution file. If you’re into tweaking your resolution a bit, you can turn it into a smaller, higher resolution file that will be the right size for print. I wrote a lesson on how to play with resolution a while back—if you need help with this part, you might want to take a minute and read it.

For this lesson, I’m really building my stamps at 150dpi, and they’re about 2-1/2 inches high. That’s a nice oversized stamp that looks good when it’s printed, but is still small enough to identify it as a postage stamp rather than a serving platter. Go ahead and tweak your stamp’s resolution and size to whatever you’d like. What you do won’t effect the rest of the steps.

Next, you’ll need the main image for the stamp. I’m using a copy of one on my Land of the Rising Sun image CD. Any image that’s at least the size of the center, black section of the stamp or larger will do. Don’t choose an image that’s smaller—ugly things will happen. If you’d like to use the same image I do, just click on this small sample, and a larger version will appear. Save it in the same place as your stamp template.

When choosing images for stamps, I always look for photos or artwork that has a nice section of a single color around the featured image. This one has plenty of cream colored areas to work with. That will make it easier when I add text, and it will also make life easier if I have to clone sections of the background to fill in missing areas.

Now comes to software part. Open both images in PhotoShop. Select the center, black area of the stamp template with the Magic Wand tool. Switch over to the geisha image, and select all of it (Ctrl+A). Copy it (Ctrl+C). Switch to the stamp template, and from the Edit menu, choose Paste Into (Shift+Ctrl+V). You’ll end up with a file that has two layers, and looks something like this one. It’s OK, but I’d be happier if the geisha was smaller, and more centered.

To position the geisha, and make her the right size, go to the Edit menu, and choose Transform>Scale. Scale the image of the geisha down a bit, and while the tool is still open, shift her to the center of the stamp window. You’ll notice as you do this that she slides under the white border, rather than covering it—that’s the advantage of using Paste Into. The image will only shift within the window you chose for it before pasting. You’ll also notice that as you scale her, a funky cream border comes into view at the bottom and right edge of the image. Ick! Tuck those behind the white border of the stamp as much as possible. When you’re finished scaling and repositioning, your stamp will look something like this.

Now we have a little background to clone, to fill in the top strip of black. This happens a lot when using images for stamps, because the normal proportion of a rectangular photo is different than the proportion of that used for stamps. I suppose this is because stamps need just a tad more height for text, but don’t quote me on that.

To fill the top strip, use the Clone Stamp tool, and choose a section of background to clone. Fill in the stripe, blending it with the other sections of background. I won’t go into detail on exactly how to do this—if you’re familiar with using the clone tool, you don’t need instructions, and if you’re not familiar with it, you should take the Adobe tutorial on how it works for your version. They always explain their tools better than anyone else can. When you’re finished cloning, your stamp should look something like this one. Now, let’s move on to text.

Text is a personal preference sort of thing for each artistamp maker. My stamps almost always have Poste Lisani, my issuing authority, on them somewhere. They also generally have some sort indicator of value on them. Sometimes I do some additional text, like a series or artist name. Regardless of what you choose to put on your stamp, you’ll have to make it somewhat readable. This takes some practice—what’s readable on screen isn’t always perfection when printed. Work with your chosen stamp size and your printer until you find a size and placement that works for you. It helps to look at some real stamps, and see how information is sized and positioned—but don’t let that confine you. You’re making your own stamps, so come up with your own rules.

Setting Up An Online Art Journal

Lisa Vollrath — Fri, 14 Oct 2005 00:05:26 +0000

I always hesitate to write articles like this, because the moment I mention a free outside service, it either goes offline, or starts charging for useage. However, I’m going to go ahead and throw this one out there, because it’s exactly what the doctor ordered for some of the members of my Gluebooks group, who have endless photos to share, but no idea how to go about it.

I’m sure many of you have visited online art journals in the past. I have one running at LiveJournal, where I tracked my progress in Art by the Inch last fall (and hope to revive when the challenge starts up again this spring). Various artists use online journals or blogs (short for weblogs) to talk about their creative pursuits. Reading them can offer a great insight into the person behind the art—and creating one can give you some perspective on your own work, and also presents an opportunity to share what you’re doing with online friends.

When I decided to write this article, I went on a hunt for free online journal services, and places to post photos. Often, these are completely different services offered by different sites, which means to get your photos over here hooked up to your journal over there, you have to be a little web savvy. While I was hunting, I found a service that offered both a free journal and online photo hosting in one nice, neat package, so that’s what I’m going to talk about. (This is where we all say a silent prayer that they don’t start charging for their services tomorrow…)

GreatestJournal offers journals that are set up just like the very popular LiveJournal (in fact, I think they’re using exactly the same code to run the site). They also offer one gigabyte of free photo space in their photo galleries—that’s a whole heap of space if you size your photos down to a reasonable size. (For me, reasonable is under 100KB—on my web site, that generally translates to 72dpi, and under six inches in dimension in either direction. Too technical? Just size them down however you know how.) The galleries allow offsite linking, so if you need to show photos over at eBay, or on some message board somewhere, you’re all set with this service.

It took me all of five minutes to set up my GreatestJournal, which you can see here. I filled out the form, chose my user name, and two addresses appeared: one for my new journal, and one for my photo gallery. I simply went to my journal controls and changed the default style and color of the journal—the one they gave me was very busy, and screaming violet, which I didn’t think would work well with my artwork splattered all over it. Then I jumped over to my gallery address, uploaded a photo, clicked the Update Journal button underneath the uploaded photo, and a box appeared with the photo already plugged into a new journal entry. All I had to do was add text, and finalize the entry, and my art journal was ready to roll.

Like LiveJournal, GreatestJournal lets you add friends to your journal, and allows you to create communities. The down side is that when I clicked on some of my popular interests, like ATCs or altered books, there were very few people listed, and nobody who was familiar to me. Perhaps that will change now that I’ve posted this article? Feel free to add me as a friend if you set up your journal there.

After I posted this, Claire wrote: “I use Blogger.com, which is free, and also has photo hosting, using Hello by Picasa. I have been up and running with this now for a couple of months. It’s so easy to use!” I’ve used Blogger in the past, and found the image uploads to be a problem if you’re on a Mac—but if you’re on a PC, and feel comfortable installing the software on your computer, this is another option.

How to Install Fonts

Lisa Vollrath — Tue, 12 Oct 2004 23:56:54 +0000

These are instructions for installing fonts on a Windows based PC:

In general, fonts are downloaded in a .zip format. You’ll need an unzip tool such as WinZip to extract the files. I ususally extract them straight into my fonts folder, which on most Windows systems is at C:\Windows\Fonts, but you can unzip them to whichever directory you choose.

To correctly install the font, click the Start button at the lower left corner of your screen, and choose Settings: Control Panel: Fonts. In the File menu, click on Install New Font. Choose the location where your unzipped font files are currently living, and click on the names of the fonts you want to install. Be sure the Copy to Fonts Folder box is checked. Click OK and you’re done.

A few things to know about downloadable fonts: they come in two flavors: freeware and shareware. Freeware fonts are completely free for personal use, and come as a complete set. Shareware fonts have a price attached to them—if you download it and like it, you send in some cash. Many shareware fonts come as an incomplete set—fontographers will choose one letter to omit, or replace one letter with a “pay up” message. The shareware fee only covers personal use as well.

How To Get Decent Prints From Web Graphics

Lisa Vollrath — Thu, 08 Jan 2004 23:39:28 +0000

While chatting with my current round robin group, I discovered that some of the players were having trouble capturing images from the Internet and printing them for their collage work. They said the images looked great on screen, but not so great when printed, but they weren’t sure how to fix the problem. I promised them a quick lesson in how to do that more effectively, so here it is:

First, it helps to know that not all images are created equal. All digital images are created from pixels, which are tiny boxes of color. The number of pixels per inch is usually referred to as the image’s resolution, or its dpi, which stands for dots per inch.

In a web image, the resolution is usually 72dpi, which is pretty low—but that’s OK, because most monitors only display this many dots per inch, so on screen, the image looks clear.

Now, when it comes to print imagery, you need more dots of ink per inch to get a clear image. I generally use 150dpi as a minimum for my black and white laser printer, and 300dpi as the minimum for my low-end inkjet printer. 300dpi is also used by many magazines and book publishers as the resolution for their printed images. Some digital artists raise the dpi of their imagery even higher to get crisp, clean prints. However, the more dots per inch, the larger the file it takes to hold them. For most purposes, unless you are doing really fine digital prints, 300dpi is large enough to get a decent image.

So, how do you find an image online that will also print well? First, look at the image size. I generally do this by right clicking on the image and choosing Properties. This tells me the how high and wide the image is in pixels. Try it with the image at left, and you’ll see the image is 159 pixels high by 200 pixels wide. It looks fine on screen, but it will make a lousy print. Try it—save this image to your hard drive, open it in your graphics software, and print it. Trust me, it’s not good—it’s very grainy.

Now try looking at the properties of this image, and you’ll see that it’s 318 pixels high by 400 pixels wide:

It’s pretty large. That’s great, but you probably don’t need an image this large, and it’s also still only 72dpi. Now’s the time to do a little manipulation with some graphics software to turn a big low resolution image into a smaller, higher resolution one.

Save this larger image, and open it in your graphics software. Since there are dozens of different programs available, and the majority of you won’t have the one I’m using, I’ll just describe this technique in the words most software will use, and you can use your Help file to find out exactly which buttons will get you where you want to go.

You want to find a function that lets you change the size of your image, and also change its resolution. If these functions can be manipulated all in one screen, great. If not, start with the resolution change, and then do the resizing. Doing it in reverse will make much ugliness!

So, you’re going to increase the resolution of your image from the current 72 to 150. Your image may appear to get larger and fuzzier on screen—don’t panic. When you’ve converted your image’s resolution, you’ll have an image that’s 663 high X 833 wide.

Now, you’re going to reduce the size of your image by 50%, from 663 X 883 pixels to 332 X 417 pixels. Do this by changing the size of the image, not by changing the resolution. I almost always knock the image down to half its size or just slightly larger when using this technique, which seems to bring it to an acceptable quality.

Now your image is the same size as the first one we viewed, but the resolution is much better. Try printing it—but you must print at the image’s size, and not use any functions that cause your printer to make the image the size of your page. You should end up with something that’s not too horrible.

Now, try tweaking your original 318 X 400 image to 300dpi, and then knocking the size down by half. Remember, if your software requires you to do this in two steps, always raise the resolution first, and then reduce the image size. Now try printing this one, and see what you get. Is it clearer than the others? I hope so! Sometimes forcing a low res image this high can result in some quality issues that have to be fixed with other tools.

OK, one more image to play with. Check the properties on this one:

You’ll find that it’s 636 x 800. That’s a nice sized image to work with. Do the resolution conversion to 150dpi, and then knock the image size down by half. You should end up with a good, usable image that’s not horribly grainy. Bumping this original up to 300 and knocking the size down by half should produce some nice results in terms of print quality.

Now you know what it takes to convert those web images—bottom line, the bigger the original image, the more pixels you have to work with, and the better your results will probably be. Other things that will help: be sure to choose an image with good color quality, that seems to be clear and crisp, and in focus. Also, be sure your printer is set to print photos at high resolution—all this work won’t do you a bit of good if your printer is converting your image back to something of poor quality!

General disclaimers for this article:

Results will vary based on experience and software. Contrary to popular opinion, digital artwork takes just as much practice, skill, and creativity as any other type of art. Don’t give up if your first image isn’t perfection.

I do my digital image manipulation in Adobe PhotoShop. It’s a professional grade program that costs $600-$700 to purchase, and about $200 every couple of years to upgrade. Like all art supplies, you get what you pay for when it comes to software, so if you’re using some piece of junk that came bundled with your computer, or is designed to make cards, cut it out—you’re using the digital equivalent of off-brand crayons to do a job that requires Lumieres. A reasonably priced alternative to PhotoShop is Paint Shop Pro by Jasc, which generally retails for under $100.

Please do not email me for individual lessons in this technique. If you’re really interested in learning how to manipulate images well, consider paying for an online class that will cover this in depth. Last time I checked, Virtual University was offering classes in all sorts of Paint Shop Pro techniques.

Last, but not least, this article in no way condones the practice of grabbing images from people’s web sites and using them for collage. If you’re downloading imagery, please be aware of their copyright status. There’s plenty of copyright-free stock art available in the world for personal use without resorting to looting web sites. Respect original photographs, graphics, and the artists who create them by not using them without permission.