Friday, February 20, 2009

Web Art Is Framed In Your Browser

What isn't web art? Anything your browser renders is web art in my opinion. From the CSS+XHTML compliant layout, to the interactive Flash portfolio, to the favicon that brands every domain. It's all web art. Web design is web art. The effective combination of typography, colors, and images rolled into one usable interface displaying information is the goal for every website. Thinking that something displayed on a web page is web art is like not seeing the forest for the trees.

For my example of web art, I'm going to use my newly created favicon for my site:


It's small, simple, meaningful, and not only brands my site but myself as well. If you want some awesome web design galleries, here are a few I came across the other day:




I'm really excited for the last half of this class because I love web design and am always looking for excuses to roll out work.

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Steal My Work from Flickr

After a surprisingly warm and positive reaction to my artwork today in class from my fellow D210 classmates, I wanted to make an announcement about stealing my artwork in case any of them wanted a copy or wanted to use it elsewhere. I've uploaded everything so far into a Flickr set entitled "Digital Art" and tried to give every piece a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

Go. Steal. Remix. Reissue. Do art!

Sunday, February 15, 2009

Practicing Digital Bokeh Effect in Photoshop

The word on the tubes is that bokeh is quickly approaching as the next design craze like rounded corners, reflecting logos, and diagonal stripes. I found a nice tutorial from Abduzeedo on how to recreate the photography effect in Photoshop.

Monday, February 9, 2009

Abstract Art Project: Frustration

"Use more than one digitized images to create a single composition that representing an emotional state, such as sadness, happiness, embarrassment, and ecstasy." I chose frustration

Frustration by Max Beatty

Sunday, February 8, 2009

Abstract Art


When I want to learn about a new topic, I use Wikipedia. Here's a little bit about what they had to say about Abstract Art.

Abstract art (also called non-objective art) uses a visual language of form, color and line to create a composition which may exist with a degree of independence from visual references in the world.[1] Western art had been, from the Renaissance up to the middle of the 19th century, underpinned by the logic of perspective and an attempt to reproduce an illusion of visible reality. The arts of cultures other than the European had become accessible and showed alternative ways of describing visual experience to the artist. By the end of the 19th century many artists felt a need to create a new kind of art which would encompass the fundamental changes taking place in technology, science and philosophy. The sources from which individual artists drew their theoretical arguments were diverse, and reflected the social and intellectual preoccupations in all areas of Western culture at that time.[2]
Abstraction indicates a departure from reality in depiction of imagery in art. This departure from accurate representation can be only slight, or it can be partial, or it can be complete. Abstraction exists along a continuum. Even art that aims for verisimilitude of the highest degree can be said to be abstract, at least theoretically, since perfect representation is likely to be exceedingly elusive. Artwork which takes liberties, altering for instance color and form in ways that are conspicuous, can be said to be partially abstract. Total abstraction bears no trace of any reference to anything recognizable. In geometric abstraction, for instance, one is unlikely to find references to naturalistic entities. Figurative art and total abstraction are almost mutually exclusive. But figurative and representational (or realistic) art often contains partial abstraction.
Both Geometric abstraction and Lyrical Abstraction are often totally abstract. Among the very numerous art movements that embody partial abstraction would be for instance fauvism in which color is conspicuously and deliberately altered vis-a-vis reality, and cubism, which blatantly alters the forms of the real life entities depicted.[3][4]Abstract art (also called non-objective art) uses a visual language of form, color and line to create a composition which may exist with a degree of independence from visual references in the world.[1] Western art had been, from the Renaissance up to the middle of the 19th century, underpinned by the logic of perspective and an attempt to reproduce an illusion of visible reality. The arts of cultures other than the European had become accessible and showed alternative ways of describing visual experience to the artist. By the end of the 19th century many artists felt a need to create a new kind of art which would encompass the fundamental changes taking place in technology, science and philosophy. The sources from which individual artists drew their theoretical arguments were diverse, and reflected the social and intellectual preoccupations in all areas of Western culture at that time.[2]
Abstraction indicates a departure from reality in depiction of imagery in art. This departure from accurate representation can be only slight, or it can be partial, or it can be complete. Abstraction exists along a continuum. Even art that aims for verisimilitude of the highest degree can be said to be abstract, at least theoretically, since perfect representation is likely to be exceedingly elusive. Artwork which takes liberties, altering for instance color and form in ways that are conspicuous, can be said to be partially abstract. Total abstraction bears no trace of any reference to anything recognizable. In geometric abstraction, for instance, one is unlikely to find references to naturalistic entities. Figurative art and total abstraction are almost mutually exclusive. But figurative and representational (or realistic) art often contains partial abstraction.
Both Geometric abstraction and Lyrical Abstraction are often totally abstract. Among the very numerous art movements that embody partial abstraction would be for instance fauvism in which color is conspicuously and deliberately altered vis-a-vis reality, and cubism, which blatantly alters the forms of the real life entities depicted.[3][4]

I thought they could do a better job summing it up than I could. Since this is such a visual topic, I thought I'd search Google Images for a few examples. Here are few hotlinked examples (probably illegal):




Friday, February 6, 2009

Museum Tour Notes



On Wednesday we went on a tour of the IU Art Museum to look at some portraits. Here are my notes:

The first portrait was of St Nicholas from the 16th century. It was very general and biblical. It was interesting it didn't have any sort of background.

The second portrait was of a woman from the late 16th century. It was very similar to the St Nick. You could tell she was educated because she was reading a book, a sign of wealth back then.

The third portrait was of Young Daniel. It was the first portrait with a light source which helped show some of the emotion. It was very detailed and used earth tones.

We moved on to two busts that had very fancy hair but not the greatest material. The choice in material makes you think they weren't absolutely wealthy, but that they had some money.

I started to focus on more cultural clues as we continued looking at more portraits. Clues such as the color of their cloths and if they were reading signified their affluence.

The final pieces we looked at were pretty unique. There was a cubic head, a dada head with zippers for eyes, a disproportionate family portrait, and a huge woman I took a picture of.