Welcome to Art and Design

Welcome to Art and Design, hosted by Praxius!

This forum will cover many aspects of art:

- Painting / Hand Drawn (Pen, Pencil, Oil, Watercolour, etc.)

- Animation (Classical, Flash, 3D, etc.)

- Advertisement / Graphic Design (Illustrations, Photoshop Work, Signs, Web Design, etc.)

- Cartoons (Political, Comic Strips, Character Design, etc.)

Thanks Praxius!

Welcome Prax!

BWWWAAAAAAA HAAAAAA HAAAAA HAAAAAA HHAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!

I knew this day would come when the power would be at my fingertips!!!!!

Soooo Much POWER!!!! So Little Time!!!!

*Starts Pushing all kinds of buttons Randomly*

BWWWAAAAAAA HAAAAAA HAAAAA HAAAAAA HHAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!

But seriously.... thanks, I'll try my best to give any pointers and such towards the arts.

He he he he heeeee........ (The Power.... shhhh..... he he..... Rubs Hands Together)

Praxi, I love you! One hell of a great and talented guy you are.
I hope you still will have time for politics... that's where your real talent shines! ...in my humble opinion, anyway.

Good luck! And...

This a welcome addition, I'm looking forward to the posts.
Will this go into the house decorating/painting areas as well?

Hmmm... I'm not all that experienced on those aspects, but if you consider it as art, then I don't see why not... Art is subjective afterall. Do you mean like how to layout a room's colour compared to design/layout, such as carpets, walls, curtains, etc?

I have background in AutoCAD design and drafting, which is also creative to an extent, but I don't really consider that as art in the way I was leaning. But I don't see why people couldn't talk about and sharing those sorts of conversations in this section.

Art to me is something being created by human hands and human mind, whatever that may be..... if you design anything, then I don't see why not, as I will be talking about sign making, vehicle wraps, vinyls, and the sort, which is moreso seen as just advertisement, but it's still art too.....

It's all open in my books.

Praxius, have you got the new version of adobe studio yet?

At work I am currently using Illustrator CS3, but still with Photoshop CS (CS2 kills my system here for some reason, and we are not officially approved to be operating CS3 - Due to Licenses, etc.... that and we don't use Photoshop too much here where I work.)

However I do have experience in both Photoshop/Illustrator CS3's.

I also know a good chunk of Adobe Bridge/Browser and ImageReady for web graphics.

As it goes for suites or studios, in paticular I think you're looking into Creative Suite 3, I haven't dabled into those, and I usually focus on each program individually.

I've been using Adobe Flash and Dreamweaver back when they were still under Macromedia, and although I haven't played around with the Adobe versions as of late, I am sure not much has changed in how they operate..... but when I get a chance I will check out the newer versions.

And Acrobat is of course a given, lol.

Any paticular questions about any of them?

Added:

Oh, and I also have experience with 3D programs such as Maya and some rusty experience in 3D Studio Max.

My girlfriend is a graphic designer and I used most of those tools back in the day when I was in school for web development. Back then though, I was using dreamweaver 2, flash 4, photoshop 5 etc, these tools have come a long way since then.

You do your work on Mac or pc or both?

Photoshop 5, Flash 3, Dreamweaver 2 all sound about the same time I got into those programs. I've been keeping up to date and track with most of them up until just the last year or so.

Most of the tools are still pretty much the same, but I have noticed some have improved here and there, plus more tools added which make things a lot easier.

I have worked effectively on both Mac and PC, however I have preference to PC over Mac. Although Macs claim better operation for graphical purposes over PCs, supposed to run faster and be more stable, that wasn't my personal experience with them, as the ol G4 and G5's I worked on with Photoshop used to give me many issues with very few solutions, while PC's have been a lot more versitile with options to correct any issues.

As an example, when I worked on the Macs... sure they were a few seconds faster in some things, but my job consisted of working on a lot of high quality photos all day. While the Macs worked good with one or two files, once you have the computer running hundreds and sometimes thousands of pictures in a day, they locked up, quickly shut down Photoshop, or just plain shut down and restarted with no warnings or protection of the work I was doing.... which got pretty frustating. All I could do was restart my work and hope it didn't happen again.

With the PC's I work on, they are customed built for specifically what I need, I know what it can and can't do, I can sense when it's getting bogged down and shut down extra things in the background to make it work better or faster, my programs rarely shut down on me, I rarely lose any files I was working on, and if something locked up, I could still fix it without shutting the whole system down. If it does, I usually have explinations as to what caused it, and then I could correct the problem.

Maybe it's because I have more experience in PC's over Macs and I know more of what I can do in PC's then Macs, but even when I brought my problems to my boss who was a Mac Head for years, even he didn't have any explinations or solutions..... the Mac was just the way it is.

Maybe it was just the few Macs I worked on, the rest are more stable and I just had some bad experiences... but Mac's had their chance to win me over and they failed.

If you never experienced these issuses with a mac and you like having a computer 3-4 seconds faster in what it can operate graphically, then the Mac's for you.... but for me, the extra 3-4 seconds per project didn't add up compared to the times crashed, hours of work lossed and waiting for reboot.

When it comes to stability in what I do, as odd as it may sound, PC's have been a lot more reliable for me over the Mac's I have used. Not to mention, their price and availability for quick and cheap upgrades.... in my professional opinion from working in the graphic design industry since 2002, PC's are the way to go.

Sure Mac's are pretty, have a lot of eye candy and can operate a few specific graphical operations faster then a PC, but none of that matters when you're sitting there with your thumb up yer arse, wondering where the hell your project just disappeared to and there's no explination or solution.

I won't go into too much detail about my company's computer specs, but where I work (Sign Industry) we all have PC's.... not one Mac in the building.

When I was in college, the computers we used were the original "I-Macs", I can't say I miss those fruity looking things. Also, these i-macs were the computers we used for our Linux classes, which was a little bizarre at the time.

My girlfriend designs fancy brochures for real-estate companies, specifically for the houses they are selling. She tells me all sorts of ridiculous stuff about clients wanting her to photoshop in nice furniture, photoshop out carpet stains and whatnot.

Have you talked your boss into getting you a sweet quad core for your workstation?

Never could stand those fishbowels with round mice.... drove me mad. Here, let me click that icon..... oh wait, I'm moving on an angle.... who's wonderful idea was it to make the mice round?

Yeah, you can pretty well do just about anything in photoshop, so long as you have the time and money for that time.... but throwing in furniture certainly isn't easy, as you gotta deal with existing perspectives, lighting, etc.... Carpet stains shouldn't be too difficult, however perhaps they should replace the carpet if they can't get it out, before they sell the thing.... geez, some people.

Reminds me of when I was in photography, the photographers were shooting a cowboy styled wedding, and there was this woman on a motocycle with her husband (Not the newlyweds, just some joe-blows who were there) and she had the bright idea of asking if we could make her look thin

Yeah, after I spent an hour trying to explain to the photographers that this isn't CSI where all these magical things can actually be done with a click of a button, they decided to assign me the project anyways, just to see what I could do..... talk about a waste of my time.

1st, it was shot in film, and they neg-scanned it at a pretty crappy resolution which pretty well gave me little in detail I could at least use for covering up the manual garbage I threw on there..... 2nd, there was grass around her feet, so removing the rolls coming out of her shoes sure as hell wasn't gonna be a picnic.... 3rd, anything I squished in to make thin, required me to create what would have been behind the area that was no longer there..... 4th, when I removed the roll lines in her shirt and coat, that just made her look like she had a pillow under her...... 5th, her double chin?


Damit Jim! I'm a Graphic Designer, not a friggin Magician!!

Let's just say that when I was done (Or gave up to be more accurate) the photo looked like sh*t and it was very obvious that it was edited.

If she wanted to look thin in the picture, then she should have lost some damn weight. I can remove pimples, lines, bags under the eyes, stray hairs, replace an eye if need be, and a bunch of other things, but other then that, Deal with who you are.

Ok, Rant over.

Well no, the one I have now is just over a year old... I don't want to push it just yet.

You seem to know your stuff pretty good, Praxius. Have you thought of moving into more challenging things?

I go where the work is around here, and there's not much.... and I'm not about to move out west just for a job and money. There has to be more to it then just that.

I am content where I currently am.

That's cool, as long as you are happy doing what you do!

Great! This Thread is made for me. If only I knew "how" to upload my sketch. The scanner did a poor job but that I can solve by finally buying a new one. Here's one of my pencil sketches of a dog portrait.

Nice work NS.

I really liked that.

Quite impressive.

I just created an account on photobucket.com to upload and link my images into here. Most of what I do is related to pens, when it comes to art by the hand. Although usually I will start a complex project with pencil then outline in pen..... takes forever, but when done right, looks pretty good.

Thanks. I've got more but must get going here or else!

I envy anyone who has the patience and 'gift' to work on the computer! Appreciate your compliment and wish I had more time to figure out the computer programs but for me that doesn't pay the rent.

Congratulations Praxius.

I am looking forward to seeing all the wonderful machinations created by the CC'ers.

That is very nice Night Safari!

I appreciate your compliment. That sketch is of one of our dogs I grew up with and means a lot to me. I enjoy using not only pencil, but pen and ink, water colour, acrylic, microwood, fabric, dried flowers, clay, etc. The challenge I enjoy is mixing various mediums up to create one piece.

I hope to be able to post these 4 photos of my work in making a "Treasure Chest" for one of my nephews.

I just went on photobucket and see that an account there is free, so I'll give that a try as it will certainly be easier for anyone to view.

No problem.

I wish that I had some artistic talent, as it amazes me what people can do.

Photobucket is also very user-friendly.

That treasure chest is very beautiful. I imagine that it must have taken a long time to finish.

i LOVE art. i'm not much of an artist like Night is, but my talent lies more in writing. if i do draw something, its always manga style

k i'm gonna put a poem up. this is the first time i publicly shared my work with anyone so plez b kind