For every artist there comes a time that we feel lack of inspiration.  Maybe we have a project in mind that you are trying to finish (start).  Maybe we have an assignment that needs a kick start.  Heck, maybe we just want to be a little more productive.

 I’ve known some people that seem to always be spitting out new ideas left and right.  How do they do that?  Could it be that they have some special well from which to draw inspiration from?  If there is such a well I want one.  My well in the backyard just has water, and I need to add to that sometimes.

I’m as guilty as any artist.  I get in a rut and not create anything for days or longer.  I’ve played guitar for 20 years now, and I still get to a point where I just look at my fingers and wonder if that inspiration bug will bite me.  So what can be done?

Inspiration comes to those looking for it.  It also comes to us when we are least expecting it.  Since we want to be productive and, not wait for the inspiration to find us, we need to look for it.  The times that it happens out of the blue is just the icing on the cake.

Not all of the tips below will work for you, but I’ve found that most will work for most people most of the time.  (It can be fun to talk in a circle.) Enough babble to make my word count look good.  Quota cops are looking for me.

1. Go see a movie. Popcorn optional.
2. Take a walk. Dog optional, but recommend.
3. Sit at the park.
4. Get a cup of coffee. Drink coffee at cafe and watch people.  Don’t stare.
5. Listen to your favorite songs.
6. Get online and use Slacker.  Tune to stations that have music that you would not normally listen to.  The most radical from norm the better.
7. Talk to other artists about their rut. Odd, but we all have unique ruts.
8. Visit Deviantart.
9. Read a book.  What book?  Any book.  Just get to reading.
10. Walk away from the computer.  AFK  But not now.  After you get done.
11. Go to a busy bar and bring your scrap book.  People will walk up to you, and ask what you are doing in your book.  It always happens.  Tell them why you are there.  Free tips, and you get to meet new people.  This also makes you look like a deep complicated individual.  A person of mystery.  How fun!
12. Eat a really good piece of chocolate.
13. Visit Logosauce.
14. Play with your pets.  It’s healthy and they will give you inner peace.
15. Play a game.  Any game, just get your mind in motion.
16. Grow a garden.  Watching over your plants that you raised can free your mind of useless clutter, and give you peace.  (Works for me.  I have a huge garden, but that’s another topic.)

There are several resources out there that have a thing or two to say about creative inspiration.  Here are a few…

Howdesign has plethora of articles and tools to get the juices flowing.  You think that you are the only one who needs help?

Meridianmagazine has a interesting article series by Greg Hansen.  In his words "This section gets into the how-to’s: the nuts and bolts of getting inspiration when you need it. It gives us the ability to take our day-to-day living to the next level, getting the understanding, ideas, and direction we need to be greater instruments of good."

themechanism has a very unique approach to finding inspiration. And might I say it’s pretty damn cool.  Check out this renaissance man.  My kind of dude.

Zingzone.  Sam Harrison is what you would call a creative guru.  He makes a living teaching all forms of being creative.  What’s best is he teaches with a sense of wit and humor. 

"Q: What makes Sam different from other speakers?
A: Sam has successfully immersed himself in creativity and ideas throughout his career.  He’s been on the creative agency and freelance side, the client and corporate side and, most recently, on the academic and consulting side. He has more than 20 years of experience in brand communications, integrated marketing, creative writing and generating ideas, so he shares real-life examples and real-world solutions."

Allgraphicdesign has been kind enough to provide a page with creative inspiration links and descriptions for each.  It’s looking like there are plenty of us with creative deficiency.

Now don’t just sit there.  Get to finding your muse, and grab the inspiration.

Tags: creative inspiration, inspiration, creative, howdesign, zingzone, muse, allgraphicdesign, logosauce, themechanism, Greg Hansen

How many times have you looked at a website, picture, or any other piece of art, and thought "Damn, that’s ugly!"?  Now we all should know that any art has it’s audience, and it may not be you.  I’m thinking beauty is in the eye of the beholder.  Who is this Beholder anyway?

If you are looking at one of your art works, and keep thinking something is wrong, maybe it’s color.  Color is the most basic thing when it comes to any form of art.  It does not matter if it’s shit brown, or neon pink.

Picking one general color is usually a pretty simple thing, or is it?  What type of feeling are you trying to get across? What are you feeling?  Either of these are good places to start.  Every color can evoke a mood.

I was planning on writing a lengthy in-depth post about color, then I came across veerle.duoh.com.  Wow!  If you are stumped about color or want to learn more about color, then check her blog out.  Her post sums up what I was going to explain anyway, but in many more words (I know that makes no sense). 

Know that color is many times the key to creating an emotion in your art.  Choose wisely, and most important have fun. Don’t forget to experiment.  There are no rules, just guidelines.

Tags: color, understanding color, emotion

Having a big poster that you made sitting on your wall is a great feeling.  "Ya, I made that!"  But how do you do that and have it look reasonably good?  And cheap?  I’ve come across a couple of pretty interesting programs that will get you some remarkable results in no time.

Most of us have some form of printer at home, and that’s where the posters are going to be printed from.  What?!  You say you don’t have a large format printer?  Well, I don’t either, but I have my walls covered in glorious posters for the eyes to feast on.  Yes, I did it with a standard ink jet printer with regular office paper.

Rastorbator enables you to create large rasterized posters from your digital images, using that regular size printer you have sitting on your desk.  Rastorbator creates images made up of visible dots (rasterized), which are designed to appear smooth from a distance (3-4 feet). The dots don’t look so good when you view the poster up close, but how often do you stand one foot in front of a poster? Using the rasterized dots allows you to create ginormous posters. We’re talking 65 feet/20meters. The program can create monochrome or multicolor posters and save them as multi-page PDF files. While it’s easy to use standard office paper, Rastorbator also supports custom demension paper sizes. Once you have all the pages printed from the PDF file, then you just sort them out like a easy puzzle, and get to hanging them up. I’ve found that the best results are when you use a thicker paper, or mount the pages to poster board. Be sure to use a glue stick rather than straight liquid glue. Why? Well, if you use good Ol’ Elmers glue and don’t smear it thin then you will end up with ripples in your paper. We don’t want ripples. Fine on water, not on our poster.

Block Posters is another slick little tool for making posters.  Unlike Rasterbator there is no software to download.  The entire poster making process happens online, then you download a PDF file with your ready to print poster.  Rasterbator also offers this feature if you don’t feel like downloading the program, but there are limitations on size and resolution limits.  The results with Block Posters are a bit different looking than what you get with the Rasterbator, but still very nice looking.

Tags: posters, DIY, poster, PDF, art, lifehacks

For a long time I would place my graphic art work all over my hard drive.  Nothing made a lot of sense where it was placed.  I’d have some inspiration, start a project and place it in a new folder somewhere, and never work on it again.  Kind of the "out of sight, out of mind" principle.  I wasted hours and hours of quality time and sweat only to misplace a file or two.

I know that some of you have to be the same way I was, looking all over your hard drive to find a project that you were working on, and not even remembering what you named it.  I’m not gonna go into a lot of detail on how to get organized.  It seems someone has done a much better job explaining than I ever could.  Outlaw Design has done a great job showing you what to do.  Heck, I even found more ways for me to get organized.  I encourage you to check out this very useful info.

Tags: organized, files, art, graphics, organizing, hard drive

Often you will see on websites and print images that are blurry and pixilated. The usual problem starts with trying to get an image that is one size to fill a space that is much larger than the original image. Just because an image looks sharp with a size of 100×100 pixels doesn’t mean that it’s going to look sharp once you try to blow it up to something like 200×200 pixels. Of course we are speaking of raster images, not vector. Raster graphics cannot scale to a higher resolution without loss of apparent quality. A good example of a raster image not scaling to a higher resolution (larger size) can be seen when you try to take you digital photos from your camera and try to make a poster with them. There are "tricks" around this though, and that will be covered in a later post.

Here is an image that was made with 72 ppi ((Pixels per Inch) at a size of 200×200 pixels.

Here is an image that was made with 72 ppi ((Pixels per Inch) at a size of 100×100 piles, and scaled up to 200×200 pixels.

Many people don’t seem to see a difference between the two images if they are both not side by side. But look at that 2nd image. It’s blurry and all around rather poor looking. I think the reason that many people don’t acknowledge the poor image is because they don’t know better, or maybe they just don’t know how to overcome the problem. Odd… But, since you are reading this, you are starting to grasp what the problem is and what you need to do about it.

If you where planning on making an image to fit a certain size then make sure that you start off with proper resolution and size first. A good rule of thumb is to have your web graphics be at least 72 ppi and your graphics that will be printed be at least 300 ppi. You can go lower than 300 ppi, but I feel that 300 ppi is best and is an easy number to remember.

For many years I’ve used Adobe Photoshop for almost 90% of my digital work. It’s very robust and has almost everything that I need, but it’s not for everyone. Photoshop is expensive and it has an extremely high learning curve. They teach college courses on this program, people. If you have a own Photoshop and have a good grasp on it already, then that’s great. But if you are like many people, you don’t have this wonderful program, and your using something else. There are plenty of great alternatives. Let’s look over a few.

• Photoshop Elements: This Adobe program has a great deal of what Photoshop has, but is more designed for the novice and possibly those on a budget. Photoshop Elements will get the job done for you with great results. However if you are a wanting to be a professional graphic artist or have a photography business, then Photoshop is the way to go. It offers the proper tools for color management and more editing features. If you don’t plan on making a career with graphic arts or photography, then Photoshop Elements is worth your time to check out. Current price $99.99

• Paintshop Pro Photo X2: Corel makes this fine program that is a competitor to Photoshop. It has a very clean and easy to understand interface. I’ve enjoyed this program, but it’s more designed to manipulate existing photos than creating. Don’t get me wrong on that last comment however. Paintshop Pro Photo X2 can also be used to create new images. Current Price: $99.99

• GIMP: This slick program is often lauded as the "free Photoshop". I don’t have much personal experience in this program, but I can tell you that for a program that is free, yes I said FREE, it’s very well thought out. GIMP is an open source program that people all over the world are very passionate about. Many of these people contribute to the continuing development of the program. Current Price: huh, FREE

A great resource for other free photo editing programs can be found here. Free Photo Editing Programs

Give thanks to Sue Chastain for putting together such a comprehensive list.

This being a new blog, you can expect some layout and graphic changes here and there till I get it the way I like it. Crazy blog software. I’ll figure it out. First lessons will commence very soon. So, site back grab a donut and have just a smig of patience. Not much longer.

I don’t pretend to be the worlds best digital graphics artist, but I do know what works. For sometime I labored with my art only to have people just look at and… well put it this way, they didn’t really care for or not care about it. I was missing something. What was it? Actually several things. Are you an aspiring artist? On a whim purchased a photo editing program? Been doing this for awhile with dismal results? Well, fear not. Grab your favorite beverage, sit back and try to learn something. I use Adobe Photoshop CS2 and Illustrator mostly, but I will dabble in other available programs as well. Most of the time it will not matter what graphic editing program you use to learn something from here. I base this knowledge on experience and basic and advance principals. Let’s have some fun. Comments are always welcome. This is my first blog, so who knows what to expect. Thanks for stopping by, Mr. Boogie

Tags: digital artists, photoshop, illustrator, help, graphic artists