Art Identity

Luckily for us all, you couldn’t loose your art identity if you tried. But you still have to find it – a well engineered game for sure.

Personally I look at it something like this:
Picture a magnifying glass outdoors on a sunny day. At one end is the sun. Much closer is the magnifying lens. It can focus the sunlight down to a very nearby burning spot.

The sun represents the cosmos. The lens represents your art. That burning point is your soul/spirit/{whatever the proper word}. The thing which the lens is focused onto is your unique personal artistic vision.

Now for the fun part: Just as the lens focuses the sun into you in one direction – it also focuses your soul outward to the sun in the other direction.

Where does your art come from as you mature? It wells up from a kind of spring you get to dig into yourself. When you start, your little trickle of art spirit is very near the surface and the cares of the world rain down and fill it with ego mud. This is a tricky time, because no one has an easier time fooling us than we ourselves do. Your ego could fool you about who you are and what you’re capable of doing.

So you keep on digging, a constant and imperfect practice, over and over – sometimes you fall back a bit, but not to worry, over the long haul you make good progress. That’s in the nature of practice and it’s human nature. Therefore, you get deeper and the flow gets cleaner and purer and eventually your authentic unique nature flows out into your work. Of course it’s not all internal. As you practice and your work gets purer, it will communicate better to others, as well as to you.

You won’t ever be finished, it’s a process, not an event. And yes, it’s a spiritual journey – one of many versions of the hero’s quest.

      _jim coe

[This was written on 05/21/2009 to answer Nicole's request for comments on learning photography, in a Fine Art America.com discussion]

Hi Nicole. I’ve been photographing since age 9 and used to teach it at the San Francisco Art Institute.

Obviously there is a huge amount to say about learning photography, but (for me at least) there are some basics that guide my image work.

My (or any other photographer’s way is of course not what you should seek – you must develop your own resources – fitting to your unique nature and your growing personal vision.

It will take some wonderful years to mature as an artist. Don’t rush – you’ll miss those early years later. Experience them fully.

Again obviously there is the tek stuff and /mind/soul/heart stuff. The tek of the camera is almost automatic nowadays and you’ll likely suss it out quickly. Check out the better books. The key there is to understand your equipment, the tek jargon (every medium has that – keeps the unwashed masses at bay) and understand what a (technically) good photo ought to look like, even if it has no soul. Your goal is to produce technically beautiful images (and for FAA, Print-On-Demand, up to 12,000 pretty pixels on the long side).

After you can do that – you must learn to do the camera part (not the subsequent digital image processing) without thought or distraction – while you concentrate 150% of your attention on “seeing” and close to 0% on working your camera.

Most people have learned to only glance. Our world is full of visual pollution and we are constantly bombarded with advertising images – most of us protect ourselves by learning to not see clearly. We look – we don’t see. The artist must above all else see keenly.

So another of your jobs is to constantly practice seeing. Beautiful photos lurk around use everywhere every day. But can we see them? The last thing I’ll write about the using the camera part is again my personal method – needs adapting at best for others and may not work at all for some. It’s a Zen approach and goes something like this (assume I’ve found a beautiful spot in the woods to look for photos – best to learn this in quiet places – later you can do it anywhere).

1. Stop your mind. This takes practice, but anyone can learn. I mean you will spend a few minutes letting the conversation we all run in our minds fade away to nothing, like smoke (along with that latest tune you can’t get out of your head).

2. Once your mind is still and calm, you put your attention into your eyes – just enough elsewhere to keep from stumbling over a root or something. Then you walk around until you “make contact” with something (don’t mean anything weird by that). For me this is usually something about the combinations of light, color, shadow and forms that fall into some pleasing or disturbing composition – from some certain angle. Once you have something going, you insert the camera without disturbing it – this is where being intimate with your equipment pays off.

But not all such situations really feel like “they want to be photographed”, or have some magic to them. Maybe 1 out of 5 or 10. I really work those – different angles (points-of-view), horizontal/vertical format, long lens/short lens, parts in focus and out of focus – whatever it takes to pull the essence out of it and make that visible. And not only is the light sensor exposed. More importantly the photographer is exposed. At that point something called “visualization” happens. You see right now how that final future photo resulting from this situation is going to look. For some photographers they see it EXACTLY. Me, I see more a small group of possibilities. The other thing that happens when you are exposed is that your (what to call it? soul? heart? spirit? personal artistic vision?). What ever it is, it has been slipping into the act – helping guide you to the shot and now it’s quite strong (if the shot is good).

3. Now you’re in Photoshop on your computer. Your job is to recapture that essence you had for a while out in the field and work to nurture and strengthen it in the digital image. You also have to ruthlessly whack away everything which does not support that essence. This is were many fine photos are lost – especially to the student. It’s so easy to fool yourself about what you wanted. To say to yourself, “Hey! I’m pretty good – this really is what I visualized.” Except it wasn’t and the more you work on it the less life it has in it. That wasn’t your authentic personal vision talking – it was your ego.

Here is how the student gets passed this difficult part:
You must be brutally honest with yourself. You must not expect great things all at once – that leads to disappointment for no reason at all. Like sketching, martial arts, or any other practice, you do it over and over – often and more often. After a while you get better and you get better at understanding how to get still better. It happens, if you stick with it.

A good way to make the fastest progress possible is to use equipment that lets you see your camera results instantly. I used to teach with Polaroid instant film. Now we have digital cameras. But you need one where you can see your image pretty large and clear.

The weak way to learn is to make your exposures and visualizations, then process them hours or days later. The strong way is to really look at them keenly right after you make them. Ask yourself, “Is this image true to what I saw and visualized?” “How can I improve it?” Then do that. Do it right there, right then – before you can fool yourself.

When you get good at that, you can go anywhere and make good photos – even while talking with your people subjects or otherwise distracted (at one level).

The last thing I want to write about the digital processing part is another of my personal things. It might sound weird at first and it is another that takes a lot of practice. I know when an image is worth putting my time into. That’s because I’ve gotten good enough at seeing that I can see when an image has a tiny spark of life in it. Then I try all the techniques (if it works it’s a technique – if not it’s a trick) I know to nurture that spark. If it gets strong enough and I look and listen well enough, it will “tell me how it wants to be expressed”. If I can do that – I’ve got a winner.

Now all this sounds very mystical, I’m sure. But that’s only because you can’t talk about the visual. Our medium is not words and when you try to express it in words you have to twist them in funny ways. If our medium were words, we’d be writers. Since we are photographers, we have to use metaphors to point roughly in the direction of our meanings.

Hope it Helps )

Remember – the camera has to point both inwards and outwards…

_jim coe
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You may want to check out my ebook, ‘Art Head Start’ it’s all about art basics and design and composition – art school stuff. Also, what light and color actually are and how they work in the world and in the human visual system. Visual Grammar and Visual Communication, etc. Also how to analyze images (using Photoshop tricks) in various ways (chiaroscuro, color scheme, eyepath, etc.). Besides the traditional art school learning, it’s combined with basic digital art info, combined with basic physics of light and color and some of the advice like above. Good for beginner’s, if I do say so myself, lol. 150 pages and 180 of my custom illustrations.

My web site’s sales page for my ‘Art Head Start’ ebook is:

One of my best friends is Ken Milburn. He’s written over 26 excellent books on Photoshop and Digital Photography.  You can check out his books and art (and the web site I built for him) at: www.kenmilburn.com. Amazon has his fine books.

I’d recommend that even if you use the much less expensive non-pro version of Photoshop (‘Photoshop Elements’) that you get a pro Photoshop book. ’Photoshop Elements’ does use the same tools as found in the professional version, but not all of them.

      _jim coe

A 3D modeled scene

What if you wanted to try your hand at 3D Modeled Scenes?

Here is my workflow
[sculpt major 3D objects {or buy them online from 3D sculptors at DAZ.com, Renderosity.com or Cornucopia 3D}] —> [Import them into your 3D environment program. I use Vue 'Infinite'. Sculpt, texture and pose environment items. Light it all. Render to 2D, using a 'virtual camera' inside your 3D world]
—> [Do "postwork" in Photoshop {optional}] —> [Enlarge for poster use. Add titles/borders/copyright] —> [Compress to jpeg format] —> Upload to your favorite online 3D art portal – I use FineArtAmerica.com]

You might think of it as a combination of playing with dolls or models, like you may have done in your youth, and then photographing the results.

Getting started
If you’d like to get started in 3D scenes, you’ll first need a 3D “staging” “natural environments” program. That’s where you import your 3D models to, pose them, create or modify their textures and clothing, light them, create vegetation, atmospheres, water, terrains, etc. I recommend Vue Infinite (but it’s over $700). They do have less powerful versions to get you started for a lot less money – then you can work your way up to the top of the line “Infinite” version if you stay interested. There is even a free trial version. Vue is sold as a 3D modeling program, but its main strength is in the creation of the 3D environments – amazing photo-realistic environments with thousands of buildings or trees or rocks, robot armies in formations all the way to the horizon and other such Hollywood special effects type stuff (Vue can do animation, if you have the computer power and is used lately in major movies).

Silo 3D
Ultimately, you’ll want to sculpt your own 3D models to put into your scenes. For that I recommend a much less expensive 3D modeling program – Silo 3D. Note that 3D sculptors have very strong opinions on the best 3D modeling program and you’ll get people swearing by one or another and putting down all the rest.

But 3D modeling is a challenge and it can take a year or more to get good at it. So to start, most people who make 3D scenes buy their 3D models online (many 3D sculptors make a living selling their models online to non-modelers). You then import your models into a third (free) 3rd program – which is specialized at clothing and posing figures, setting facial expressions adding wigs and such (or texturing vehicles, etc.). I recommend the free ‘DAZ|Studio’ over the older ‘Poser’ (which has a dated and awful user interface).

Many people never do become 3D sculptors and just continue to buy their models – but it’s great if you can learn to do both. As you might imagine, being a good enough 3D sculptor to make photo-realistic human figures is no mean feat, so many (like me) make some 3D models themselves and buy others. Still, hundreds of people do learn to make photo-real human figures every year. Those of you who already paint or draw realistic figures and understand anatomy will benefit greatly from that.

Virtual photography
Once you have your environment to your liking, you have a virtual camera in there with which you select shots and render those out as your 2D artwork – a lot like photography. Unlike manual drawing, once you have made a 3D scene, you can take thousands of “photos’ in there from different points of view. In fact though – you usually have a point of view in mind before you start. And also unlike manual drawing or painting, you can always go back and change things or start a whole new version based on a previous project.

Here are some resources
3D Natural Environment (staging) program: Vue by e-on software
Vue

3D sculpting: Silo 3D: Save learning this for the last part of your 3D adventure – it’s quite challenging.
Silo 3D

DAZ 3D (models for sale. Notice that each product, e.g. clothing tells you what “base model” it’s designed for, that is which human or animal figure you must buy first):
Most 3D models cost $2 to $30 – not too bad.
DAZ 3D

DAZ Studio (free) the program where you clothe and pose your models. many people stop here and render – but you’ll get much better results by exporting your DAZ models and importing them into Vue.

The 3D art portal (forums, community, store, galleries, etc) just for Vue, “Cornucopia”, and they sell models specifically for Vue.
Cornucopia 3D

Renderosity: The biggest and oldest digital art portal – check out the Vue gallery and forum.
Renderosity

Fine Art America is a good place to sell your images as prints or greeting cards, as well as a great community of artists using many different mediums.
Fine Art America

Check it out and let me know if I can help. There are a lot of online tutorials (and some of mine) to get you going.

Cheers!
_jim coe

One of my web site tutorials for digital artists is about image file formats. If you you need info on the file formats .TIF, .JPG, .GIF, when and how to JPEG compress you image files and such – please check it out.

Understanding Image File Formats

  _jim coe     :o)

Yes, just one more day…

Do you believe in ‘talent’?
The word ‘talent’ has several dictionary definitions. For instance the top 3 at dictionary.com are

1. A special natural ability or aptitude: “A talent for drawing.”
2. A capacity for achievement or success; ability: “Young men of talent.”
3. A talented person: “The cast includes many of the theater’s major talents.”

That first one is where I disagree most. That is, if ‘talent’ means some lucky few are blessed at birth with abilities which the rest will never have.

I believe that anyone, who is not in some way handicapped, can create good visual art – no ‘talent’ required.
Are some people especially good at it? Sure, but is that from nature or nurture? Or both?

I doubt they’ll ever find a gene that’s coded for art skills. But I don’t doubt that the best visual artists have for years nurtured their personal vision, their ability to observe keenly, their design sense and their understanding of visual communication principles.

When I write of “handicaps”, that includes all the self-doubt, shame and guilt that drag so many down. And authorities (including parents) have usually done their best to handicap or closely channel creativity, with its close ties to individuality and “unsupervised thinking”.

Highly creative people with critical thinking skills and a strong streak of individuality are hard to control. Control is a big concern for authorities of all kinds. No wonder so many people feel they are untalented and uncreative.

I’d love to read what you believe about talent in art…

      _jim coe

This is my blog about making art…
…here I’ll post thoughts about art (digital art mostly), creativity, visual communication, tool recommendations and links to my favorite resources, my tutorials (static and video), my image gallery and other such stuff.

…hope you’ll take the time to add your own thoughts and suggestions under each post –thanks!

     _Jim Coe