A few years ago, I was fortunate to be involved in an unexpected conversation one day at my studio with an artist friend. I didn’t know when we started talking that the next few minutes would so significantly sharpen my understanding of one aspect of my painting. We casually looked through a group of my paintings while she offered her observations.
After much discussion, we both simultaneously realized we had stumbled upon a truth about much of my work. A common abstract thread that made sense of my varied subjects: it wasn’t so much the crisp white sail boats moving over dark blue water, big puffy clouds in turquoise skies, or white houses surrounded by greenery, but rather it was large white objects in a colorful settingthat I was painting over and over again. What an awakening! I thought I liked painting those different subjects and I do, but now I can see that they are all variations on a theme. It’s almost like looking through a kaleidoscope; different shapes and patterns emerge, but there are always large chunks of white and scattered backgrounds of saturated color.
That may not sound very revolutionary, but in the blink of an eye, I suddenly owned two new possessions:
1.) An answer for countless viewers who have remarked that I certainly painted a lot of different subjects. Now I had a way to tie many of them together.
2.) A better understanding of my artistic hard-wiring, which
a.) I can use on occasion to find what I want to paint faster and more easily
b.) In a purely narcissistic way—a fascinating (to me) fact about myself, of which, after all these decades I had been unaware.
Every piece I do does not feature white on a color field, but now when it happens, I smile to myself and recognize it as another chapter in my love affair with this combination.
Painters speak in the language of paint; it doesn’t seem fair that every artist should also be required to speak eloquently in the English language about painting. But language and thought are so intertwined that verbalizing and analyzing your artistic visions, as difficult as that may be, can actually illuminate them.
Maybe Henry David Thoreau had an experience similar to mine that caused him to say, “So we saunter toward the Holy Land, till one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, as warm and serene and golden as on a bankside in autumn.” And who can resist the colorful image this conjures up—maybe a white horse in a grove of yellow cottonwoods?
If you feel there may be a hidden theme in your work, or some unrecognized essence, or you wonder how all your painting threads connect, I have a suggestion: block out some time for a lunch with a savvy artist friend and leisurely peruse each other’s portfolios. A fresh eye and a frank discussion may uncover a powerful current flowing just under the surface of your paintings.
Archives for November 2012
What is FINE art?
As a landscape painter myself, I admire Keith’s work, as he is obviously sensitive to his surroundings, a keen observer, and a skilled artist. Raising the topic of whether any artist is a fine artist or illustrator, especially in light of the fact that stunning volumes of incredible art have been produced by those who consider and call themselves “illustrators” as well as those who don’t, just increases the difficulty of categorizing artists as either one or the other. It’s like hoisting a dime on a pole and trying to shoot it from fifty yards–no one is ever going to hit it. The personal goals of all kinds of artists are certain to be similar, in that they wish to create the best work of which they are capable.
The question that Keith raises, though, “What is Fine Art, Anyway?” is an important question for all artists to answer, I believe, because all artists who are working seriously—and seriously working—very much want to produce art that is truly “fine.” The dictionary defines “Fine Art” as that which is “produced for beauty rather than utility.” Wow, if we take that definition as gospel, that definitely undersells some of the most magnificent illustrations from the course of human history that have been created for books, churches, posters, hymnals, and advertisements. Just to mention a few, consider those “fine” illustrations from the body of work of such greats as Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Gustave Doré, and Rick Griffin (The Bible ) N.C. Wyeth ( Last of the Mohicans, Treasure Island), Howard Pyle (Robin Hood, King Arthur), Rockwell Kent (Moby Dick), Norman Rockwell (“The Four Freedoms,” “The Problem We All Live With”). Even my favorite artists, who probably created the first profession known to man, the cave artists (Lascaux, Altamira, the Magdalenians) might have been creating their art for utility—hunting and animal worship—or not. Perhaps it was the beauty of the forms themselves that captured their imagination, which in turn inspired them to capture that beauty in charcoal.
From the enduring quality of these artworks, it would appear that all those artists mentioned above—whose works were “illustrations” for definite purposes of dissemination—were intent on creating beauty within and emanating from those artworks, which then became “useful” (having a broad impact and appeal) as much as they were truly “beautiful.” How could those artists have captured the beauty of human form, its costume, the elegant turn of a whale’s fin, the power of a bison’s charge, unless they, too, had—as is very evident in Keith Bond’s work—“a reverence for the world in which we live”—and a spirit of both “exploration and veneration.” In my own work, I am also hoping that that same spirit of reverence for creation and its Creator is both alive and evident.
Keith suggests that perhaps illustrators and fine artists are not that much different. I quite agree. I would suggest that– more important than the categorization of artists into this camp or that—the most significant question for artists to answer is “Why” they do what they do, and whether they are creating successful works of art. Herein, for me, lies the definition of “Fine Art”—those artworks which creatively inspire, stimulate you to feel something, communicate a message in a unique and unified way, are created in a medium and are of a scale that best conveys that message, and are presented in such a way that nothing distracts the viewer from what the artist is saying. In my opinion, “Fine” art is that which successfully communicates the artist’s message, a truth about existence, whether that truth be personal, historical, social, or even product-oriented. Those artists that we admire the most, I daresay, are those that communicate the truth of what it is to be human, whether they be painters, sculptors, jewelers, photographers, musicians, actors, dancers, mimes or ad-men. Creativity and truth are at the heart of fine artworks, whether they are intended to have a broad appeal (as in advertising), or an intimate one (as between the artist and an audience of one).
Fine artists learn the foundational skills of effective design, composition, color choice and more because they know that those artistic choices, when effectively employed, will create symbolism, evoke emotion, and convey meaning. It is the constant honing of their craft that will produce “fine” works of art that will inspire and impact an audience, whether the channel for that art is a painting, a book, a sculpture, or an advertisement. “Fine” art is simply that which is finely expressed and executed.
Thanks, Keith, for your post. It helped me to answer some of my own questions about what I am doing , and further clarify in my own mind why the arts and dedicated artists—“fine,” illustrators, or otherwise—are all invaluable to our culture, and to our civilization.
Creating Better Digital Images of your Paintings. How to Ensure your Masterpiece is Best Represented Online and in Print
Most of us have had the experience of taking a photo of our painting, only to find out that it’s a distorted, too light/too dark, too blue, too red (insert your own adjective here) version of our beautiful painting. Then we go to Photoshop ( if we even know what kind of “animal” that is) to try and manipulate the image to make it look like the original. At the end of the session, we end up with an even worse image than we started with! How frustrating!
Well, Susan Abma and Jerry Goroski have some great tips on how to make the process of photographing your paintings (almost) painless!
Artists these days must do so many things – take photos of their work, post to Facebook , update their website, blog, etc. the list goes on and on…. all these activities leave limited time to actually create art. So how do we make sure we spend time painting, instead of manipulating technology? One way is to take better photos of our paintings. Here are some guidelines:
A good camera is an absolute must
What is a good camera? One with a glass lens. With cameras, as with most things in life, you get what you pay for. A cheap camera has a plastic lens, which distorts the image. A camera with a glass lens will give you a detailed, sharp, intense image. Buy the best camera you can afford. As a general guideline, a camera costing at least $300-$400 will have a glass lens.
Never use an IPad or Iphone image for print
The resolution is not high enough, and you will get a grainy, distorted image every time
Lens Tips
A longer lens, further back takes a sharper image than a 15mm lens close up. Get a zoom lens – at least a 15-85mm.
Lighting and setting up paintings
Using photo lamps indoors can change the colors of your painting dramatically. Susan and Jerry recommend taking your painting outdoors on an overcast day or in shade (but not deep shadow). Put an easel in a perfectly straight vertical position (measure to make sure it’s perfectly vertical). Put your camera on a tripod. Use of gray card (if one can be found) is recommended to calibrate the color. Another way to calibrate color is to place a piece of white foam core in front of the camera on a tripod exactly square to your image, and take a photo of that. Your camera will now have a guideline for white, and will adjust all the other colors accordingly.
Always take your painting out of the frame to avoid cast shadows. It does not matter what color you choose to put behind the easel. Again, make sure your painting on the easel is in a perfectly vertical position, you want to limit having to crop the image. Try to keep your camera at the same angle (vertically) as your painting. This will help in eliminating glare.
Back up your camera!. Shoot your photo from farther away, with a longer lens. That’s it!.
If your image quality is not where it should be, retake the photo, rather than trying to manipulate the image in Photoshop. Take as many shots as you can, so you have lots to choose from later on.
Manipulating images in Photoshop
If your image quality is bad, there is not much a printer can actually do with your image. Try to avoid extensive Photoshop manipulation at all costs, unless you are a Photoshop super-user (expert). All computer monitors are different, so the color you see on one, will not necessarily match the color on another monitor. If you have several computers, check the image on all of them. Manipulate the image in Photoshop by very small percentages, because small % changes alter the image dramatically. Overly manipulated shots usually come out very dark and muddy off the press.
When manipulating images in Photoshop, DO:
- Darken images
- Lighten images
- Sharpen images
DON’T:
- Manipulate color, unless you are a Photoshop expert. Just try to take a better photo!
- Adjust light/dark curves more than 2% either way. Adjusting by a higher percent will result in grainy images coming from the printing press.
- Adjust color in curves. If you need to adjust color, or light/dark by a large percentage, take another photo!
Photoshop is a very expensive program to buy. If you do not have Photoshop on your computer, a cheaper program will do just fine for the above manipulation of images. No need to invest in Photoshop. Save your money for a better camera!
Jpegs vs. TIFs
Most printing facilities require images in TIF format, rather than Jpegs. You can save your image as a TIF file in your computer, but the image needs to be a higher resolution – aim for a resolution of 300. When you change the resolution of your image in Photoshop, if resolution is increased 4 times, the other dimensions need to decrease 4 times. That is the way to obtain a crisp image. Normally, the image from your camera will be in a resolution of 72. Keep your original (unchanged) image file, because when you manipulate a file, it completely changes the image. Save the manipulated files under another name.
Closing thoughts
Final words of advice from Susan and Jerry – If you can at all afford to have your work professionally photographed, do it. Otherwise, spend more time learning how to take good photos, than learning how to manipulate Photoshop!
Important Website Considerations for Artists: Part 3 of 3
This article is part 3 of a 3-part series discussing important website considerations for artists. The first part laid out some general thoughts to keep in mind during the initial stages of creating your art website. The second piece attempted to put complex website elements into simple terms.
Part 3: Implementation – Putting it all together
In today’s world, your website is likened to a business card, giving you credibility, basic details about yourself and a way for others to contact you. If you’ve read the past two parts of this series, you know it must reflect the excellence and perfection of your artwork, as well as be inexpensive to maintain and easy to edit, which is why WordPress may be your best bet. Assuming you’ve read my tips on setting up your website in Part 2, you may be asking, “So, how do I design a great website?”
Navigation
When designing a website or choosing a theme, I believe that it is much more important to design through the lenses of usability than esthetics. Sure, your website should be beautiful and pleasing to the eye because it reflects your excellent artwork, but the colors and layout is much less important than your visitors ability to move around the site.
If a visitor comes to your site, but cannot navigate easily, it is very unlikely that they will hang around long. So it’s essential that your site navigation be blatantly obvious, intuitive and consistent.
Blatantly obvious navigation
Make your links easy to see. A usable website will incorporate vertical or horizontal links that are either shaped as buttons, tabs or use colors to distinguish them as links. If your site navigation uses the same font, size and color as the rest of the text on your site, it will be very difficult for a user to discern between text and links.
Intuitive navigation
Your links should describe with simplicity what the user is being linked to. Terms such as “store”, “portfolio”, “contact us” and “home” are widely used and understood. If you get too creative in the titles for your web pages, it will only succeed in confusing your guests. It’s like being at a restaurant where they get too creative in theming the names to the Men’s and Women’s restrooms… using a different language or some ancient hieroglyphic symbol can leave you feeling real embarrassed when you wind up choosing the wrong door.
Consistent navigation
This is a common mistake for most beginners. For example, when you visit the home page, the navigation is on the top, but then it’s on the bottom on the next page. Later on, it may move over to the side, or change verbiage. Even for a familiar web-user, this can be confusing and cause them frustration — even to the point of finding another site to browse. Do yourself and your visitors a favor: keep your navigation consistent on every page.
Connecting with your visitors
There are a few methods of connecting with your visitors. Because of SPAM-bots that scan websites for e-mail addresses and then bombard your inbox with junk mail, it’s recommended that you avoid listing your e-mail address on your website. If you must share your e-mail address, I recommend using the following code to help throw the SPAM-bots off the trail:
Replacing the @ symbol with @ and period with . is a method of protecting your e-mail address from being hunted down and mercilessly overwhelmed with SPAM e-mail.
Contact Forms
Another excellent way of letting your visitors connect with you, and my preferred method, is using a contact form. WordPress offers a number of superb form options, with my favorite being Gravity Forms, allowing you to easily create a form that can be used for contacting you, taking polls or making purchases. The benefit to the contact form is that it doesn’t require your visitors to use their default e-mail program. Have you ever clicked an e-mail address on a website and all of a sudden the website disappears and a program you never use opens up? This is the default effect of linking to an e-mail address. Instead, I recommend linking either the text “Contact Us” or, if you must, your e-mail address to a contact form. The contact form, when submitted, will safely send you an e-mail and return a confirmation such as “Thank you for contacting us! We’ll reply shortly.”
Social Media
Social Media is the general term for tools such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, MySpace and other platforms that allow you to create a profile and use their features while connecting with others. Depending on your business, different platforms may be more useful than others. Let me explain a few of them:
Facebook is the most widely used social media platform. It originally started with college users, but has since grown to welcome children, grandparents, businesses and celebrities. By posting photos, videos, links and comments, Facebook users can keep in touch with a wide range of friends, family and coworkers easily. Facebook is an excellent resource for artists who want to feature artwork and keep their collectors and potential followers updated. Facebook provides some great tools, such as the “Like Box” and “Activity Feed” to help you easily integrate Facebook with your website.
Twitter seems to strike the most fear in people’s eyes when it is mentioned. And, other than fear of the unknown, there is little reason for this. Twitter is a social media platform allowing you to post short (140-characters or less) status updates, called “tweets”. Other Twitter users can “follow” you, which allows them to receive regular updates on your status updates. Twitter appeals to quick-paced hipsters and executives alike who prefer to get straight to business, cutting away the clutter of videos and long-winded Facebook status updates. Twitter uses a few symbols to help users shorten their tweets:
- The “@” symbol is used refer to someone’s username
- The “#” symbol, or hashtag, denotes a subject or keyword, making it easy to search for or join in a conversation
- “DM” means direct message and is used to send a private message
- “RT” means “retweet” and is used to forward someone else’s tweet
- URLs are frequently shortened to save space. Twitter will do this for you automatically.
A great Twitter example for an artist would be:
@OilPaintAmerica Check out my artwork being featured at the #OPANationalShow this year! //bit.ly/uxHSPX
Pinterest is a newcomer but has quickly taken the social media world by surprise. Pinterest is a digital pin-board of creative ideas. Thousands of creative crafts, recipes, outfits, haircuts, architecture designs and cute quips are posted daily. As an artist, I believe this is a great opportunity to share your paintings with the world. Simply post your paintings, linking them to your website or blog, and Pinterest users will “pin” your paintings if they like them. They may even begin to follow you on Pinterest, in which case their friends would see your artwork and could lead to more artwork sales.
LinkedIn is the serious side of social networking. Geared towards the executive or businessperson, LinkedIn has become the generally-accepted digital resume. As you connect to others in LinkedIn, your network of connections grows, giving you credibility and potential job opportunities. This would be a great option for an artist wishing to connect with publishers, businesses looking for artwork or portraiture, as well as side-jobs or a way to stay connected with others in the business world.
Keeping it all organized
There are many more social networking options coming out every year. My word of advice is to pick one or two that you feel comfortable engaging with and then focus on those alone. Do not feel the need to master every new trick the internet throws at you.
For those of you who want to try your hand at a few social networks, I recommend using a desktop program such as TweetDeck, which allows you to post to multiple platforms with a single click.
Search Engine Optimization
I’m going to keep this section short, because there is a lot of information about Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, on the web. SEO is the process of creating websites that are simple for search engines to understand, making it easy for search engines such as Google and Bing to present your site to visitors.
A few things to know about SEO:
- It’s not an overnight job. It’s a process. Count on it taking longer if you have a lot of competition who is actively pursuing high search engine rankings.
- Focus on content before tricks. Similar to “If you build it, they will come.” in SEO, “If you provide valuable information, your ranking will improve.”
- Proper coding matters. Use a web designer that knows what they are doing and a search engine-friendly platform like WordPress.
Strategy
Begin with the end in mind. We talked about this a bit in the first part. Begin with a clearly defined goal so that you can focus on achieving it. If your goal is to collect a large list of subscribers to your blog or newsletter, then make your sign-up form obvious and the sign-up process simple. If you’re goal is to increase the amount of people seeing your artwork, integrate social media with your website and be active on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. If you want to sell artwork at all costs, make your online store flawless and offer to mail artwork out to buyers to inspect, giving them 72 hours to send back the artwork or purchase it. There are many strategies. Choose one that fits your personality and goals and stick to it.
Don’t be afraid to have a simple website. Your website can be very simple and doesn’t need to be updated often. But make it professional so that it reflects your product. Though, I recommend that at the very least, use a Facebook or Twitter feed as a way to provide fresh content on your site.
Try something new. Give blogging a try. Tweet. Give something away for free on your website… you’re an artist! You’re supposed to be the crazy type! 😉 Do something fun and take a risk!
Learn from some of the great minds of our day. Read the writings of Seth Godin, John C. Maxwell, Dave Ramsey or Michael Hyatt. These thinkers are shaking the way marketers sell, leaders stir and people spend.
In Summary
Part 1 spoke about adapting to a digital world as an artist, as well as general goal-setting. Part 2 detailed the backbones of a website and a few steps to getting a website set up. This article gave some next steps after you have a site up and running: easy-to-use navigation, connecting with your visitors, and additional strategic tips. We at OPA hope this has been helpful and welcome your thoughts, criticism and questions. Thanks for reading the OPA Blog!
If you have questions, feel free to visit www.steckinsights.com for consulting or website advice.