My art is flat on the floor. The camera is pointing down. I use a carpenter’s level to level both the camera and the arm of the tripod.

Most important I wait for a not too cloudy day (but no sun). I place the art close to a big floor window–actually a wide door whose glass is from the floor. The art is close to this “cloudy” light; say two feet away.

All the focusing has been done and the camera is focused on the center of the art. Use a timer.

The slightly cloudy day is important because it eliminates reflections from canvas texture, and it gives true color (the sun is just let me say impossible).

Sorry this is so general. Hope you can figure it out.

Robert Tracy

You are a treasure for other artists. The information you provide is unbiased, excellent and to the point. I’ve posted about your series on my blog and hope it helps generate lots of new readers for yours in the process.

Thanks for your unselfish and informative contributions to the visual artist community.

Your site is a morning essential!
thank you!
-jay

If you only have Illustrator, I’m not sure what to suggest. Illustrator doesn’t seem to want to anti-alias the vector shapes when exporting to JPEG.

The best I can suggest is use Export: JPEG, not Save for Web. Choose a custom resolution setting of 300 or better at your print size. Choose Baseline JPEG. Leave the compression setting at the highest (probably 10), i.e. largest file size.

You may also have better luck saving as a TIFF file.

Could I ask for some advice regarding JPEGS? I am trying to send my A4 illustrations via email and a format ready for printing.

I have created fashion mood boards in Adobe Illustrator and when I convert them to JPEGS on the highest resolution setting my images come out looking very pixelated. How can I improve my images?

Thank you :-)

However, given your description I think I should point out that you can’t copyright an idea or a general story line. (Otrherwise most current movies and television shows couldn’t exist in their formulaic, derivative state.) To enforce copyright infringement, you must be able to show close similarity to an existing work, i.e. an actual story, image or other work.

Nor can you copyright a character. Characters can be trademarked, however, if they are used as a symbol for commerce (e.g. Mickey Mouse). The rules here can be more vague, but trademark is a much more involved and expensive process than copyright. See this quick overview from the US Patent and Trademark office: http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/doc/general/whatis.htm

This is where you need more guidance and information than I can give you in a paragraph or two. Try a search on patents and trademarks, and/or intellectal property, at Amazon. There are lawyers, of varying degrees of expense, that specialize in these areas.

It’s an area in which I don’t have much experience because I don’t personally like to work within their limitations, although they’re great for some things (blogs, for instance), but that’s a very personal bias. (I tend to turn down design jobs that involve CMS, just because I don’t want to take the trouble to learn them.) For a given job or individual, though, they can be an excellent and powerful choice for creating and managing a web site. I do know there are some online gallery CMS that a number of artists use as their galleries, particlualrly concept artists, and I’ll try to look into these. Best I can suggest in the meantime is to search for some reviews and comparisons to see what other people report from personal experience with them.