It’s been the subject of much discussion, some suggesting that it is misleading enough that it should be rethought entirely, but the color wheel remains the most common and convenient method for visually understanding and comparing the relationships of different hues.

As part of the Gutenberg-e project by the American Historical Association and Columbia University Press, Sarah Lowengard has written a scholarly treatise on The Creation of Color in Eighteenth-Century Europe, the third chapter of which, Number Order, Form, delves into the history of color wheels and other visual systems of ordering and visualizing the relationships of colors.

The link going around the web currently (I found it on Digg) is to a post on the Color Lovers blog, which has extracted selections from her paper into an article on the History of the Color Wheel.

Color circles have been used to describe associations of colors from medieval times, but the first known example of the representation of hue in the form of a wheel, or circle, commonly suggested as the original color wheel, is traced to Sir Isaac Newton; whose keen mind was for some time focused on the nature of light and color.

Other systematic visual arrangements of colors precede it, like Tobias Mayer’s Trhchromatic Graph [correction - see below], which he first described in 1758 (interpreted by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, image above, top left), but Newton’s circle is recognizable as the predecessor of the one in modern art texts. (For a couple of color wheels that I find particularly useful, see my links to Bruce MacEvoy’s artist pigment color wheels on handprint at the end of this article.)

Newton’s experimentation splitting sunlight with a prism is relatively well-known. (It’s still a fun and instructive practice is you haven’t indulged in it, I got mine from Edmund Scientific.)

Less well known is Newton’s original color circle, or hue circle, which was actually a kind of pie-chart (image above, top right), in which the bands of color he observed were distributed in wedges corresponding to their width in the observed spectrum, and arranged around the circle in the order of their wavelength. Newton emphasized that his circle represented the properties of the color of light (additive color), not artists’ pigments (subtractive color).

It was Newton who accomplished something that I have long been fascinated with, and confused by — the “closing of the circle”.

Physical wavelengths of light, which our eyes and brains interpret as different hues, can be thought of a part of a linear arrangement, segments of the electromagnetic spectrum; a continuous band of wavelengths of energy from the very short (X-rays and Gamma rays), with wavelengths measured in the distances equivalent to atomic nuclei, to the very long (radio waves) with wavelengths measured in distances on a human scale (meters or 10’s of meters).

The spectrum of visible light sits somewhere in between, at wavelengths the size of protozoa (micrometers, or millionths of a meter, also known as microns), ranging from red on the short end at 700nm, to violet on the long end at 400nm.

But how, my fevered little brain would like to know, does this linear relationship bend back on itself, like the optical equivalent of a Möebius strip, and connect in a continuous band; and how does it fit into that neat and oh-so-convenient system of primary, secondary and tertiary colors, triads; and in particular, the dramatic, and apparently biologically founded, relationship of color wheel opposites, or complimentary colors?

This seems to have something to do with a “gap” in the color wheel, between the physical wavelengths of red and violet, in which the purples fill in with colors that are not discrete frequencies on the spectrum, but combinations of others.

I have to admit that I’m still basically unclear about this, but let’s face it, we always knew purple was weird.

Correction and addendum: Divid Briggs, author of The Dimensions of Color, was kind enough to write a comment and point out that though many systems of color charts precede Newton, Mayer’s was not one of them.

He also appears to have an answer to my question about the “closing of the circle”, which comes from the opponent model of vision. He explains if briefly in his comment on this post, and in more detail on The Dimensions of Color.

It turns out that I’m obliquely familiar with this model of human vision, which is based on two “channels” or scales of color, redness vs greenness and yellowness vs blueness, and a lightness scale or channel, in that this is the color model on which the LAB (CIELAB) color space is modeled.

CIELAB (”LAB color”) is a color space used in Photoshop, and is the fundamental color space on which Photoshop bases its interpretations of other color spaces. If you convert between CMYK and RGB, for example, Photoshop converts to the first color space to LAB and then from LAB to the other. (Here’s Adobe’s Technote.)

The CIELAB color space, based in part on Munsell but founded on the biological way in which the cones in the eye react to color, was codified in 1931 by the Commission Internationale d’Eclairage (International Commission on Illumination) to describe all colors visible to the human eye.

The closed circle of the color wheel is a product of the related opponent model of vision in which the interaction of the redness to greenness and blueness to yellowness scales forms a circle, and the oppositions produce the famous complimentary color effects with which artists are so familiar.

So there’s my answer. It’s in the eye of the beholder.

Ben Grosser is an artist and composer who also directs the Imaging Technology Group at the Beckman Institute. As a painter, Grosser paints large scale non-represenational works. After being frustrated early in his painting career by the cost of large easels that would accommodate his desire to paint large canvasses, he decided to build his own.

Impressed by the helpfulness of the free information of various kinds on the web at the time (1998), Grosser decided to contribute his plans to those interested and posted them on his website.

He has continued that practice and the plans, which are detailed, accompanied by a materials list and photographs, are available freely on his web site today.

With them, he states that even a novice, with borrowed tools and no woodworking experience, can build their own large easel for under $100, handling paintings as well as some large easels costing many times that much.

There is also a gallery of photos from people who have built their own easels using Grosser’s plans (images above, bottom row), as well as emails with anecdotes, descriptions of customizations and clever enhancements, and even stories of easels built from scrap materials for under $20, some of them looking wonderfully rough hewn and rustic.

Grosser was offering easily downloadable PDF versions of his plans, but his generosity was repaid by scavengers ripping off his free plans, stripping out his credits and selling them on eBay as if they had created them; so he has had to discontinue the PDFs. The web based plans, however, remain available.

If you decide to build an easel, be sure to send him photos and comments about your experience.

[Link via Ujwala Prabhu]

I love pen and ink drawing. It has a visual charm and character unlike any other medium.

I assume that I came by my affection for it from realizing as a teenager that pen and ink drawing was the basis for comic books and cartoons, but I was also exposed at a pretty early age to the amazing pen and ink illustrations of Howard Pyle and other illustrators of the Brandywine School in my visits to the Delaware Art Museum, where I also encountered beautiful pen drawings by some of the Pre-Raphaelite artists.

It’s medium that doesn’t get as much attention as more colorful forms of expression, but it’s still there as the basis for much illustration, comics, cartoons and concept art, as well as standing on it’s own as a method of sketching or creating finished drawings.

There are some good resources out there on pen drawing if you dig for them, and you’ll occasionally find some for free.

A case is point is the Project Gutenberg eBook version of Pen Drawing by Charles Maginnis. (Amazon listing here)

This is a relatively short treatise published in 1903, at a time when pen drawing was in its heyday as a ubiquitous method of drawing that could be easily and inexpensively be mass reproduced as illustrations in books and periodicals.

The tone and attitude of the text are a bit dated, but is fascinating as a bit of history for that, and the instruction is basically sound.

The illustrations are not reproduced well, one of the frustrating things about Project Gutenberg that I’ve railed about before, but some of them fare better than others and can give you a taste for some of the excellent pen and ink artists featured from that era, including Joseph Pennell, Daniel Vierge, Herbert Railton, B. G. Goodhue (image above, top), Martin Rico and Maxime LaLanne.

Author Charles Maginnis was a noted architect and the book is slanted a bit toward architectural rendering and supplemented with the author’s own drawings (image above, bottom), but he also includes examples from more figurative artists like Howard Pyle, Will Bradley and Alfonse Mucha.

If this whets your appetite and you want physical pen and ink instruction books with high resolution images of great pen and ink drawing, look for copies of Joseph Pennel’s Pen Drawing, Pen Draughtsmen and Arthur Guptill’s Rendering in Pen and Ink.

[Link via ArtDemonstrations.com]

Though its title might suggest a more general interest magazine devoted to drawing, Draw! magazine is focused on topics of relevance to comic book art, animation and related varieties of illustration.

Each issue features how-to articles and tutorials from industry professionals, profiles of artists working in those fields and in-depth interviews.

Draw! is edited by Mike Manley, long time comics veteran who has worked on titles like Batman, Shazam, Darkhawk and numerous other titles for DC, Marvel and Dark Horse, as well as being a storyboard artist and background designer for Walt Disney, MTV, Warner Brothers and the Cartoon Network.

Manley, who is an extreme multi-tasker, is currently back in school going for a degree in painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and also teaches drawing and animation related subjects at the Delaware College of Art and Design (where I teach a class in Adobe Flash). I’ve had the pleasure of knowing Mike for a number of years and he’s also an all-around nice guy (but don’t tell him I said so…). I’ll cover more on Mike’s other accomplishments in a future post.

In recent years Manley has been focusing much of his attention on Draw!, working to make it a focal point for those interested in the skills involved in creating comic book art and animation. He has gotten a long list of industry pros to contribute, and has also formed a core group of regular contributors who give the magazine a solid foundation, including Bret Blevins, Paule Rivoche and Alberto Ruiz.

Draw! is an 80 page magazine, mixing black and white and color pages, and sells for $6.95 U.S. Manley packs it tight with how-to insights and artist profiles from cover to cover. Draw! is published by TwoMorrows publishing, which also publishes other comics related titles like Rough Stuff, Write Now!, Alter Ego and The Jack Kirby Collector.

You can often find Draw! in comic book specialty shops, and larger bookstores. (If your local comics shop or bookstore doesn’t carry it, you might be able to convince them to do so.)

You can also order individual issues and subscriptions from the Draw! website. Unfortunately, the official Draw! web site isn’t well designed or maintained, and does a poor job of showcasing the magazine. (I don’t think Manley has control over the site, I think TwoMorrows is responsible for it, as the TwoMorrows site is poorly designed and arranged as well.) You may get more of a picture of the magazine’s contents from other sources, like Manley’s interview with Alex Horley as reprinted on Newsarama.

The most recent issue of Draw! that I have (#15, Spring, 2008), is a bit of a departure from the usual format. It’s called the “Back to School Issue” and features an overview and in-depth look at the major art and specialty schools in the U.S. that are now offering dedicated courses of study in comics and related arts, including The Joe Kubert School of Cartooning and Graphic Art, The Center for Cartoon Studies, The Minneapolis College of Art and Design, the School of Visual Arts, and the Savannah College of Art and Design.

I think the new issue (#16) is due out soon, but you can still order #15 through the site (even though they mislabel it as “Winter 2008″ instead of “Spring 2008″). You can also order downloadable PDF versions of recent issues for $2.95, several collections of the Best of Draw! and Manley’s How to Create Comics From Script to Print in both trade paperback and DVD versions.

For those who are drawn to the siren call of “creative” endeavors, whether it be in any form of “the arts”, the process of making a living is often one of struggle, compromise and at times even desperation. Artists of all stripes are notoriously not a group associated with business acumen and across-the board financial success. Though some do extremely well, and are good at those aspects of managing their lives and careers. many are not.

If your work isn’t well known to millions, or in demand in circles where it can command the highest rates, it may be difficult to work out a creative living from the traditional pathways.

But what if there were an unorthodox business model for artists, musicians, writers and other creative individuals in the modern world, that didn’t depend on the kind of large-scale acceptance often associated with success in those fields?

What if artists could make a good, ongoing living from a smaller number of people who happen to love their work? Instead of having to appeal to millions, what if they could make their living on the devoted following of just 1,000 individuals, 1,000 “True Fans”?

Some background:

Kevin Kelley helped launch Wired magazine in 1993, and served as its Executive Editor until 1999. He co-founded the WELL, one of the first online services, started in 1985, and was also the publisher and Editor of the Whole Earth Review, a “journal of unorthodox technical news”. The latter is where I first encountered him, and came to hold his knack for reviewing cool stuff in high regard; as I recommended to you in my post on Blurb and Lulu, which referenced his review of same on his high-profile Cool Tools web site.

One of Kelley’s former Wired alumni, Chris Anderson, coined the phrase The Long Tail in a 2004 Wired article, to put a name to the phenomenon of business like Amazon.com or Netflix succeeding in profiting from selling low volume items, but lots and lots of different ones, as opposed to the usual retail goal of only selling a lower selection of highly popular items. (See the article on Wikipedia.)

Kelley, no slouch when it comes to ideas and thinking through the ramifications of things, posted an article, 1,000 True Fans, yesterday on his blog/column The Technium (from which the graphic above is taken), that takes off from this premise with an unusual suggestion.

In it he has put forth the notion that the same technology that allows this kind of approach, which, by its nature seems to leave out the small seller, can in fact empower individual artists (visual, musical, literary or other), if they can culture the devotion of a certain number of True Fans.

Kelley defines a True Fan as “…someone who will purchase anything and everything you produce. They will drive 200 miles to see you sing. They will buy the super deluxe re-issued hi-res box set of your stuff even though they have the low-res version. They have a Google Alert set for your name. They bookmark the eBay page where your out-of-print editions show up. They come to your openings. They have you sign their copies. They buy the t-shirt, and the mug, and the hat. They can’t wait till you issue your next work.”

He posits that if a True Fan spends an average of one days wages per year in support of your endeavors, stating that this is probably conservative, as your Truest Fan will spend more than that, there is a certain number at which they can support the artist. If the average spending figure is $100 per year, 1,000 True Fans works out to $100,000 a year, a decent living for most people.

Kelly goes on to say: “..the actual number may vary depending on the media. Maybe it is 500 True Fans for a painter and 5,000 True Fans for a videomaker.” [...] “But in fact the actual number is not critical, because it cannot be determined except by attempting it.”

The point isn’t the number: the point is that there is a number of True Fans, at which individual artists of various kinds can make a living.

He continues: “I am suggesting there is a home for creatives in between poverty and stardom. Somewhere lower than stratospheric bestsellerdom, but higher than the obscurity of the long tail.”

But he also cautions that dealing with True Fans is time and attention intensive, and that not everyone has the temperament to culture a base of True Fans. They may need someone to run interference, like an agent, a rep, an aggressively devoted gallery or other intermediary, who is willing to share the load, but must also share in the profit, hence making the “magic number” higher to support the duo.

But, if your goal is to make a living from your art, as opposed to a choice between striving for stardom or accepting poverty, perhaps it’s a viable model.

Kelley ends his article (which goes into much more depth than my skimmed description here) with a call for those who have chosen such a path to let him know. Presumably, some interesting personal stories will be added as word gets out.

[Link via BoingBoing and Waxy]

ArtDemonstrations.com is a blog in which the author has collected and shares links to various art demonstrations and tutorials he has come across on the web.

Some of them are more useful than others and they take several forms, from a few steps in a painting process shown as photos, to longer step-by step breakdowns, to time-lapse videos of the creation of drawings or paintings (like the portrait drawing by Barrett Bailey shown above), to full half hour or more videos of painting demonstrations.

At first I thought that the blog might be from someone associated with SmartFlix, an instructional video rental service that features a number of art instruction DVDs, because of the ubiquitous banner. There is also a list of text links under his Google ads that look like a blogroll, but are actually links (presumably paid links) to items in the SmartFlix store. These are videos that might be of interest, but the listings feature no actual online demos or articles.

Apparently, though, SmartFlix is just a sponsor the author encountered after doing a short post on them. (They’ve contacted me as well, but I haven’t had a chance to check into the service yet. I’ll try to rent a video or two and give you a report in the near future.)

Some of the ArtDemonstrations.com posts are links to short promos for artists’ commercial video releases, including short excerpts from a new instructional painting video, The Portrait Sketch, by Jeremy Lipking, as well as other video clips of him.

In addition to Jeremy Lipking, the blog points to demos by other artists that I’ve mentioned on lines and colors, including Tony Ryder, Duane Keiser, and a couple by William Whitaker (from the blog’s listings for November, 2005)

Other posts mention books and web archives of books, as well as tidbits like old film of Picasso at work and a PDF of an article on Sargent’s painting methods (PDF link 28k) posted by Craig Mullins.

In addition to Mullins there are a few mentions of concept artists, though that’s one of the largest areas of available tutorials on the web, particularly in the portals like CG Society and ConceptArt.org. Still, most people with a particular interest in concept art are aware of those sources and I think ArtDemonstrations.com is better aimed at the broader art community.

Unfortunately, the author, who I can find referenced only as “Jeff” (and is apparently an artist himself and has contributed one or two of his own demos), doesn’t seem to post often; and has not yet included a number of readily available painting demos I’ve come across on YouTube and other places.

The idea of trying to collect a central reference for available art tutorials on the web is a terrific one, and I would love to see it pursued more aggressively; but instead of complaining, I should be thanking Jeff for sharing what he has.

Most artists who have done much life drawing are familiar with sanguine, usually as a color of conté crayon or colored pencil. Not that many, however, have drawn with real sanquine.

Sanguine (Hematite) is a red-brown iron-oxide chalk, usually mined in Italy. It’s color, particularly when used on cream paper with touches of white, makes it wonderfully suited for figure drawing, and it was a staple tool of the old masters.

Sanguine was used widely before the development of conté or modern drawing crayons, which are made from ground pigments mixed with oil emulsion binders; and it allows for a degree of subtlety and control beyond what those convenience chalks offer, provided you’re prepared to deal with it as a “raw” drawing material.

KM Scott Moore has posted a wonderful short tutorial on Drawingboard.org titled Renaissance Style Drawing (Sanguine) — A Tutorial (images above), that goes through the basics of sanguine, from purchase to use, with a series of clear photographs. He shows starting a drawing with rough chunks of the material simply hand held; then, looking almost like tiny flint arrowheads, the chipped pieces of sanguine are set into a holder commonly used for uncased chalks and conté and used for detail work and hatching.

I was aware that sanguine, like the more processed chalks, can be smeared and stomped to create smooth tones; what I didn’t know until reading Moore’s article is that the sanguine dust, because it doesn’t have the oily binders found in the processed crayons, can be mixed with water to form a kind of “ink”, and washed on with a brush or even a pen.

Moore purchased his sanguine from Kremer Pigments in NY, now part of Sinopia. Here is their catalog listing for sanguine “lumps”.

The Cennini Catalog from Studio Products offers “reconstituted” sanguine, a powdered form mixed with Gum Tragacanth (a non-oily binder) to make extruded chalks that handle much like the original, but are less expensive.

Rob Howard, founder of Studio Products, has posted this beautiful sanguine drawing, a copy of a drawing by Hyacinthe Rigaud (more info here).

For many other sanguine drawings, see most old master drawings described as “red chalk” prior to the 1600’s.

The word “sanguine” comes from old French and Latin words meaning bloody or blood colored. The association of reddish faces with a courageous or hopeful disposition in European cultures, as well as it’s part in medieval explanations of physiology involving sanguine “humors“, led to the common use of the word to mean cheerful or optimistic.

Which leaves us with a nice double meaning for “sanguine drawing”.

[Link via Danny's Art Notes]

100 Photoshop Tutorials, subtitled “for creating beautiful art”, is a set of digital art how-to articles from numerous artists, collected and accessed through a large page of thumbnail images.

Somewhat confusingly, though the majority of them seem to be for 2-D digital painting, the site on which they are hosted is called “3D Total“. The site devotes space to both 3-D and 2-D digital art, however.

Hovering your mouse over the large thumbnail images on the 100 tutorial page produces a “tool tip” style floating box with some information about the tutorial by it’s creator. Unfortunately, this feature is a bit buggy in Safari, and the pop-up boxes often appear below the current screen when scrolling through the page. Browsing isn’t difficult, though, as the tutorial pages are fast loading, and you can get a good idea of the subject of each tutorial from the nature of the image.

Many are of digital painting techniques are for figures, environments, landscapes, and characters, and would be of particular interest to digital painters and concept artists.

The style and approach of the artists included offers a nice variety, and digital artists of differing interests are likely to find material relevant to their own preferences.

Most of the tutorials deal with the techniques involved in the creation of a specific image, and range from three to six pages in length. A good number of them seem to be from 2d Artist, the PDF-based online magazine devoted to digital art techniques.

[Link via Digg]

When I last wrote about Zuda Comics, DC Comics’ recent venture into webcomics, I pointed out two of the new webcomics that I thought were standouts, Bayou and High Moon. Both of them are now running as features, and are prominently promoted on the Zuda Comics home page.

High Moon is a horror/western by writer David Gallaher and artist Steve Ellis, with lettering by Scott O. Brown.

The High Moon team has been chronicling their work on the strip in a blog, from initial proposal to acceptance and production of the currently running strip.

It’s a loose, stream-of-consciousness kind of account, as blogs commonly are, but it covers many aspects of the process of creating a webcomic (or print comic, for that matter). You’ll find posts on initial concept designs and character sketches, photo reference, notes on writing and preparing the project for submission to DC Comics, plot breakdowns, page layouts, decisions about word balloon placement and, of course, preparation of the final art for the pages.

There is a recent post that starts to go into more detail about that process, in which artist Steve Ellis shows how he creates the unusual look of the comic.

He draws the pencils and inks in the traditional manner and scans the art into Photoshop. This is the most common method of working in the comics field today, though some comics artists, in particular some webcomics artists (like yours truly), do all of the drawing directly on the computer with a pressure sensitive tablet.

Ellis often adds to his drawing once it’s in digital form and then applies an unusual step in that he tones the final ink drawing with color adjustments in Photoshop, giving the entire work a sepia, old-photograph look particularly suited to the story and its setting. He further adds to the gritty texture of the images by leaving some of his pencil marks in place, eschewing the ultra-smooth look preferred in many mainstream comics.

Under the toned inks go a layer of color fields, that fill in color areas for the main forms, and on top of the ink layer goes another layer of detailed color highlights and final touches to make the finished image snap.

As I pointed out in my previous article on Zuda Comics, one of the things they have done brilliantly (in sharp contrast to the history of the “big two” publishers’ less than stellar forays into webcomics) is to utilize the medium to advantage in offering the option to view the pages at high-resolution. This enables you to not only get a cinematic feeling when reading the comics, but also a more detailed look at the artwork than afforded in normal printed comics or smaller-scale web comics.

When viewing the comic pages you have the option at the bottom right of the page frame to choose a full screen mode, and then read through the pages at that size. This is a wonderful feature, and particularly enjoyable with a comic as interesting and well-drawn as High Moon (see detail from the top-left panel of the final page in the image at left, bottom).

BTW, for those of you who may be too young to be aware of it, the title High Moon is a perfect take on the title of the 1952 Fred Zinnemann classic with Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly (not to mention Lon Chaney Jr.).

Suppose you’re meeting an art director and you want to leave behind printed samples of your work.

You could print out some pages on your home printer and try to assemble them in an office store report cover, or you could go down to Kinkos and have them print and bind it in some kind of corporate report package; you could give them a disk and hope they take the trouble to view it, or you could just give up and beg them to bookmark your web site.

Imagine the difference, though, if instead of a printed pamphlet, you leave a full-color, glossy, hardbound book of your work, complete with dust jacket.

Or…

Suppose you’ve been asked to present a gallery with some photographs of your work as a form of initial contact. Some galleries still asks specifically for slides, but if it’s up to you would you rather give them a pile of photos, computer print-outs, bound or not, or… a book of your paintings that looks like you just picked it up off the shelf at Barnes and Noble?

Or…

Perhaps you’d like to collect your work in a book and offer it for sale on your web site, something I know many artists would love to do, but consider out of reach. (I can see all of the “painting a day” artists sitting up and taking notice.)

Or…

Maybe you’d just like to have your paintings, or even a collection of your travel photos, arranged as a book that you can give to friends and family as gifts.

“But, Charley,” you say, looking at your computer screen with a quizzical and/or bemused expression, “this all sounds great, but I don’t recall inheriting a fortune lately, I can’t afford to pay thousands of dollars to have a book printed. Have you gone daft?”

“Why, no,” I say, “well, maybe…, but that doesn’t alter the fact that one-off printing of individual books has become practical and, in fact, is now remarkably affordable and easy.”

It used to be that printing a full-color book required and outlay of thousands for an extensive print run, making such things impractical unless you could attract the attention of a publisher willing to invest in publishing your book to a wide audience. In printing the general rule has always been that the more copies you printed, the cheaper each copy became, and you had to print a relatively high number to get the price point per copy to be remotely viable, particularly in color. The idea of printing a single copy of a full-color book was absurd.

Printing technology, though still slow to change by the standards of digital media, has made some amazing progress while we were busy being dazzled by the internet. New on-demand printing techniques, utilizing sophisticated ink-jet technology, have finally made the low print run and one-off printing of full color books, even hard-bound books, practical.

You can now put together an 8″x10″ (20×25 cm) 40 page full-color hard-bound book and print one copy for as little as $30, soft-cover for $20!

There are several companies now that offer inexpensive short-run or one-off on-demand printing using this new technology; the one I have experience with, and can recommend almost without reservation, is Blurb.

In the case of Blurb, the technology is the HP Indigo 5000 digital press. Some of you may be familiar with Apple’s iPhoto books, which use the same principle but are much more expensive.

You don’t have to be a graphic designer, or know how to use Quark or InDesign, to put a book together for printing by Blurb. You download Booksmart, their book template software for Mac or Windows (I used the Mac version) into which you load your digital images and arrange them in a choice of book sizes and page template variations. The software is well thought out and very easy for someone with no design experience to use. Graphics professionals will actually find it a bit restrictive, but it’s not aimed at us, and as a work-around you can use your own typography and layout in the form of full-page images. The process even allows you to do full bleeds (images that extend to the edges of the page) at no additional cost.

It’s suggested you do a test print from your home printer, and then upload the book to your Blurb account through the Booksmart software. In 7-10 working days (1-2 weeks) the UPS driver will plop your shiny new securely packaged book into your eager hands.

You can print in several sizes, from 7×7 inches (18×18cm), starting at $13 for up to 40 pages paperback, to their “coffee-table book” at 13×11 inches (33×28cm), which is hardcover only starting at $55.

Most importantly you will blown away by the quality of the results (providing, of course that you are careful in the preparation of the book on your end). The books look fantastic, the printing and color are absolutely beautiful and look remarkably professional. They may be printed on-demand, but these are bookstore quality books that you would be proud to offer for sale on your web site.

For more information, I’ll refer you to a more extensive review by Kevin Kelly, a reviewer whose opinion I trust and from whom I learned about Blurb, who also reviews another on-demand printing service, Lulu.

I don’t have direct experience with Lulu, but I mention it because Kelly does and because Blurb is about printing in color, it’s not the ideal solution for black and white printing, which should be much cheaper than even the remarkably inexpensive color of Blurb books. Lulu may be of particular interest to those printing black and white comics.

When preparing a book for Blurb printing, be sure to heed Kelly’s advice about blurred images, take care to photograph your work sharply and as professionally as possible. (I list a few resources about photographing artwork at the end of this post.)

Once your book is complete (and you’re seen at least one copy of the finished article to make sure that it’s the way you want it), you can order more, at a discount if it’s over 10 copies. You can also offer the book for sale through the Blurb bookstore.

When I was investigating Blurb, I didn’t have enough artwork in a state that I wanted to print in a book yet, so as a test I put together a book of photographs I took in Venice and published a 20 page Blurb book. You can see it here in the Blurb bookstore. Below the image of the book cover is a link where you can download a PDF preview of the first 15 pages that will give you some idea of the Booksmart template layouts, at least as I have used them.

The image above shows that book in the Booksmart software on screen, the actual delivered book open to the same page and the book cover (inset).

If you’re at all curious about Blurb, you can create a small Blurb book for as little as $13 (plus shipping) just to check out the process. A friend of mine just did that and was delighted and amazed with the results.

So what are you waiting for? You’re only a couple of weeks away from being a published!