As necessary is it is these days for artists to have a presence online, there are times when print is the medium of choice for showing one’s artwork, whether as a leave-behind for galleries, a sample book or portfolio for prospective clients or as a printed book for collectors.

I wrote back in 2008 about Blurb, and other modern print-on-demand services that allow you to create and print a professional looking 8x 10″ book, up to 40 pages, in quantities as few a one copy, for as little as $20; providing a terrific alternative to traditional means of printing portfolios or sample sheets for presentation to galleries, potential clients or buyers.

These are printed on Hewlett Packard’s Indigo digital press, in a process that produces results close to the more expensive process of offset lithography. The pages are bright and crisp with rich color, well suited to inexpensively reproduce color artwork and photography.

Blurb books are bound like a book and have a minimum of 20 pages; nice if you have a fair bit of work to present.

For a smaller body of work, an alternative resource is MagCloud, a service from HP that uses the Indigo press to produce short run on-demand magazines. This allows you to not only create a short run magazine on a schedule if you like, but also to create magazine-like printings that you can order yourself to use as handouts, or gallery leave-behinds, that can be as few as 4 or as many as 100 pages.

For magazines with more pages, they also offer a “perfect bound” option (a square binding as opposed to the fold and staple, or “saddle stitched” binding used in thinner magazines). These can be from 20 to 384 pages.

Unlike Blurb, which offers a free software application to allow amateurs to easily layout a book, you’re kind of on your own with MagCloud; but all you need is any software that will allow you to create and output a PDF file of the appropriate dimensions.

Like Blurb, MagCloud has a online store that allows you to offer your publication for sale if you want. They have a base price of 20 cents U.S. per page, and you mark up your publication to whatever price you want to set beyond that. The website has a feature that allows you to provide a multi-page online preview of the printed piece.

In theory, you could even publish comics, but the size is limited to 8 1/2 x 11″, not a standard comics format in the U.S. or Europe. I don’t know to what degree the service is available outside the U.S.

The New York Times has a photo/audio essay about a group Making a Magazine with MagCloud, and Read Write Web reports that MagCloud is rolling out a new feature that lets you create an iPad optimized version of your magazine.

A friend of mine, photographer and 3D computer graphics animator Harry Saffren, has been publishing his series of photographs of food on plates (as sequential images of the progress of consuming a meal) as 16 page issues of Plate Magazine. I was impressed with the results. Though there is no “cover” of heavier stock on the shorter run magazines, the reproduction is very like a professional newsstand magazine, and the printing reproduced the the bright vibrant colors of his original photographs to a remarkable degree.

MagCloud has an introduction as well as a Help page to get you started.

(Images above, links are to MagCloud page for that publication: top 2: Harry Saffren’s Plate Magazine, Paintings of Lesley Deacon, The Artwork of Bonnie Gloris, Works, American Painter John Grazier, Concept Art by Josh Mongeau 2010, SLAM (Support Local Arts Magazine), Fire Mass, eatsleepdraw magazine, John Bell, Jr. Paintings & Prints)

For a while now deviantART, the online arts community portal, has been teasing it’s members and visitors with an “It’s coming..” campaign, touting an event to coincide with deviantART’s 10th anniversary on August 7th.

The event was the release of deviantART Muro, a new online digital painting and drawing application that works in the browser.

While online drawing and painting interfaces are nothing new, this one is different in that it is made entirely in HTML5, rather than the normal approach of creating these apps in Flash. For those of us interested in the technology, it’s a striking achievement, and the most impressive use of HTML5 I’ve seen to date.

For the casual user, the most relevant advantage of creating the app in HTML5 is that it can be used on the iPad (and presumably the iPhone, though the interface would be quite small).

Beyond that, it’s just a very nicely implemented online drawing an painting tool, well designed, fluid, and able to respond to pressure sensitive input from Wacom tablets. It’s sophisticated in other ways, the “Pro” version, available at the flip of a switch at the top of the interface, allows for the use of layers (image above, top).

There are a range of brush types, adjustments and a nicely functional, if small, color picker. Both the Basic and Pro version of the interface are available free. There is a feature to login in and purchase more advanced brushes.

Images can uploaded directly to deviantART if you have an account, or exported (from the “Image” menu) as PNG files.

There is a gallery of work done in the app that is still small, but growing. The deviantART community is largely devoted to art styles related to concept art, science fiction and fantasy, but you can get an ides of the range of styles that could be accomplished with the app. (Images above, below the interface: ‘loish, nuevemonos, ‘len-yan).

While not a substitute for a dedicated digital painting app on your computer, this in-browser app is impressive, fun to work with and an indication of even better things to come.

[Via WebMonkey]

[Note: if you have trouble accessing the Muro interface, particularly in Firefox, please see this post's comments, and let me know what your experience was.

If you encounter a request for a survey, my suggestion is to close the browser window and open another one and try again.]

Sharpie, makers of the iconic line of markers and pens, has announced a Liquid Pencil, a pen like instrument that makes lines with “liquid graphite”.

The lines are apparently erasable like a pencil, but dry into ink like permanence in 24 to 36 hours (depending on whether you believe the packaging or the Sharpie blog).

I like to carry around small sketchboooks, but seldom sketch in pencil because the subsequent wear on a sketchboook carried in a pocket often smears pencil drawings. I love the idea of being able to sketch in graphite, erase and smudge while drawing, and then have the resulting drawing “self-fix” in a few days.

Whether it actually works as advertised I don’t know. I haven’t had a chance to try one of these yet, but the concept is appealing enough that I thought I’d mention it now. The Sharpie blog says they will be available in stores in September, though Office Depot shows them as available for order online now.

Engadget has a short video review of the Liquid Pencil in use.

Sharpie, incidentally, is looking to make their web presence a resource for doodlers, with their Sharpie Uncapped site and Showcase (more here and here).

[Via Daring Fireball and Engadget]

[Addendum 8/29/10: Alas, though I haven't yet tried this myself, follow up posts on Engadget indicate that the dream of the Liquid Pencil is indeed just a dream, and Sharpie is getting by on their claims on a technicality. The marks remain erasable, to some degree, indefinitely. No mention was made of smear resistance, however, so I may yet try one when I get the chance, but Sharpie hasn't done themselves any favors with this bad bit of PR.]

Sketch Theatre collects step-through demonstration videos of artists from comics, film and game design, animation and related fields.

Created by Alex Alvarez, founder and director of the Gnomon School of Visual Effects and the Gnomon Workshop, and produced by Lily Feliciano, Sketch Theater allows artists in these fields to give quick instructional demonstrations that pass on some of their techniques and working methods to other interested artists.

Some are longer and more elaborate, others are short, but usually still informative. Many are extracted from longer instructional DVD’s offered commercially by Gnomon Workshop, but usually stand on their own as a demonstration piece.

The videos are all shown within the amusing conceit of a mock theater interface.

There is a list of artists, apparently arranged alphabetically by first name, many of whom have more than one video clip.

There are also video interviews with a number of the artists, news, a forum and a store.

(Images above: Travis Louie [top 2], Christian Lorenz Scheurer, Jordu Schell, David Krentz and Syd Mead; see my posts on Christian Lorenz Scheurer, Jordu Schell, David Krentz and Syd Mead.)

Like many of the online interactive color visualization and color picking utilities, ColorJack offers multiple interfaces with different options and capabilities.

The most interesting of these, and most popular of the ColorJack options, is their Color Sphere, or Color Theory Visualizer (image above, top). More than simply a color picker, this displays the secondary, tertiary and multiple other colors in some of the most common color harmony relationships (complimentary, split-complementary, triadic, etc.); and allows you to dynamically see their relationship in the color space as you move the chosen color within the sphere, or adjust one of the color’s characteristics in the bars to the right of the sphere.

Another interface is the Color Galaxy (above, second down); it displays the color wheel position of various named colors, displayed from a color index chosen from a drop-down menu at top left. This would be more useful to painters if there were a choice traditional painters pigments, though you will find some of them in the “CNE” choice. There are choices for Munsell’s catalog listings, though you need to be familiar with his cryptic indexing system for it to be particularly useful.

Other options include the obligatory swatches feature, an online drawing app they call Sketchpad (above, third down), other color pickers, color relates articles, and a blog (image above, bottom).

Navigation between the sections is inconsistent, but you’ll find interesting features if you’re willing to flip around and investigate.

Danny van Ryswyk is a painter from the Netherlands who studies and adheres to the techniques of the Dutch masters, painting on mahogany wood panels prepared with traditional animal skin glue and chalk gesso in a series of glaze layers, each of which must be allowed to dry before the next is applied, with a medium of walnut oil, balsam and amber resin.

Van Ryswyk applies his knowledge and skill to luminous, refined still life compositions, shimmering with light and wrapped in contemplative stillness.

Frustratingly, his website presents images of only three of his paintings, the three shown above, along with a sheet of details from them. The paintings are shown reasonably large (click on the presented images for the larger versions), which is nice, though one might wish tie images were even larger considering the detail revealed by the close-ups.

In addition to his own work, in a section titled Studio Secrets, Van Ryswyk has started presenting some of the fruits of his research into old master techniques; with information on painting in oil on supports like copper and paper, the use of various oils like walnut and poppyseed oil, the preparation and application of gesso (real gesso, not the acrylic primer sold as “gesso” in art supply stores) and picture varnishes.

Though there is a good deal of valuable information here, much of the intended subject matter is labeled “under construction”.

Unfortunately, in the months I’ve had his site bookmarked, hoping for updates, there have been no changes or additions that I’m aware of, so I’m uncertain if he will be updating it in the near future.

While we wait and check back, Van Ryswyk has provided us with another resource, a wonderful Flickr set, Old Masters – study & reference ‘detail’ pictures and technical resources, in which he has selected a range of images and close-up details from a number of great painters.

The Flickr page also includes a long and very good list of links to painting and art related resources.

Artists have long known, whether by intuition or study, how to direct a viewer’s eye through a painting. It’s always interesting, though, when researchers attempt to codify and study these aspects of vision and perception in scientific experiment.

Researchers at the University of British Columbia’s Vision Lab recently turned their attention to Rembrandt’s incisive and justly famous portrait paintings in an attempt to identify the source of their visual power and appeal, and in the process, the techniques by which he commands your eye and directs it where he will.

It may not come as a surprise to artists who study such techniques that Rembrandt uses value contrasts, “lost and found edges”, and contrasting areas of texture to add interest, and grab and lead the eye; but the UBC researchers found ways to test the efficacy of the techniques by modifying photographs with some of the same characteristics and comparing the response to those and to control photographs without the specified characteristics.

You can read an abstract of their article, Rembrandt’s Textural Agency or the press release, UBC Researcher Decodes Rembrandt’s “Magic”, or download a PDF of the entire article, and see the gist of the techniques collected in a poster.

For a great resource on Rembrandt, see Jonathan Jansen’s Rembrandt van Rijn: Life and Work.

[Via BoingBoing, with a thank you to James Bright of Ottawa]

Writing in her blog on the Telegraph in an article titled Why preserve Van Gogh’s palette?, Lucy Davies points to some of the considerations for artists learning from the palettes of the masters, both in choice and arrangement of colors.

Those fascinated by the techniques of the great painters would benefit from understanding their palettes. Even when learning from contemporary artists, the palette plays a greater part than is often acknowledged.

I always find instructional videos exasperating when they ignore color mixing and act as though the brush is always magically loaded with the the proper color, with little thought or work on the part of the artist. This seems to apply to a great majority of the instructional videos one encounters on the web, though those that are professionally prepared often address color mixing more thoroughly (as in the instructional videos of Richard Schmid).

There has, of course, been an effort to preserve the palettes of master artists when possible, even if only as historic artifacts. Davies’ article shows several, including those of Eugene Delacroix (image above, top), Gustave Moreau, Auguste Renoir, Georges Seurat and Edgar Degas (image above, bottom) .

If you look around, you can find other photos of famous artists’ palettes, as well as much verbal discussion and listing of the colors used by individual artists, including those of Delacroix, Whistler, Vermeer, Degas and Monet. Often these discussions will make a point of mentioning modern equivalents to fugitive colors used in the originals.

In general, the range of colors available to artists has increased over time, with significant additions in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries as the range of materials increased and artificial pigments became widely explored, importantly reducing reliance on pigments that are not lightfast.

Davies also links to selections by art supplier Natural Pigments which sells sets of colors matched to Titian’s Palette and Goya’s Palette.

The article is peppered with links and is a nice jumping off point on the subject, including links to discussion of color theory, another aspect of artists’ practice that has changed over time (see my post on the History of the Color Wheel).

[Via Neatorama]

The Arts Map is a new site, still in BETA, that uses a version of Google Maps to list artists, arts organizations, galleries, and other arts related people, places and things in a geographical context.

Other than those who operate their own gallery or offer instruction in their studios, I’m not sure how useful it would be for artists to list themselves (I didn’t see any reason to list myself at this point); but if this catches on and fills out significantly with galleries, art schools, art supply stores, museums and related subjects, it could become a very useful resource for artists to consult.

The site is still young, and the listings sparse particularly compared to what I know exists in areas I’m familiar with, like Center City Philadelphia. This becomes obvious to almost anyone when viewing the map of lower Manhattan. Though art museums and art schools, for example, exist on the map as location highlights, as they would in any Google Map of an area, they are not yet pins, or clickable entries, on the Arts Map.

It’s apparently up to each institution to enter their information, just as an individual artist might, and participation is at an early stage.

According to the founders, “The Arts Map is about inclusion, not exclusion. Our goal is to provide a resource which will benefit the entire arts community.”

Listings are free, and you can be non-specific about address if you want to (street address is optional), providing other locations or ways to see and access your art, including galleries, websites or blogs. So in that respect, it may be worth listing for artists who don’t have a reason for someone to come to their location, just know where they are in a general sense.

[Via Jeanette Jobson's Illustrated Life]

Vincent van Gogh’s now iconic painting of his bedroom in Arles is one of his most famous and favored works.

He described his intention for the painting in his letters to his brother Theo, saying: “This time it’s simply my bedroom, but the colour has to do the job here, and through its being simplified by giving a grander style to things, to be suggestive here of rest or of sleep in general. In short, looking at the painting should rest the mind, or rather, the imagination.”

The painting is one of the most immediately recognizable in the canon of Western art, but few know that it now looks quite different than when Van Gogh painted it. In the same letter quoted above, which was accompanied by a sketch of the painting (image above, bottom), he described the colors of the major objects:
“The walls are of a pale violet. The floor — is of red tiles.
The bedstead and the chairs are fresh butter yellow.
The sheet and the pillows very bright lemon green.
The bedspread scarlet red.
The window green.
The dressing table orange, the basin blue.
The doors lilac.”

And in a subsequent passage: “The shadows and cast shadows are removed; it’s coloured in flat, plain tints like Japanese prints.”

Many of these colors, the floor and the doors in particular, don’t match his description, most likely because of his use of a fugitive red pigment (Rose Madder Lake?). Colors like Rose Madder Lake and Alizarin Crimson, made from organic components rather than metals or earths, lose their color in prolonged exposure to light. This has led to the development of modern light-fast substitutes like quinacridone pigments, which artists in Van Gogh’s time did not have.

In addition to the chemical changes that have altered the color over time, the painting was damaged in Van Gogh’s lifetime, both by a flood of the Rhône in 1889 and by being rolled for sending to his brother, who Van Gogh asked to reline the back of it with additional canvas. Theo returned it to Vincent unaltered, suggesting that he copy it first, which he did. There are two additional copies of the painting, one of which is in The Art Institute of Chicago and the other in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.

The original is in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, which has found it necessary to address restoration of the damaged painting, and has decided to chronicle that process, giving us a rare glimpse not only of how restoration of artworks is carried out, but of some of the difficult decisions faced by conservators.

For example, should areas of the floor that were retouched by past conservators to match the original color (which can be seen under the edges of the frame where it has not been exposed to light) be removed and replaced with a color that matches the current faded state of Van Gogh’s original paint?

The museum has a mini-site devoted to the restoration of The Bedroom, featuring a high-resolution image of the painting, a blog that details the process as it happens, supplemented with images and video, and links to Van Gogh’s letters about the painting (part of the Museum’s wonderful project of posting Van Gogh’s letters online, which I wrote about here).

There is also an informative section of the museum’s site devoted to Van Gogh’s studio practice.

A good place to start are the sections on The Painting, and The Examination. The latter features a video in which Ella Hendriks, the Head of Conservation for the van Gogh Museum, describes the state of the painting, the comparison of the colors and the start of the process of examining the work; and the decisions that must be made in taking on the restoration.

You can then follow the blog posts detailing the process as it happens.