Starting A Digital Art Program With Open Source 61
An anonymous reader writes "We are running mainly Windows on our HS campus with the exception of Macs in the visual arts department, and are just beginning to get into the process of teaching using computers in the area of art. What recommendations do you have for starting a program? I am looking fo apps that will be able to be used on both our Macs and on our PCs in the Library etc., and specifically I am looking for a program (curriculum, not software) for teaching digital art concepts using the FOSS tools that are out there. I am aware of Gimp, Blender, and Inkscape, but have not seen any curriculum per se. Any help?"
Open-source revolution? (Score:3, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Open-source revolution? (Score:2)
I consider myself a "true geek" more than a "true artist". It's just a bit of self-assessment; the fact that I make more money doing geekstuff than artstuff just reflects where my strengths lie, and which skills get the most development.
Re:Open-source revolution? (Score:5, Insightful)
Hah! That's a joke. It takes just as much time to learn Photoshop and Lightwave as it does to learn Gimp and Blender. People sometimes scoff at the new generation of F/OSS graphics software because it's not what they're used to. But I find it just as difficult to use Photoshop after years of using Gimp, so I can understand where they're coming from. The key is educating the next generation on F/OSS tools from the beginning so that we can finally move away from the rip-off proprietary standbys. At the rate that Gimp and Blender are improving, there will soon be no valid technical reason why they cannot be used even for the most professional of tasks. As for the UI side of things, it would be an interesting project to develop an alternative Gimp interface designed for current Photoshop users. It's more about familiar layout than anything. In the grand scheme of things, both free and non-free software needs a lot of work to improve in the HCI area..
Re:Open-source revolution? (Score:1)
Hah! That's a joke. It takes just as much time to learn Photoshop and Lightwave as it does to learn Gimp and Blender. People sometimes scoff at the new generation of F/OSS graphics software because it's not what they're used to.
The criticism of clifyt in this thread is very valid.
From someone who has worked with artists and layout specialists, and who is familiar with everyting from Photoshop, Quark, Illustrator, DreamWeaver on both Windows and Macs, to vim and gimp on Linux (I run Gentoo), let me ass
python gimp (Score:4, Informative)
Shameless Self-Promotion (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:GiMP is like Data (Score:1)
Re:GiMP is like Data (Score:2)
Personally... (Score:5, Interesting)
I for one don't like Gimp, although it is a powerful tool, it lacks some of the most powerful and useful tools available for photoshop. Look into a site license for photoshop it is really not as extravagantly expensive in an educational license as the commercial ones.
As for a pre-made curriculum, I suspect that you're SOL. It should be pretty easy though to adapt existing self learning tutorials for your students.
Tutorials are at:
http://www.blender3d.com/cms/Tutorials.243.0
For learning 2D I would suggest a brief intro to vector drawing, using Illustrator, or my personal preference AutoCad. I come from a technical drawing background and find that AutoCad is my favorite vector drawing program, although it is very-much overkill.
After vector drawing I would introduce them to photo manipulation, take inspiration from the fark.com photoshop contests. Give the students a photo to manipulate and have them show their work to the class.
I would suggest that you use the format of assigning work and teaching skills on monday, free work for the middle of the week, and then on friday have the students show their work to the class and discuss their experiences.
Here at WWU in my department all design majors are required to take a course called "Introduction to Design Communication," this is a basic overview art course that teaches drawing, painting, illustration, and drafting. This was easily my favorite class I have ever taken. It is formated with the professors sharing their design work with the students, and teaching their personal techniques. The goal is to get the students up to speed so that they can begin to develop their own style.
Just remember that there is not right way to do anything in art. Start by showing the students how you work and let them use that as a launching point.
I would highly suggest the following Books/Films:
Technical Drawing by Frederick E. Giesecke et. al.
Shrek DVD bonus feature on the making of.
mindfields and all it's great making of info (http://www.artificial3d.com/mindfields/)
Any textbook on mechanical perspective (can't think of one off the top of my head)
The Blender book
and of course the Blender tutorials mentioned earlier.
Technical Drawing gives a great deal of information on mechanical drawing and is a great foundation of knowledge for the instructor to have. The Shrek DVD bonus features are a great source of inspiration for beginning artists, and also shows the students that even the pros make mistakes. Mechanical perspective is critical to understanding how we perceive depth and should be taught to students as they learn 3D modeling. Mindfields is fabulous as you can see the film and then get an in depth tutorial on exactly how it was made.
I would have to say that 2d image manipulation is much more intuitive than 3d modeling, and should be taught as a tool to rather than a goal. I would suggest visiting my own website, even though there isn't much there (they now only allow sftp now so I can't upload form dreamweaver (I'm lazy)) it has some stuff that wile time consuming is actually quite easy to do.
if you're interested in talking about cg art education my aim id is "glk572" and I'll be keeping an eye on this thread.
So to sum it up teach a foundation of skills that will allow the students to achieve their own goals. Have the students discuss and show their work. Focus on results and not methods.
Re:Personally... (Score:2, Interesting)
I can totally recommend Blender, as it not only has a good 3d-engine for animation, it also has a complete scripting environment, making it possible to create user-interaction schemes.
I wanted to post additional Blender Tutorial links:
i found a collection of Tutorials [tripod.com], the Blender Classroom Tutorial Book [members.home.nl] or a list of Blender Tutorials found on the net [dyndns.org].
Re:Personally... (Score:1, Interesting)
http://sv1.3dbuzz.com/Downloads/3dbook.pdf/ [3dbuzz.com]
Blender art to inspire.
http://www.centralsource.com/blenderart/index.php/ [centralsource.com]
Wings3D
http://www.wings3d.com/ [wings3d.com]
CGI Filmmaking: The Creation of Ghost Warrior
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1556 222270/ref=pd_sim_books_2/104-8933766-9003967?v=gl ance&s=books/ [amazon.com]
if youre contemplating CAD... (Score:1)
Solve the flawed alpha method (Score:2, Interesting)
What I mean is, with the current alpha method Photoshop (and nearly all programs) uses, every time you blend two colors at any transparency level, you lose saturation. The colors average each other, which makes them lean toward gray.
Just as a demonstration: Make a pure blue square (0,0,255), then on a layer above, make a yellow square and put it at 50% opacity.
Re:Solve the flawed alpha method (Score:1)
Try Multiply, and try cyan (Score:1)
When you mix blue and yellow paint, or put a blue glass in front of a yellow glass, you get green.
Mixing pigments works more like componentwise multiplication. In this case you get black. Now try multiplying cyan (which many non-technical people call a shade of "blue") with yellow, and you'll get green.
Re:Try Multiply, and try cyan (Score:4, Interesting)
Mixing pigments works more like componentwise multiplication. In this case you get black. Now try multiplying cyan (which many non-technical people call a shade of "blue") with yellow, and you'll get green.
Speaking as someone who has actually done this, I can tell you that when I mix blue paint - even a warm, definitely-not-cyan blue like ultramarine - with cadmium yellow, I get a shade of green. A fairly dull one and a fairly dark one, but still green. If I want black, I mix that ultramarine with an equal quantity of burnt siena (a dull warm orange)... the result is deep, dark, and neutral. But you are sort of right: mixing a cool blue like cyan with yellow will get me a brighter green.
You're making the mistake of trying to apply the CMYK color scheme (which works fine with transparent inks and dyes) to the pigments in paint, and it simply doesn't work. Paints use a third system of primaries and secondaries, in which the mixing complement of yellow is violet (not blue), the complement of cyan is scarlet (halfway between red and orange) instead of true red, and the complement of magenta is a warm, yellowish green. It's similar to CMYK, but not identical. So what you learned in first grade is still technically correct: in the RYB system, blue + yellow => green.
Re:Try Multiply, and try cyan (Score:1)
In that case, you probably just need to ditch your Photoshop and get a paint program that specializes in simulation of natural media such as grade-school paint.
Re:Try Multiply, and try cyan (Score:2)
Photographers most likely.
It's called photoshop because it behaves like the world as known by photographers, who manipulate (3 colors of) light.
Painters have a different model of the world and manipulate it with paints which behave in both subtractive and additive combinations. In addition, two paints which look identically colored can behave very differently when mixed with a third
Re:Try Multiply, and try cyan (Score:1)
Re:Try Multiply, and try cyan (Score:2)
Imagine a filter that only passes blue light,
say a filter that passes light with a wavelength between 380 NM and 500 NM with a peak at 450 NM
Imagine a filter that only passes yellow light,
say a filter that passes light with a wavelength between 550 NM and 650 NM with a peak at 600 NM
Imagine a sandwich of the two filters.
What do you think gets passed?
Now imagine mixing a beam of light that passes through the blue filter with a beam of light that passes through the yellow filt
Re:Solve the flawed alpha method (Score:1)
Processing (Score:4, Interesting)
I strongly recommend at least giving them the opportunity to be exposed to processing [processing.org] - I've had the fortune of sitting in on one of the classes at UCLA by one of its creators, Casey Reas, and the students in there (from art courses all over, most of whom had no prior programming experience) were all digging into it like rabbits into a carrot sale. Beautiful to watch.
Some students won't like it, that's a given with any programming subject, but those that do will thank you endlessly for it.
Re:Why computers? (Score:2)
(What do you need pads and pencils for? Let them scratch stuff in the dirt.)
He didn't say it was just "an art class"; he said it was a class on how to use a particular tool (computers) for art. Kind of like you can teach a class on using oil paint for art, using charcoal pencils for art, or using pieces of wood for art. By hig
Re:Why computers? (Score:2)
Computers are not displacing traditional media in art. Computers supplement not replace. That's just like saying that pencils displaced charcoal. You get a different result. There is no way that computers will ever overtake traditional media, the interaction between pigment, surface, and light just can't be replaced. You can simulate the results but you just can't get the tactile feedback, the feel of the paint, as you get with watercolor. I make heavy use of pencil, ink, watercolor, AD markers, and yes com
Re:Why computers? (Score:2)
I'm not trying to argue that digital media is "just as good as" or a one-for-one replacement for every other media. Oil painting and charcoal drawing aren't going to vanish from the earth any time soon, and are still unique artistic media. But in certain segments of the professional world, digital tools most definitely are displacing traditional media, as surely as word processors have displaced most typewriters, photography has displaced most newspa
Re:Why computers? (Score:5, Insightful)
I entered Art School around 1975, about the time I started building my first microcomputer from a kit. I majored in drawing and photography, but dabbled with computers and took a lot of computer classes. The compsci department treated me like crap, I was just a dumb artist (yeah, a dumb artist that switched majors from Honors Chemistry/PreMed). But I was the first person to exhibit computer graphics and primitive computer animation at my art school. The art school Dean was very conservative and considered drawing/painting, printmaking, and sculpture to be the only valid areas of study. Even the new Photography department was considered the Black Sheep of the family, it was not art, merely technology. I got kicked out of art school during my senior year, they got fed up with me. I used to go around telling my professors that I was sick of drawing with charcoal, that technology hadn't changed since Paleolithic Man dragged a burnt stump out of a campfire and scratched it on a cave wall, I wanted a NEW artist's studio, more like a mad scientist's laboratory with bubbling beakers and sparking coils.
So I went to work, and spent many years working in prepress, computer graphics, etc. To my utter astonishment, as new computer tools like Photoshop were released, I consistently found that my traditional art school techniques (i.e. my darkroom classes) were the most valuable training I could have taken in preparation for these programs. I consistently got better results than the computer geeks around me that had no art skills.
Back around '92 when the recession hit, I decided to go back and finish my BFA. And to my astonishment, my old art school was only then just installing its first computer classroom. By that time, I had seen and done about everything in the computer graphics field, I completely abandoned doing computer graphics and focused on oil painting. And when I finished my degree, I found my CG work was much stronger. Anybody can push around pixels (or paint, for that matter) but it takes artistic skill, training, and practice to understand why an image has to be THIS way and not THAT way. If you have no ability to plan out what kind of result you want, you will have no way to create the work. You will be randomly wandering through the program trying to figure out why you aren't getting results.
I continually assert: there is NO image you can create with a computer that can't be done with conventional tools. It may take an infinitely larger amount of effort, but it could be done. The fundamentals of art production have not changed with the introduction of computers. This is why it is easier to train artists how to use computers than it is to teach computer experts how to be an artist. Artists always know what they would like to create, maybe they have dreamt of artworks that were beyond their capabilities before computers, but they still have ideas about how they would go about creating the artwork even without a computer. The same cannot be said of computer geeks, they cannot see how an artwork could be created without computers.
The moral of the story: artists need to study art, not computers. They need paper and pencils first, and computers last. My old Photo professor said that a true artist can make art despite his tools, a great photographer could take great photos with a pinhole camera, but a crappy photographer couldn't take great photos even with a great camera. Great art tools like computers are useless in the hands of someone with no artistic training.
Re:Why computers? (Score:2)
Absolutely!
But there's no reason to use a camera at all when with enough time with the pencil you can do a perfectly adequate representation of a scene.
And there's no reason why you should use a high-level programming language when you can do everything with enough time in assembler, where you'll learn the true meaning of programming.
Look, the question was about digital arts, which is
Don't put the cart before the horse. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Don't put the cart before the horse. (Score:2)
Because you are available. In my experience, if I'm not present, people will figure out how to do things on their own (on a PC). If I am present, they won't bother thinking even for a second, but just ask me
Sorry, but (Score:2, Insightful)
To agree with another poster, don't base your curriculum around the software, especially with software that isn't big already in the design world. The fundamentals can,
Trail blazing (Score:5, Interesting)
I do tech support for an art school, and I also picked up a BFA there, so I have a pretty good sense of the kinds of tools needed to teach digital media effectively. I promote the use of Libre software here as much as anywhere else I've worked, but I have to admit that there's little use for it in the classrooms (except for mainstream officeware like OOo and Firefox). Macromedia's apps and Photoshop Elements aren't Gratis or Libre, but they're fairly inexpensive for schools, and meet the rest of your requirements (e.g. cross platform, curricula) pretty well.
I'm setting up one of my old Macs for sale to a student, and in trying to "add value" with some free apps they'd actually have use for, the best I could come up with was GIMP (which I'm sure they'll delete and replace with a cracked or educational-licence copy of Photoshop) and WordPress for blogging.
Libre stuff might be OK if you're just trying to help high school students get their feet wet, but if you're trying to prepare people to do this stuff as professionals, you need to teach them the software the industry uses. Employers don't want someone with digital-paint-program vector-drawing-program experience; they want someone with Photoshop and Illustrator/Freehand experience. (They'll usually settle for Windows users, but they'd rather have someone who knows his way around OS X.) And freelancers are going to want to be proficient in the best tools they can afford, and that's also going to be commercial software.
I think what you're doing is a great idea, and I don't want to discourage it, but it's definitely going to be an uphill battle. Best of luck, and if you pull it off... please share what you learn from it!
Commercial tools, OpenSource curriculum? (Score:2)
1. hands-on learning of tools in a reasonable amount of time
2. students who want to get jobs with these tools
3. the available training materials outside of the course
4. the equipment in the lab
You have it backwards. (Score:2, Insightful)
This is exactly the wrong way to do things. You should not be looking to buy equipment first and then shoehorn your program onto that. You should be looking to hire a computer-savvy art faculty member first. What he teaches will largely dictate the
2D is not 3D (Score:2)
For 2D artwork
computes and art. visual programming in realtime (Score:3, Informative)
I can recommend the Book "Composing Interactive Music" [mit.edu] from Todd Winkler, as I found it not only interesting for re-thinking how to use Computers in artistic installations, but also how to completely rethink computer interaction.
Winkler proposes a framework of 5 stages [yorku.ca] which i think can also be adoped for any digital works, not only music.
The book is inteded for composers working with max/msp, a visual programming language where object boxes can be "patched" together; this style of working shows fast results, as this kind of software is working "realtime", meaning you get constant ouptput of the things you are doing or the parameters you are changing.
I am working with this kind of "patchable software interfaces" for more than five years now; and this is also teached on the University of Applied Arts in Vienna/Austria, where I am studying.
If it comes to interaction (sound-visual, sound-dancers, graphics-interface, whatever) in the field of artistic work, these tools such as
PD Pure Data (windows/mac/linux) [pd.iem.at] - Audio/Video/3D (GEM [gem.iem.at],Framestein [framestein.org]) -opensource-
Cycling74 max/msp [cycling74.com](windows/mac) - Audio/Video/3D (also see Nato [m9ndfukc.org] and Jitter [cycling74.com]) -free 30days demo-
Native Instruments Reaktor [nativeinstruments.de] (windows/mac) -commercial, but has education pricing-
vvvv [meso.net] (win) -free-
are used from lots of the people around.
there are hell lots more, you might want to take a look at the audiovisualizers.com tool shack [audiovisualizers.com], or pawfal.org [pawfal.org]for example.
For some visual examples and also works, you might want to take a look at
http://www.harvestworks.org/maxreel/ [harvestworks.org]
http://puredata.info/community/ [puredata.info] (mostly audio)
talking chair [tompeak.com] (vvvv+hardware)
http://www.realtimearts.net/ [realtimearts.net]
or you might also want to take a look at the department of digital art in the university of applied arts/vienna [vis-med.ac.at].
currently we are a group of people trying to bring opensource and arts together. there are also workshops and lots of projects going on: http://5uper.net [5uper.net]
for sure there are also "standard" programs teached, which are good for working with business and advertising companies -- but if we are speaking about digital arts, that's going beyond the standard approach of software use. at least for me.
My Magnet School (Score:2)
More to the point.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Students need to learn how to draw and paint, the techniques have not changed much since the Renaissance. Not surprisingly, many of the best art instructional materials are long out of copyright, and are freely available. For example, you can feel free to reproduce Leonardo da Vinci's "Lessons on Painting" or Andrea Pozzo's "Perspective in Architecture and Painting" as they both date back to the 17th century.
You would be surprised at the amount of free instructional materials that art supplies vendors will give you, just for the asking. Of course they have a financial incentive to attract new artists to their products, but hey, an oil painting lesson sheet works the same with Windsor & Newton oil paints as it does with Holbein oil paints.
Artists tend to learn best by example, by viewing other artists' works. Any computer with a browser might be helpful in sampling artworks, but ultimately, no video display can show the subtle nuances of an artwork sufficiently for a student to understand them. So again, computers won't be much help. A trip to the local museum would be much better.
Artists are also a good resource. I know many artists who would be glad to talk with students and give their advice, even for free, if someone would just ask them. My university often got internationally famous artists (I mean REALLY famous artists) to come to lecture at my art school, merely by offering them room and board and a relaxing stay at our laid-back campus. This cost the school essentially nothing. I asked my professor who got my favorite painter to come and lecture, how she convinced someone like that to come to our school for basically no money. She said, "well, I ASKED him and he said yes."
So I hope I've offered a few areas to investigate for free study materials. Every art instructor should already have ideas about what materials are suitable, they wouldn't be much of an artist if they didn't.
BTW, I should tell you about a book I read way back when I was a newbie art student. I found a book in our university's art library, commissioned by IBM in the 1960s, describing how computers could be applied to the Arts. There wasn't really any such thing as computer graphics as an art media back then, so the book focused on odd applications, the one I remember best was a computer search that could attempt to fit broken fragments of archaeological pieces back together. They managed to even reunite two pieces of pottery from different museums, now the two pieces together were worth far more than the sum of the parts. But I digress.. what really got to me was an extensive statistical survey of art students and professors, the data all crunched on vintage punchcard mainframes. The survey was an attempt to find out what exactly do students LEARN in art school. The statistics were clear, and the conclusion astonishing (to me at least). There were only 2 things that students really learned in Art School:
1. How to dress like an artist.
2. How to act like an artist.
Art students learned this merely by copying the dress and behavior of their teachers. Actual learning of technical skills were so statistically insignificant that they could not be measured. The survey concluded that if you just act like an artist, you will be considered an artist. Perhaps this survey revealed more about the limitations of the minds of IBM statisticians.
Re:More to the point.. (Score:2)
I studied with Nam June Paik, who surprised me by declaring the World's Greatest Artist's Tool to be the Manhattan Yellow Pages. He said that if you wanted to know something to help you make some artwork, all you had to do was look it up in the Yellow Pages, phone up someone and ask, and they'd tell you everything you needed to know. No matter how obscure a subject it is, there's always some lonely expert out there, just dying to talk to someone about his specialty, if so
Re:More to the point.. (Score:2)
1. How to dress like an artist.
2. How to act like an artist.
Then I must not have learned anything, because I still dress the same as I did before art school (mostly the very same articles of clothing), and I don't think I act any differently. I'll have to go ask for my money back. {smile}
The main thing I did learn (which I suspect the folks with narrow black ties, hornrim glasses, and pocket protectors at International Business Machi
Re:More to the point.. (Score:2)
In my photography classes, the professors used to talk about "seeing" photos (a term that goes back to Ansel Adams) but they were really talking about the mental process of visualizing the photographic image you wanted to produce.
Use LiVES ! (Score:2)
create your own. (Score:1, Informative)
First off, if you are wanting to teach, set aside time when you've learned the program to create some multimedia tutorials. Get camtasia studio and record tutorials, export them to flash. It's better and fast than writing a book with screenshots.
If you are wanting some linux movies, check out xvidcap.
It's a great idea to promote and use open source software. Some might say that those skills will have no marketability because the apps are open source and not industry standard. However, when teaching an