Vyoma

Just a small update. The blog article along with which the above article goes, is published at Splat. Check it out at:
http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/

As you may see, I tried to give a hint of humor along with the almost serious article.

Ok. This is about it. I do not think I can push my PC any more.

 

 

I spent about half an hour on her hair, and there are too many polygons now for my PC to handle. I think I will have to wrap up this project. I will spend about half an hour to one hour more on this, adding some frills and framing it neatly, so that I can give it as a present for her birthday. I will post the finalized one soon.

 

Software: Inkscape

Total Effort: 9 hours

Hmmmm. foolakadugie, not exactly. I mean, you did give a new perspective that I did not think aboout.

 

I was more on the terms where, I would work on compiling the artworks of an artists (or more than one artist), based on a theme and then make a PDF document out of it. These PDF document would, in priciple be similar to the traditional artbooks.

 

I was wondering how the business model works out in terms of traditional artwork book (for example, the 'EXPOSÉ 4'). In terms of different nuances - one for example would be on what lines the copyright contract would be between the artists and the publisher.

 

I understand that the business model works for traditional art books - I just want to understand how the work and their intricacies.

 

On the other hand, I was also pondering over whether the same model would work in terms of e-Artbooks. Would people buy it or not? Or would we require to do some changes in the way how it works?

Hmmm... this strikes some resemblance to what I would want to achieve. I mean, I want to work on a solution that has a similar requirement but for blogs and not for forums.I actually want to run a couple of blogs that shares all the posts it makes in a root or main blog. Also, some of the posts are shown in two or more blogs among them. Is this possible? Could some one explain an approach in a little bit more detail if there is a solution?

Vyoma..you still having probs with your crons???

Ok. I checked it up.
My cron run seems to be running ok now. But this past week, I have seen my Drupal logs, and there are a handful of instances (about 6 or 7) where it reports that the cron run was not completed.

Back when I reported this, the cron just would not respond for weeks together, and all of a sudden work for couple of days, and back to not working. It used to do that back then but now, it seems to run properly most of the times.

I am not sure how many of you here have come across Art books. I had seen quite a few when I was a bit more than a kid at one of my parent's friends house. Then, it had been just a sense of wonder with which I had thumbed through the pages.

Time passed, and I could not give much of my attention to the hobby of art. Those days when I went through the Art Books were almost forgotten, until lately when I came across a review on 'EXPOSĂ 4' Ballistic Publishing at a random website. Reading through that review, led me to the actual selling page of Ballistic Publishing. Going through the page gallery, I looked through the different pages I would get if I bought that book. And to my surprise, I saw many artworks that I recognized. These were some of the artwork by veterans at the art forums I frequent. And this was the time, I remembered those days I would go through all those art books at that almost derelict home library.

This time though, I have a bit of different perspective in terms of these Art Books. I wonder how exactly the copyrights and the contracts are handled by the different parties - the publisher as well as the various different artists that contribute with their artwork. How does the business model tick?

Moreover, lately - I too have been thinking in similar terms. I had been chatting with co-AstaHoster, m^e, and we were discussion over giving freebies of artwork away at our blogs. For example, at my blog, I write about Design and Art, almost as frequently as I write about other topics. And I naturally thought, I could put my 'digital' brush to use and give something for my visitors.

What does this have to do with that Art Book by Ballistic Publications, you may ask.

Well, I was thinking, how would a business model of a digital art book in the online form run? At least theoretically, how would it work? Could it work at all? Too many questions and I know there is Google Search Engine that might answer me - but you see, I am a bit lazy.

If any of you can shed more light on it, that would be great. May be another perspective?

Note: No. I am in no way affiliated with Ballistic Publications. There might as well be other publications, but this was just the one that I came across that sold digital art books. I am still contemplating on buying it - the hard cover EXPOSĂ 4 costs $60 (ok $59); quite a large sum where I live in.

Thanks for that link, foolakadugie, and thanks for all that juicy info.

 

I knew about color harmony a bit, and I do apply it while designing web-pages, but it never really crossed my mind that the artworks to could use choices heavily based on color theory.

These are few more of vector artworks I made as gifts for friends:

 

"Worm"

 

"Cyber Goat"

polarysekt, hey thanks. That is quite an extensive explanation of color schemes you have given there. Though, I could not use it for the context.

 

as for the sky - the blue resulting from a diffraction of light through particles of O3 is usually quite natural... but you could generate a cloud field... to show perhaps why those geese are flying in the first place... (clouds seem to show that crappy winter weather is coming... although... they may have already arrived at their destination closer to the equator...)

Ah! Them flying in one direction is not actually the aim of this illustration. It is just that I wanted a illustration that showed that alignment amongst entities in nature, brought about their aesthetic beauty.

Yet, these are good set of options you have given me. It will surely help me in my study...

 

foolakadugie. :|

 

WOW! I mean - W O W!

 

I just woke up and logged into Asta and when I saw this, the little bit of sleep beads on my eyes evaporated! I just could not believe that you took the lame looking artwork of mine and converted into something so dramatic.

 

This definitely puts me on a path to learn more on color theory. I just cannot rely on structure and composition.

mtnbluet, Mark420, thanks a lot.

 

knight17, could you suggest a color sheme for me? I seem to not able to go creative on the color scheme (might be because I am too sleepy now), but when I tried everything else, I seemed to do worse, and so I stuck with a naturalistic color scheme. It just marginally went along with the site where it will be published. Man! >< I do need to work on my color theory.

 

Thanks for your input, knight17.

Here is one more of a vector art illustration that I created just now for a future blog post of mine. After looking at few geese photos from Google Image search, I came up with this concept and drew it.

 

 

It took me about an hour using Inkscape to do the above illustration.

 

Just thought of updating: the prema blog link where first one is published.

I did think of adding few more details to it, but in the end I thought it would be a waste of time, because it would be published in the blog post as a tiny 250x152 pixel image.Thanks for the comments. And I sure will post my future works here.

 

Well, that is a enlarged view of a vector illustration I made for another blog post I will be writing soon.

 

Nothing breath taking - I know - it is just a 5-10 minute doodle I did in Inkscape and it seemed to have come out ok. Thought of showing it to you guys here.

Yes - you spoke my mind, seec77 when you said this release was not that exiting (as it involved mostly security fixes) and I too am waiting for the 2.1 release.

 

About phpBB - I am not sure what to take of it. It is a real mess in two terms - security and code organization. And the developers committed to phpBB seem to be the hard headed lot, where they do not want to hear from 'mere users'.

Akismet is a 'spam-busting' service provider. They have a plugin for Wordpress, that once activated by a Akismet API key (that is given free for all personal uses), would filter out all spam comments from the comments list and keep it aside for 15 days after which it would be deleted permanently. You can, with in that time review the list at your leisure, and mark out any false positives - which is a very rare case due to the good job that Akismet does at identifying the spam comment.

Akismet does this with the help of a central database, that keeps track of all the spam that gets posted on people's blogs. If it finds a comment being made in your blog that gets matched against the one in its central database, it filters it out. The ones that you mark as not spam are sent back to Akismet and their software learns from it.

(This is how much I know of it).

Also, they say that it has a open API to interface/integrate with other blogging platforms. The Akismet plugin comes along with the WordPress dowload, and needs to be activated.

You can know more of Akismet at https://akismet.com/
If you are intending to activate the Akismet plugin in your WordPress powered blog, you will require a API key that you can get free of charge (for personal use) by registering at https://de.wordpress.com/

Now, on the requirement you have - to have a good temporary solution when you code in the background. I think WordPress would be a good solution for you, as it has a good code base - you can even start of as a blog and then gradually expand to what you want.

If you want a solution that requires some hard work - I would suggest you go for Drupal or other CMS like Joomla/Mamboo. I used Drupal engine to start my wesbite, WiseTome.com and it is pretty stable for my purposes. I am able to code what I want and add to it (for example a name generator I made: link).

Note: I use both Drupal and Wordpress. Drupal for my website, and WordPress for my blog. Both of them, though are basically content repositories have different kind of work flow in terms of content creation, and hence I have chosen these two separate solutions.

I upgraded yesterday to this version, the only problem I got is one of my plugin doesn't work anymore, don't know why, the error is very strange with php } symbol, well anyway, I just uninstalled it and don't need it anymore, found another plugin which works fine. I like that wordpress is getting better and better

Yes, some plugins can be version dependent. That is the problem with plugins - sometimes, the developers do not continue to develop it along with the core code. That is why I keep my plugin to a very minimum and stick to plugins that have more credibility.

PS: One a side note, Aksimet is my favorite plugin. Makes life much easier.

leafbunk, thank you for your suggestions. Yes, I do see that I could have done a little better with use of transparencies - more exactly a linear shading fills over the alpha channel. But as I started off and continued to work on this piece, I sort of set a goal to myself that I would attempt to complete this piece of work with only flat colored paths and patches. If you take a closer look at the piece, you will notice that there are no gradients to this point - and that is a kind of style I am experimenting in this piece.For now, I am not actually aiming at a photo-realistic image, but a vector caricature that has been given immense effort in terms of details.And another reason I did not go for gradients - my PC cannot take it. (><) It almost comes to a standstill when I apply even one layer of gradient to any polygon on this piece. :)And thanks for that link to that DeviantArtist's gallery. I am checking it out. I think though that the person has been giving tutorials with respect to Adobe Illustrator. (I use Inkscape). I hope I can get some general info on technique from those tutorials there.

There has been another release of WordPress after the Wordpress Ronan version, or Wordpress 2.0.5 version. Quoting from wordpress.org:

We have a pretty important release available for everyone, it includes an important security fix and itâs recommended that everyone upgrade. This is the latest release in our stable 2.0 line, which weâve committed to maintaining for several more years.
Hereâs whatâs new:

* The aforementioned security fixes.
* HTML quicktags now work in Safari browsers.
* Comments are filtered to prevent them from messing up your blog layout.
* Compatibility with PHP/FastCGI setups.

So, if you have any blogs that you are running on Wordpress, do remember to upgrade it. But before you begin upgrading, do remember to go through the upgrade instructions carefully at this link.
It involves a 5 step process;
1. Take back ups of both the files and the database
2. Deactivate the plugins - I have seen a blog go down because its owner did not remember to turn off the plugins.
3. Overwrite the files after downloading the Wordpress 2.0.6 version
4. Run the upgrade script that would be located in the wp-admin directory
5. Reactivate all your plugins

Some are though waiting for the Wordpress 2.1 release as it is already in beta and also Wordpress.org says that 2.0.6 will be the last release before 2.1. It is not a wise decision to not upgrade if you have a high-traffic blog because as stated it is subject to security breaches.

Well what can I say?

 

I am honored, Chesso.

Na. The last update was me working yesterday night. Then I replied to you today morning. Now I am getting ready to go to office. So, did not get time to work on it. I might get a couple of hours to work on it this weekend. I will post updates then.

Ooooh. Music composition? Well I do learn classical guitar and a month back I gave the Grade 2 exams for both theory and practical to the Trinity School of Music, London - no, I did not go to London, they came to my city. But still, I do not dare to create my on compositions. I am always awed by the compositions of the masters, and I just spend my time I spare on it on practicing them on my guitar.

 

Now, back to topic. Yes, I too used to create sprites for games that I would code using C along with Allegro library that would result in 32-bit Dos games. Was a lot of fun.

 

And well, for sake of reference, I have converted your image to PNG (it wont loose any detail):

You can always use PNG format to upload to the net and display - cause it does not loose details and also is not as bulky as BMP.

 

A nice start there you have Chesso.

- On all the images except two you have white action lines - you should work on their flow. I am not getting the inference of them.

- And the two image, the ones on the right bottom - are you trying to show that they are hitting the ground? You should try to draw some inverted splat kind of lines around them to get the feel of the impact on the image if you ask me.

But still, it is a good start.

Ah! I would have offered to help if it were not for my busy schedule at my job. It almost eats up all of my time, and I barely get to work on my skills.

I am not sure with any of those, friend. I mean, there are not many complete projects I did in pixel art, and nor in 3D design, though I have worked in both of them. I think, in both the cases, it would largely depend on the scale of work and also the level of detail you want to put into it.PS: The image link in the above post was broken. I corrected it.

I did try pixel art. You will see some incomplete projects displayed here at the forum.

 

Well, here is a small update. Small I say in terms of progress, but I did spend about one hour on it.

 

 

Just finished one lock of her hair. So much more to go! And I do not even have the photographic reference for the hair, because I restructured her hair than the way it is in her photo.

 

Total Effort: 8.5 hrs

Software: Inkscape