Artist Hideout

When I was about 9, I used to enjoy trading baseball cards. Phrases come back to me of “I’ll trade my Jose Canseco Dream Team card for your Nolan Ryan?”. I must admit I was a big fan of Nolan Ryan. Baseball fanatics today don’t know the love of the game that once existed. I’m not old enough to know it at it’s peak, but I remember the enthusiasm I had opening up a brand new pack of Upper Deck baseball cards and going through them and sorting out the “commons”. There is something about …read more

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So yesterday I began trying out the open-source animation tool, Blender. I played around with blender for a few hours and came to the conclusion that there are probably some good blogs and sites about Blender. In fact they are hard to miss when they are ranked number one on blogtopsites for the art section.
BlenderNation is who I turned to. They must be doing something right if they are ranked number one.
I ran across a tutorial that looked to be just my speed.

Creating a Heart in 10 Steps
Learn basic modeling, vertex manipulation and working …read more

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I think I wrote this on my all things new post but I’ve decided to start learning to do digital animation using the freely available (open source) tool, Blender.
Now looking at Blender for someone like me is daunting to say the least. I can usually download a tool, play with it a little and have a general clue as to what I am doing. I never took a formal computer class in my life but somehow ended up being the guy that everyone comes to for computer questions. So I figured, hey why not? Let’s give …read more

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This evening I was reading through some of the feeds in my feedreader and came across Cyndi’s post about fractals. Prompted by the need to try out a new art program, I downloaded Apophysis and set out to try my hand at creating something, anything, whatever…
In about 15 minutes I had a fractal art image… not the greatest, but I liked it. I still don’t know much about the program as I just hit random buttons which is how I work most of the time.
Here is my fractal that I came up with. I did a …read more

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Now over the last few years (before October this year) I have not done a whole lot of art. I went to museums and shows but to actually get my hands dirty and all painted up, well college and career seemed to be getting in the way. So with this year just barely begun, I am challenging myself… no forcing myself to learn some new stuff. So here is my list of new things to try or work with in the coming year:

To learn to work with Blender and accomplish small animations: No this isn’t some …read more

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Digital painting of photographs has really taken a leap in the last few years thanks to artists like Scott Engel.

Scott says this about this particular piece. “Fly By Night”

I was out photographing in Simmons Woods Park, in Pewaukee, Wisconsin around Halloween last year, when I was inspired by the near-dusk flight of some geese. Having taken notice of the moon, I wondered what it would be like to see those geese flying across the face of the moon. So I photographed the geese and the tree, then followed it up with the picture of the moon. In Photoshop, I enlarged …read more

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Okay, Here goes nothing! I have been thinking about how to celebrate Christmas here on Artist Hideout. I couldn’t think of anything I could give so I figured out an idea on something I could make for everyone. The typical artists response for the week of Christmas.
Maybe this will be a continual type of thing that I’ll do every now and then. I am not too sure on the specifics yet on how this will work. It is up to you, the readers, to help out.

Here is the way it will work. …read more

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warning: full image size is 1536 x 1024 at 202 kb
This is the first of my mood wallpapers. I guess this is how I feel today. Slightly pensive that the storm of my recent health problems has subsided. It could rain or the sun could come shining through at any moment. Hopefully, the latter is true.
Tags: art, artist, wallpaper, fractal, landscape, bryce 3d, digital art

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With the recent release of OpenOffice 2.1 which you can download here. I’ve been thinking about how we can use the draw program included as a great tool for doing some digital scrapbooking. So I decided to show off a few of the capabilities of the program with an image.
This was put together using OpenOffice 2.1 Draw in a matter of just a few minutes. I used images from this article.
The toughest part of this was adding the washout effect for the background image of the flowers on the belly button. I used two …read more

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