Below are Eight lists posts from some of our bloggers around the Arts and Design channel here at b5media of things they found interesting or have gleaned from experience.

Enjoy.

1. 10 Quilting Sites & Blogs That Excite Me: Check out some of the quilting web sites and blogs Mary Emma finds interesting and inspiring.
2. It’s a list of 25 DIY Jewelry Sites by Tammy over at Jewelry and Beading.
3. Chloe lists 20 reasons why having your own workspace is great.
4. Also, Chloe has a few (more like 30) needs in her new studio that you might identify with in creating your own studio workspace.
5. For my own entry here on Artist Hideout, I listed 25 art forms and artists who already use them.
6. Noreen over at hankering for yarn is passionate about small loom weaving and has made a short list of a few reasons why.
7. Christine over at Mad Cropper gives you her Top 10 favorite posts in her blog. Wanna know more? Read on!
8. Noreen,  also at hankeringforyarn, has been enchanted by a very special doll that has taken on a life of her own: Tottie Tomato.  Tottie Tomato is on a journey, and Noreen has been posting about it….. read all about it in the Chronicles of Tottie Tomato (and yes, Tottie  REALLY is a Tomato…..)

Post from: Artist Hideout

I guess it’s been around awhile, but I only just found it via Dan over at www.EmptyEasel.com (by the way Dan, I love the new design…  I didn’t catch it when you put it up because I read your feed, but nice job).

The art blog www.linesandcolors.com had recently caught my eye as a great resource for learning more about particular artists and art forms as well as a few other tidbits of great information.

Here’s a few particular links I found interesting at Lines and Colors today:

How Not to Display Your Artwork on the Web

How to Display Your Art on the Web

Preparing images for the web

Making Comics: Storytelling Secrets of Comics, Manga and Graphic Novels

Also a nice little post on one of my favorite artists:

Ron Mueck

Post from: Artist Hideout

But I failed to mention color schemes in the process. 

I have found the following to be a pretty good standard for colors.  If the colors appear together in nature, then they will work visually for your project.  Granted, this is a pretty loose judgement, but it seems to work for me.

The color scheme above is entitled Fire Flower, based off of the colors of the following image I took while on vacation earlier this year.

I haven’t worked out how to pull these types of color values out using free software yet such as gimp, but I have found a website that will do it for you. 

By the way, this is the flower I used for that really, really annoying post.

Post from: Artist Hideout

Here’s what I would try (to do more of anyway).

Sculpting.

Sculpting is messy work. 

There is a reason I shy away from sculpting.  It’s expensive, it’s really time consuming, it takes up a lot of space and well…. it’s messy.

Not that I wouldn’t do more if I had the resources, I think I would.  Or at least I like to think that I would. 

But here’s why I would do it.  Sculptures seem to reach out into our three dimensional space and pull us bodily into the work. 

So, what would you try?

Post from: Artist Hideout

So I’ve started a list of Art Forms and Artists who use them.

My list is now at 25, but I’d love to feature you and your unique art form too if you have something different from what is listed.

These are in no particular order, but have fun exploring each and checking out each artists work.

1. Conte – Aaron Saaco
2. Inkwash – David Hayward (flickr)
3. Acrylic painting – Nancy Standlee
4. Oil painting – Michael Story
5. Charcoal – Erin Fostel
6. soft pastel – Casey Klahn
7. oil pastel – Tonya Bond
8. fumage – Me (sometimes)
9. henna – Khadija Dawn Carryl
10. glass etching – Christine Masters
11. Pen and Ink – Hugh MacLeod
12. Encaustic painting – Brad Ellis
13. Airbrush – Mike Learn
14. scratchboard – Greg Murray
15. watercolor – Ryan Petrow
16. colored pencils – Gayle Mason
17. pencil drawing – J.D. Hillberry
18. assemblage – Deborah Hayner
19. Screen printing – Kristy (craftgrrl)
20. Stamping – Katelyn Thomas
21. Digital Illustration – Bryan Ballinger
22. Digital Animation – Channel Frederator
23. Enamel Paint – Jackson Pollock
24. clay – Viki Hardin
25. collage – Collage Artists of America

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After reading probably at least half of the 91 reviews of the Intuos3 Wacom pen tablet and seeing the amazing amount of great feedback that this product is generating, I am taking the plunge.

With the average feedback being four and a half stars out of five with 91 reviews, I am feeling pretty confident about my purchase.

But, I will be using this day in and out maybe sometime next week. I will be putting it to the test in a very real way.

I am going to pack up my mouse and disable the little touch pad on my laptop and see how well I function going back to pen-based input.

Post from: Artist Hideout

Not only is DT a great designer (and actually works professionally in the field), he’s a been a great guy to work with as a friend. So, I invited him to guest post here on Artist Hideout for this discussion to give you more of the design approach to art. I hope you enjoy it, and to read more of DT, check out Design Sojourn.

Is Good Design Art?

Taking a position as a designer and moving from the discipline of Design to Art, I like to ask can good Design be considered as Art? This is one of those perpetual debates and discussions topics that really have no right or wrong answer. The way I see it, it always seems to be in essence boils down to how you define what design or art is? If I take a stab at this relationship between Art and Design, I always find that the issue is not only about the definition of Design or art, but about the amount of “constraints” a discipline has to deal with.

Just to clarify, I believe creativity cannot exist in vacuum, there must be boundaries. For example even creating Art has its own constraints that must be dealt with such as the properties of clay and even paint on canvas. But my point is Art has a lot less constraints to work with than say Industrial Design or Mechanical Design. In many ways, I always consider Art to be pure expression, in other words a tangible form born from emotion and/or inspiration. This if taken from a Designer’s stand point could be very difficult to reproduce in industrial design.

Often Industrial designers have to make compromises simply because the mechanical and manufacturing processes do not allow a certain form or detail. Product shapes are often be dictated by what manufacturing machines or processes can or cannot do. Therefore logically for a product to be considered Art, or an expression, it has to conquer the different mechanical constraints, raise above AND maintain the original inspirational intent. In many cases the more complex a product is in terms of specifications, manufacturing or usage requirements, the more difficult it is to turn it into Art. I do take my hat off to the few designers that has been successful and possibly the reason why many products in MoMa’s Architecture and Design collection are often very low technology products, although Apple has shown that they can buck the trend. Kudos to them. Now lets get back into what was brought up originally in the beginning of this Article. And that is when Designers try to create a product that could become Art, how we define design rears its ugly head again.

To explore this further, we need to look at the title of this post from another angle; can good Art be good Design? Let’s take a look at Philip Starck’s infamous Jucy Salif. The more artistic inclined love this and most Designers I know hate it, I myself sit on the fence on this one. Why? Many designer dislike this orange or lemon juicer as it does not do its job at all. The only think it does is make an artistic statement. So the Jucy Salif, if considered as a product that has to solve a problem (ie juicing oranges), it outright fails. Is it then bad design? Perhaps. However, if you consider it as a form of expression and its only purpose of it existing is to make a statement, then it does the job well.

To further expand on this point lets look at how the dictionary considers the words Design and Art. Firstly Design is often used as verb. We design, you design or I design. You see “Design” is an action and something you do. Art for example is a noun, a description of perhaps even a classification of genera. You don’t really say we art or I art, instead you say we paint or I sculpt. So you see Design has intent and often has a functional purpose and that is to solve a problem. Many good designs are great solutions to problems as well as able to maintain in their form outlook the other “deeper meanings”. It’s not to say that art has neither purpose nor meaning. No, it’s just that good Art is defined under a different set of parameters. In many ways Art and Design are 2 sides of the same coin. So therefore at the end of the day, can good Design equate to Art? Yes and no. As good design can also NOT be art. Fortunately this divide caused by constraints and definition will get smaller. The advances in computing and manufacturing technology will bridge this gap. We can soon create beautiful forms, based purely on emotion, without much of the current manufacturing constraints we now have. We can soon be only constraint by the basic laws of physics and rejoice that the manufacturing requirements we have are basically now gone. As a great example, do take a look at some of the cutting edge “design” work by the Studio Commonwealth in collaboration with Joshua Davis at their exhibition. They build their very unique products by pushing the edge of rapid-prototyping machines. Currently though only featuring low-technology products, the potential of this process is very huge.

Some of their other great work.

Image Source As you can see the time will soon come, when the limits or making thing will be only our imagination. I hope you enjoyed this article and I would love any feedback you might as well as your thoughts or examples you might have on the relationship between Art and Design.

Don’t forget to check out DT at Design Sojourn for more design insights.

Post from: Artist Hideout

Cave Paintings have always fascinated me. Most art books start out with talking about cave paintings as the origin of art. I figured it would be fun to do as a first vodcast. This one is a little short, but if all works well (second time posting this) I’ll do a longer (this one is just under 2 min), more in depth vodcast in the future.

I’m also hosting this myself, and don’t want to kill my bandwidth completely in one go.

Feel free to subscribe to this via itunes and watch it on your ipod with the following url:

http://feeds.b5media.com/b5media/ArtistHideout

Post from: Artist Hideout

I think this has been one of those ongoing debates in the art 2.0 world for a long time. www.artflock.com offers a great service for selling your art, and that’s what I’d recommend to anyone who wants to sell their work. It’s an amazing service. But for some reason, I think I continually look for something else. For some reason, I still like to be in control of my work, up until the point that someone else has purchased it. It’s a personal preference, and it’s not for everyone.

So I came up with an alternative. I haven’t seen it too much yet, but I think this may be a great way to not only promote your work and sell it, but also still maintain that element of control in your selling.

I have a painting that I’ve listed numerous times and still haven’t sold. I haven’t really promoted it too much, but any service I choose doesn’t usually have that option for a price that I feel is worthwhile on the “per click” basis.

So I’ve turned to Google and decided to try them. Google Base in particular.

Here are some advantages:

• Creating your listing is free
• Your item can be listed up to 31 days at a time
• Images are free to upload
• You can upload up to 15 files totaling 20mbs
• You can utilize the Google adwords service to promote your item
• It’s also easy to use

Here’s my current listing for this painting.

So what online service has worked the best for you and how do you promote your artwork online?

Post from: Artist Hideout

I’ve been hoping to write this post for a long time now and today it has finally come to pass. Darren Rowse, the Problogger himself, has brought Digital Photography School to b5media.

Digital Photography School – a website with simple tips to help digital camera owners get the most out of their cameras.

While it’s exciting to have Darren joining the ranks in the Arts and Design channel, he is bringing an amazing blog and community with him too. There is always something exciting happening around b5media.

Welcome to Arts and Design Darren!

Post from: Artist Hideout