How to Make Vector Art

Bitmap Images

There are two main types of graphics used on computers. There are Bitmap graphics, which is a type of image that uses pixels to store image information. A pixel is a tinny square on the screen and many of them are used to make up an image. As the image is made up of many tiny dots, the image is not easily scalable. If you try to enlarge it, the quality of the image will decrease.

Vector Graphics

The second type is Vector Graphics. Vector graphics are scalable. They do not use pixels to store information. A vector application, uses mathematical information to store what an image looks like. If you remember maths from high school, you can use co-ordinates to record positions, formulas to record the angles of lines, and shapes etc. This is a very simplified explanation, however, the point is that vector graphics do not use pixels. Because of this they are scalable. You may enlarge them, and the quality of the image will not decrease. So it makes them ideally suited for any situation where you may need the image in different sizes.

How to make Vector Art

To create Vector Art images you will need an application such as Adobe Illustrator, Macromedia Freehand, Coral Draw, or the free open-source alternative Inkscape. Creating an vector image is different to traditional applications in that you can't just use an eraser rub out parts of an image which you want to delete. Vector images are made up of objects, which have sizing handles to manipulate your images with. Once you master your application, professional and crisp scalable graphics are easy to create.

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The author of this article has a site which offers: Free Vector Art and Free Vector Clip Art Downloads

Metal Clays Work Like Clay, But With a Whole Different Result

If you have never worked with metal clays, also commonly referred to as silver clay, you are missing out on an exciting media. Similar to what you can do when you make clay art with ceramic clays, metal or silver clays can be rolled, sculpted, stamped, sanded, filed, engraved, drilled and pre-polished, all prior to firing. This gives you limitless possibilities for your art. The difference between these two mediums really shows when you pull your fired project out of the kiln. The results will amaze you and the doors will be open to significantly broaden your artistic talents. Don't be afraid to explore metal clays.

The most common metals used in metal clays are silver and gold with silver being used by the vast majority of artists. Metal clay is a combination of water, binders, and small particles of either silver or gold. It works just as your traditional clays do. This resemblance to conventional clays allows you to form pieces of almost any size from jewelry to larger sculptures. You can use the same tools you are using on your ceramic clays or shape your project by hand. When designing your work, keep in mind your shrinkage will be about 8 - 12 percent. Up to the point that you kiln silver clay there is not much difference from the clays you have in your studio today.

So what happens inside your kiln that is different from ceramic clays? With mineral clays the firing process bakes the clay into a solid finished form. The difference with metal clays is that inside the kiln the binders burn away and the metal powders fuse together. This leaves behind a solid and durable object. Essentially you are sculpting metal which makes it great for jewelry making. Form beads or pendants with silver clay and add small gold clay accents to make a stunning one of a kind piece.

Need more motivation to try metal clays? How about no need to invest in special equipment to try it out? Metal clays fire at lower temperatures in a short period of time. So if your kiln controllers don't have low enough settings you can fire these clays with a propane torch or even a gas stove top. Should you fall in love with metal clays as I'm sure you will, there are some great kilns available exclusively for metal clays. But to experiment and try your hand at this incredible media you can just pick up some clay and see what you create.

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Works just like traditional clays yet can be fired on your gas stove top if necessary. These are just some of the benefits of metal or silver clays. If they don't sell you on it, the beautiful finished pieces you will create are sure to do the trick. So why not order some silver clay next time your are in the mood to make clay art from The American Art Clay Company? As you probably know their website has everything from molds to kiln controllers at prices that allow you to try out new things with ease. Once you sculpt and kiln silver clay you will be hooked.

Learn How to Use Acrylic Paint

Acrylic paint is a popular painting medium and is very forgiving. Both beginning and advanced painters used acrylic. Acrylic paint is great for several reasons. First, it dries quickly. This may or may not be a good thing for you. It better for those who like to layer their paint. Oil paint takes a long time to dry and if you layer, it will take even longer if it ever does completely dry.

Acrylic paint can also wash out of your clothes with soap and water. You have to use terpentine or a similar solution in order to get oil paint out off the brush, your skin, and your clothes. That's if you're lucky it doesn't ruin your clothes. That said, acrylic is a better choice if you are a messy painter unless you wear some old clothes or an apron you don't mind getting paint on.

Before you start learning to paint, you need to get the proper tools. First, buy some acrylic paint. You can either get a set of a dozen or more colors, or you can just get a few of the primary colors and black and white, and then just mix all the colors you need. If you are a beginner, I suggest you get a set with small tubes until you get a handle of mixing.

Next, get some paintbrushes and canvas. You can usually get a small set of brushes that will give you a wide enough selection. You can either buy a canvas board, a stretched canvas, or stretch it yourself. I prefer the canvas boards that come in many sizes, big and small.

After you lightly draw out what you want to paint, although you don't have to do this, you can begin painting. Start with the lightest colors painting wide spaces. Layer in the darker layers as your previous layers dry. You can choose any brush you want to use, there is no right or wrong. Experiment and use what you like best.

As you go, become more and more intricate if you are doing a detailed lifelike painting. If you want to go abstract, let your imagination and paint brush guide you. Don't worry about if you are doing it right, just let yourself go. Add color where you want it and use as much paint as you feel is necessary. The more you paint, the better you'll get at it, and the more you'll enjoy it!

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Do you want to learn more about art and do you want to learn to paint acrylic? Go to BeginninginArt.com for more information about painting with different painting mediums, such as acrylic, watercolor, oil, and more.

Urban Art and Graffiti in Berlin - Urban Affairs Festival

Berlin has lived an important process of continual redefinition and change since the Reunification in 1990. Now it has become world-famous because of its international architecture, its performing arts and its cultural diversity. Moreover, Berlin rates as one of the best locations for street art and graffiti.

There is nothing unusual about graffiti covered walls in Berlin. The city has become a blank canvas for graffiti artists far and wide. The roots of graffiti culture can be traced back to West Berlin in the early 1980s, when the American-occupied sector was the reluctant melting pot of anarchist punks, Turkish immigrants and West German draft resisters. Nowadays, Germans accept graffiti in their cities because of the graffiti painted on the Berlin Wall. Once a symbol of division, the preserved parts of the wall now showcase some of the most famous graffiti in the world.

Grafiti may be vandalism, but it is also celebrated as street art and even regarded as an integral component of Berliner Strassenkultur. Some 45 street artists from nine countries are taking part in Germany's biggest-ever urban art exhibition, which has been extended to the end of August because of the huge interest. It is the URBAN AFFAIRS Festival. Located in a post-industrial building, this 900 sq. meter exhibition space is the ideal location for the largest and most comprehensive Urban Art exhibition in Germany to date. It is one of the most interesting showcases of more than 25 international artists in this context. Jochen Kuepper (riot arts) originally from Cologne is one of the initiators and curators of this ambitious project, which tries to contribute as an alternative platform for backjumps or planet process, both bigger but also more established festivals of street art.

Urban Art and Street Art are experiencing increasing global attention from significant collections, publications and institutions in the established art market, as well as an academic reappraisal of the genre within the art historical context. Works by selected street artists continue to break auction records and the fact that URBAN AFFAIRS participants El Tono and Nano 4818 are currently exhibiting at the Tate Modern Museum in London symbolizes the staggering development and widespread notoriety of this anarchic art movement.

Unlike other cities which have demonised its urban artists, street art today is an integral staple of the Berlin cultural scene. The whole city is a canvas. It has so many walls, so many atmospheric buildings. Berlin has become a magnet for artists who produce their art on concrete surfaces. Clubs and bars are also commonly decorated with graffiti. This is such a big contrast from most clubs and bars in the United States. The graffiti makes some travellers leery of venturing in to such establishments. Street art is gaining increasing global attention from the established art market, with work by its top exponents starting to break auction house records.

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Take a ride on an overhead commuter train and graffiti accompanies you on both sides for miles and miles of your journey. Rent your Apartments in Berlin to enjoy its amazing Urban Art!

American Impressionists in Old Lyme, Connecticut

What art lover can get enough of the impressionists? Not Emsworth, certainly, despite his vow to partake of more solid fare, and so last weekend found us in Old Lyme, Connecticut treating ourselves to a second generous helping of American impressionists this summer.

Old Lyme is home to the Florence Griswold Museum, the only museum I know of devoted solely to American impressionism. For a decade or two, beginning around 1900, a number of painters, including Childe Hassam and Willard Metcalf, came each summer to stay at Florence Griswold's boarding house and to paint in the congenial and picturesque surroundings of Old Lyme. Metcalf depicted its classy facade in one of his best-known paintings, May Night.

The boarding house is no longer the home of an art colony, but instead a small, unpretentious museum. The gardens have been nicely restored, a new gallery building (sadly devoid of architectural interest) was erected several years ago, and a good (though narrowly focused) art collection has been assembled.

The show that now fills the new gallery spaces (through July 27, 2008) consists of American impressionist paintings from the Terra Foundation. These were painted by Americans working from about 1885 and into the 1920s in Giverny, of all places, the French town where Claude Monet lived and tended his celebrated garden with its Japanese footbridge and lily pond.

These young Americans must have been quite a nuisance to Monet and his family. One of them, Theodore Butler, succeeded in marrying Monet's step-daughter, Suzanne Hoschede, an event memorialized in Theodore Robinson's painting The Wedding March, which is part of this show. Several of Butler's own paintings, which did not especially appeal to us, were also on display. Willard Metcalf, who collected birds' eggs (on display in this exhibit!), managed to be hired to teach botany to Monet's son and stepson.

Still another American, John Leslie Breck, apparently tried and failed to marry another stepdaughter, Blanche Hoschede. Breck surely did his best to curry favor with the girl's stepfather; he joined Monet in painting those tiresome haystacks. One wall of the galleries was wasted on a dozen small haystack studies by Breck.

But we did enjoy a large and impressive pastoral landscape by Breck entitled Autumn, Giverny (The New Moon), which shows the influence of Barbizon painters Jean-Francois Millet and Jules Breton. Everyone in our party agreed, however, that Breck had devoted too much of the canvas to the foreground.

The show in Old Lyme has a satisfying set of works by Theodore Robinson, some of which brought to mind paintings by Ernest Lawson we had recently seen in the exhibit from the Phillips Collection in Rochester. For example, Lawson had a habit of putting bare tree limbs in the foreground of a landscape as a sort of screen for the rest of the painting. Robinson's earlier painting, Winter Landscape, done in 1889, used the same device.

Lawson's work is characterized overall by the use of thickly applied, jewel-tone paints. But Theodore Robinson apparently used this technique first, as evidenced by my favorite of the Robinson pictures in this show, Pere Trognon and His Daughter at the Bridge.

The highlight of the show for me was a wall of several paintings by my favorite American impressionist, the bold colorist Carl Frieseke, who produced his best work in the second and third decades of the twentieth century while Matisse and Picasso were taking modern art in quite different directions. In Frieseke's Lady in a Garden, the stripes on the lady's dress become indistinguishable from the reeds through in which she is standing; she becomes one with cultivated nature.

For an art museum junkie who cares about American art, and Emsworth stands at the front of that line, the Florence Griswold Museum is worthy of regular visits for its excellent permanent collection. Most of that collection is, unfortunately, in storage when the museum has a traveling exhibition like the present one from the Terra Foundation occupying its new exhibition space. However, highlights of the collection, including this quintessentially impressionistic work by Childe Hassam, can be seen in the first- and second-floor rooms of the old boarding house. A particularly pleasing painting by William Chadwick shows the veranda of the boarding house as it was when Chadwick, Hassam, and the others were working there a hundred years ago. Amusingly, the panels of the kitchen cupboards were all painted by the denizens of the art colony back in the day.

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