(This post is for a presentation I’m giving to the Digital Multimedia class.)

Artists working with games:

• Cory Arcangel – Super Mario Clouds
• Ben Fry – Distellamap and Mario Soup
• Alison Mealey – UnrealArt
• Eddo Stern
• Brenda Brathwaite – Train

Art games and meta-games:

• Jason Nelson – i made this. you play this. we are enemies.
• Jason Rohner – Passage, Inside a Star-filled Sky, Sleep Is Death
• Ian Bogost – Cow Clicker and A Slow Year
• Metagames: Games about Games
• David Shute – Small Worlds
• Michael Molinari – But That Was [Yesterday]
• Daniel Benmergui – Today I Die
• Stephen Lavelle – The Terrible Whiteness of Appalachian Nights
• Retro Sabotage
• Austin Breed – Distance

Indie Games

• Indie Game: The Movie – Growing Up Edmund & Adam Atomic Talks Canabalt
• Jonathan Blow – Braid
• thatgamecompany – Flower
• Superbrothers – Sword & Sworcery EP
• Markus Persson – Minecraft
• Polytron – Fez
• Cave Story
• Spelunky

Indie gaming community and distribution

• TIGSource
• Ludum Dare
• Humble Indie Bundle (Wikipedia)
• Brainy Gamer podcast
• Game Development Stack Exchange

During this class, we got started on Assignment 3, which asks you to “create an image that both presents a truth and contains an element of fiction or fabricated reality” using Adobe Photoshop. We took a look at some examples of artists who work with raster imaging – see the Photoshop & Image Manipulation Examples post for those links.

We got started working with Photoshop in this class. Much of the Photoshop interface will be familiar from working with Illustrator, including the toolbar, palettes, and working with layers, although there are small differences. When starting a new Photoshop document, I’d suggest using the Web preset, with a size of 800 x 600 pixels or larger, and a resolution of 72 ppi (pixels per inch). When working with raster images, the size of your document is very important, since you cannot make raster images larger without losing image quality (unlike vector images).

Some of the basic Photoshop drawing tools include the Pencil, Brush, and Eraser. Just as in Illustrator, the Zoom and Hand tools are used to navigate around your document, and the Layers palette is used to organize your work and control layering order. The Layers palette controls can also be used to change layer opacity and to blend Layers together in different ways.

One very useful palette when you are first learning Photoshop is the Info palette. When you select a tool from the toolbox, the Info palette will show you a brief description of what the tool is used for. If you don’t see these tool descriptions, make sure the Info palette is visible and that “Show Tool Hints” is checked in the Palette Options.

The History palette in Photoshop is also very useful. It shows a list of every action you’ve taken so far when working on your document, and you can return your work to previous states by clicking back to that step in the list. So you can ‘Undo’ not just your previous action, but many actions at once.

The Paint Bucket tool is used to fill an entire layer or selection with colour. Another tool which does not really have an equivalent in Illustrator is the Clone Stamp tool, which uses one area of your image as a brush to draw over another area. This can be used to remove elements of an image, from something as small as a speck of dust to a major component of the image such as a person. The Healing Brush tool is similar to the Clone Stamp, but is specialized for retouching images by removing small blemishes.

We’ll spend some more time reviewing these tools and others in class as we continue to work with Photoshop.

Isabelle Hayeur is a Canadian artist who creates intriguing, metaphorical landscapes by digitally manipulating photographs. The subtle illusions in her photographs often play with the ways in which the environment is presented in advertising and other media. In an interview with Mason Journal, she says “In my earlier works, like the Uncertain Landscapes series, I use digital photomontage to show what we don’t see in our artificial spaces by confronting dreamscapes with disenchanted spaces in the same image. In the Model Homes series, I try to highlight our usage of counterfeit cultural values, postmodern pastiches and synthetic construction material. By creating a hyper reality that reveals the fake and the absurd, I am hoping to show the misrepresentation of these manufactured spaces. I use the digital illusion to highlight the fabricated “lies” that we encounter in reality.”

In the artist statement on her website, Hayeur provides a compelling description of the ideas behind her art practice:

“We have the privilege of constructing our world: the world we inhabit and the world that inhabits us. This is, of course, not a new phenomenon, but we have unprecedented means for achieving these ends. We give form to worlds that were once impossible and even unthinkable. We act on our surroundings and intervene in the course of events as never before. The universe in which we live has become malleable. It seems clear that our visions and lifestyles have a much greater impact on the world we occupy than in the past. It thus becomes particularly important that we assume responsibility for the landscapes we create and the worlds we imagine. These are the reflections that have informed my work over the past several years.”

Assignment 3 asks you to think about truth and fiction in the digital image. Here are some related links we looked at in class as we started this project.

Examples of artists working with Photoshop and image manipulation:

• Filip Dujardin (imaginary buildings; see also Escape Into Life post)
• Isabelle Hayeur (see Model Homes)
• Cassandra C. Jones (wallpaper patterns from clip art)
• Matt Siber (removing text from photos, floating logos)
• Mattijn Franssen (placing himself in fantastic landscapes)
• Craig Hunter Parker (surreal photo-illustrations)
• Michael Najjar (see High Altitude)
• Ben Heine – Pencil Vs. Camera
• Alex Cano (digital collage)
• Andy Baio – Meme Scenery

Historic photo manipulation:

• Alfred Gescheidt (photomanipulations made before Photoshop)
• Photo tampering throughout history
• The Ethics of Digital Manipulation

In Class 9, we had a group critique for Assignment 2. There were a lot of good comments during this critique, and I thought more of you were actively participating, which is great! Some interesting words came up during the critique, too. Here are some of them:

The Tyndall Effect is a scientific term referring to the phenomenon of light scattering by particles in a fine suspension. During the critique it came up as a way of describing dust particles in a beam of light, but it turns out that this definition is incorrect, as the Wikipedia article points out: “Occasionally the term Tyndall effect is incorrectly applied to light scattering by macroscopic dust particles in the air. However, this is more like reflection, not scattering, as the macroscopic particles become clearly visible in the process.”

Bokeh describes the way a camera lens renders out-of-focus points of light. This effect is most noticeable in photos with a very shallow depth of field. Some camera lenses create more aesthetically pleasing bokeh than others.

Albedo is a way of measuring the reflective power of a surface. It is used to describe the brightness of the moon and other astronomical bodies.

Kireji refers to the “cutting word” used in haiku to separate two different images. It is “a kind of verbal punctuation mark which signals the moment of separation and colours the manner in which the juxtaposed elements are related.”

During the crit we were also trying to find out if there was a word for the small utensils used to hold corn on the cob. I couldn’t find one… they seem to be just called corn holders, corn handles, or corn skewers. Check out A Word A Day for a daily dose of random vocabulary!

During this class, we took a look at some art blogs you can use for research or inspiration. We also took a look at some new Illustrator tools and techniques, including creating new Symbols and using the Symbol Sprayer tools to manipulate them, and creating custom fill patterns that you can apply to shapes. We looked at a few tools that manipulate paths, such as the Scissors tool (which snips your path at an anchor point), the Knife tool (which can be used to divide a path into two separate shapes), and the Eraser tool (which is used to subtract areas from shapes). The Appearance palette can be used to align shapes to the Artboard or to each other. Stroke palette options allow you to control how Illustrator draws corners on your paths, precisely control how the path is drawn, or to create dashed lines. We also looked at the Blend tool, which can be used to tell Illustrator to create a gradient between two objects, or to create a series of in-between objects as it blends one shape into another. It can be used to create grids and other patterns.

It’s easy to get so involved in your own artwork that you forget to take a look at what other artists are doing. Blogs are a great way to find out about interesting artists and learn something new every day. Here are a few excellent art and design blogs:

• but does it float – a curated stream of contemporary art.
• Escape Into Life – showcasing interesting artists and illustrators.
• Everyone Forever – “a stream of exploratory thinking.”
• Übersuper – “Mostly inspiring images, moods & colors, artists and their work series and sometimes just funny & geeky stuff.”
• Inspiration Lab – daily design inspiration.
• Aesthetics of Joy – “exploring the intersection between design and positive emotion.”
• Networked_Performance – network-based new media art.
• VVORK – great slides and links to artists websites.
• Heart Fish – art / design / craft inspiration.
• Art Fag City – New York art news and great articles.
• we make money not art – “We visit art galleries, listen to conferences, cover art and design events, take a lot of pictures, interview creative people, and we document these findings in order to share them with you.”
• Daily Routines – “how writers, artists, and other interesting people organize their days.” No longer updated, but still full of great material.
• an ambitious project collapsing – the digital equivalent of wandering through a library.
• BOOOOOOOM! – “Art! Design! Film! Music! Photo! Junk! Projects!”

In this class we discussed some different ways of coming up with ideas. We took a look at Frank Chimero’s How to Have an Idea, which suggests using mind maps to come up with creative, alogical associations between things. We drew a mind map with ‘diptych’ as the central idea. Chimero’s process of coming up with new ideas involves pulling together two ideas from different sides of the map, which means that they are connected by your central idea. This is somewhat like the technique of circuit bending, a way of creatively hacking electronic equipment to create new sounds or other unexpected effects.

The important point is to get started rather than waiting around for inspiration. As Frank Chimero points out, “there is no process if you don’t start – no one crumples a blank sheet of paper.” Mind maps are just one way you can get your brain fired up and generate ideas.

For our second assignment, we’ll create a diptych, or two images that go together. The word diptych originally meant a pair of panels attached with a hinge. Historical examples of diptychs often involve religious iconography (altarpieces, book covers, and so on). Today, the word is often used to describe two images which are meant to be seen together. Using Adobe Illustrator to create a diptych will help you practice combining elements from multiple files, copying and pasting, and editing individual shapes, and will lead into upcoming assignments where we’ll work with multiple images.

Placing two images beside each other creates something new. Our brains create new associations between the two images, even if they are completely different. It activates the space between the two images and can suggest a sense of time, movement, or narrative. This relates to the way that we read comics – Scott McCloud writes about this in Understanding Comics. It also relates to how our eyes perceive film and video.

Diptychs don’t have to be two images placed side by side. You can have vertical diptychs, or diagonal ones (think of the symmetry of playing cards). The two images do not have to be the same size or shape, and you can experiment with the distance between them. Diptychs can also be created in many different media, including painting, printmaking, photography, and even animation and video.

During this class, we got started on Assignment 2 (creating a diptych in Illustrator). We also had a visit from artist Greg Staats, who is here for the opening of his exhibition, Condolence, at Grenfell Art Gallery. Greg talked about his working process, including his techniques of intuitively collecting images, building a personal archive, and aiming to create “photos that slow you down.” He also described how, when making a diptych or series of photos, he aims for each image to stand on its own. This is great advice to keep in mind when working on your diptych project.

You can see more of Greg Staats’ work on the Indigenous Arts Network website (there is a longer version of the video interview here), as well as the Centre for Contemporary Canadian Art website.

Here are some examples of artists working with diptychs, which we looked at in Class 6:

Artists working with diptychs or related forms:

• Piero della Francesca – Montefeltro portraits
• Kenojuak Ashevak – Siilavut, Nunavut
• Kunisada and Polyptychs in Japanese printmaking
• M.C. Escher – Day and Night
• Andy Warhol – Marilyn Diptych
• Tim Lee – My My Hey Hey
• David Hockney – Pearblossom Highway
• Siggi Eggertsson
• Kristan Horton – Dr. Strangelove Dr. Strangelove
• Charles Burns – One Eye
• Susan Coolen – Parlance
• Claudia Cortinez
• John Baldessari – Hands And/Or Feet (Part Two) (more)
• Frédéric Delangle – CERN diptychs
• Bill Viola – The Passions (video diptych)
• David O’Kane – The Nothingness of Personality and other animated painted diptychs

Collaborative diptych projects:

• 3191: A Year of Mornings
• A collaborative diptych project by two Montreal photographers

During this class we looked at everyone’s work for Assignment 1. We also started Assignment 2, where we’ll be creating diptychs, pairs of images which are intended to be seen together. One way you can create a diptych in Illustrator is to use the Artboards palette to work with multiple artboards. Here’s a good overview of working with multiple artboards in Illustrator.

During this class, we spent some time working on Assignment 1, which is due next class. Remember to bring a USB drive (labelled with your name) for next class, so that you can hand in your work. We also took a look at some new Illustrator tools and features, including context menus, Live Paint, Warp, Twirl, and related tools. Here are a few more essential Illustrator tools and techniques to remember:

Selecting Colours
There are several ways to choose colours in Illustrator. You can use the Color palette to pick a colour from the coloured bar, but because the palette is so small, the controls are rather limited. For more control over colour selection, try double-clicking either the Fill or Stroke colour in your toolbox. This brings up the Color Picker window, where you can easily adjust the colour you have, or use the controls to find the precise colour you’d like.

Illustrator allows you to select both a Fill colour and a Stroke colour. You can use the toolbox buttons to swap these two colours, or switch them to the default white and black. You can also set either the Fill or the Stroke to None, and the Fill colour can be set to a gradient or a pattern instead of a solid colour.

Using Swatches
Swatches are a way to save colours that you intend to use later. To create a swatch, simply select the colour you want using either of the methods described above, then click the New Swatch button on the Swatches palette. You can give the swatch a name if you’d like. Your swatch then appears in the Swatches palette, and you can click it to make it the active colour.

When you first start a new Illustrator document, the Swatches palette is filled with the default swatches. If you aren’t going to use these and want to clear them from the palette, simply drag each swatch to the little trash icon on the palette to delete it. You can also click the first swatch, hold the Shift key, and click the last swatch to select them all, then drag them all to the trash at once.

Free Transform
The Free Transform tool is used to resize or rotate an object. It’s quite easy to use, and you don’t even need to switch to it most of the time – when you select an object with the Selection tool, the Free Transform controls automatically appear. To resize the object, simply drag the controls on the corners and edges of the object’s bounding box. When resizing, you can hold the Shift key to keep the same proportions (so the object is not stretched). When you move the mouse slightly outwards from the corner controls, you can use the controls to rotate the object.

Changing an object in this way is called transforming it. To more precisely control the position and size of an object, try using the Transform palette. You can also access more Transform options from the Object → Transform menu, which will let you Reflect the object (mirroring it) or Shear it (skewing it).

Digital imaging refers to using computers to create and work with images. Early experiments with computer art in the 1960s often used plotters, which are printers which specifically print vector images. For some interesting examples, see Plotter Drawings on the Digital Art Museum website.

As computers continue to become more important in work, communication, and daily life, more and more artists find themselves working with digital technology. Think about how important computers have become to photographers and video artists over the past ten years. Even artists who do not create work directly on the computer use computers and the internet to research, communicate, and publicize their work. So learning to work with computers as part of your art practice is useful, even if you do not see yourself as a “digital artist”.

Digital imaging is used in many other fields besides artmaking. For example, digital imaging technology is very important for designers, photographers, cartographers, journalists, doctors, engineers, and many other professionals.

In this class, we will look at digital imaging as it is used for making art. You can think of digital imaging as part of a larger field of art called new media. Instead of traditional art media such as painting and sculpture, new media artists work with emerging technology to make art. Besides digital imaging, new media includes media such as video art and video installation, sound art, digital animation, interactive art and internet art, physical computing and electronics, art using computer code, biotechnology art, and even virtual art. Because it involves technology which is evolving quickly, the definition of new media is always changing. The Canada Council for the Arts defines new media as “Artworks that use multimedia, computers or communications technologies in creative expression”.

Digital imaging is an intuitive place to get started making art with computers, because you can use your drawing, painting, photography skills to create digital art. As the class progresses, we’ll look at other ways to make digital art, using the web, video and animation, and even working with computer code. Digital artists are doing a lot of interesting and exciting things. New media does not have the vast history of traditional media like painting or sculpture – it is really a whole new world.

This class was mostly studio time, to give everyone a chance to get working in Illustrator and ask questions. There was also a brief demonstration reviewing some of the Illustrator tools, and introducing the Type Tool and Type on a Path. As you are getting started with Illustrator, here are some of the more important tools and features to focus on:

The Pen Tool
The Pen Tool can be used to create just about any shape in Illustrator. Despite its name, it works quite differently than the Brush or Pencil tools, and is a good way to get used to the differences of drawing in Illustrator. The Pen Tool creates lines, which in Illustrator are called paths. However, instead of dragging the tool to draw each line, you click to define where each anchor point of the line is. An anchor point is a place where the line changes, such as a corner or the apex of a curve. You can click without dragging to create a corner point, or click and drag to create curves with smooth points. Hold the mouse down on the Pen Tool’s toolbox icon to access the other pen tools, which allow you to Add Anchor Points, Delete Anchor Points, or Convert Anchor Points between corner and smooth points. The Pen tool takes some getting used to, but with some practice you will find it super useful for drawing many shapes.

The Selection and Direct Selection Tools
Both the Selection and Direct Selection Tools are used to manipulate your drawn shapes, but they do so in different ways. The Selection Tool is the dark arrow, and is used to select shapes (by clicking them) or reposition shapes (by clicking on them and dragging the mouse). You can also select multiple shapes by drawing a box around them, or holding the Shift key while you click different shapes. The Direct Selection Tool (the white arrow), on the other hand, is used to manipulate parts of shapes. For instance, you can use the Direct Selection tool to move a single anchor point, or adjust a curve using the control points. You can select multiple anchor points by drawing a box around them, or by holding the Shift key as you click multiple points.

The Layers Palette
The Layers Palette is used to organize your artwork. Everything you draw in Illustrator will show up in the Layers palette as a separate object, and each object is contained in a Layer which acts like a folder containing the objects. You can use the Layers palette to organize your drawing, select and delete objects, and change which objects appear on top of others. Objects at the top of the Layers palette will appear “on top” in your artwork. To select an object using the Layers palette, click the empty area on the very right side of the box containing the object’s name. One of the most useful functions of the Layers palette is that you can use it to temporarily hide or lock certain layers or objects so that they are not in the way when you are working. To toggle whether a layer is hidden or locked, click the two boxes on the left side of the box containing the object’s name.

The Zoom and Hand Tools
The Zoom Tool and Hand Tool are used to navigate around your drawing. With the Zoom tool selected, you can click to zoom in on your drawing, or hold the Option key and click to zoom out. With the Hand Tool selected, you can click and drag to reposition your artwork on the screen. It is quite helpful to learn the shortcut keys for these tools: you can press Command (⌘) and + to zoom in, and Command and – to zoom out. You can also press Command and 0 (zero) to fit your artwork on the screen. The shortcut key for the Hand tool is the spacebar, so you can hold the spacebar and drag the mouse to reposition your drawing at any time.

In our second class we looked at the work of several artists and illustrators who work with vector graphics or related techniques:

• Siggi Eggertsson
• Alex Hohlov
• Marian Bantjes
• Joshua Davis
• Andy Gilmore
• Autumn Whitehurst
• Tom Whalen
• Catalina Estrada
• Cristiano Siqueira

We also looked at several artists who do not work with vector images or even digital media, but whose work shares some characteristics with vector imaging. Many of these artists are painters who work with flat geometric shapes and bold colours, and make use of precise placement and symmetry. Others work with text and patterns, sometimes referencing commercial design or advertising techniques.

• Tauba Auerbach
• Chris Ware
• Takashi Murakami
• Piet Mondrian
• Bridget Riley
• Peter Halley
• Barbara Kruger
• Robert Indiana
• Wassily Kandinsky
• Andy Warhol
• Keith Haring
• Ed Ruscha
• Banksy

In this class we also looked at some examples of Illustrator projects, and there was a brief Illustrator demo. Since we were not able to meet in the Mac Lab, we’ll go over most of the tools introduced in this class again, so you can try them out. We also started Assignment 1.

Siggi Eggertsson is an Icelandic artist and illustrator who lives in Berlin. He works extensively with vector images, creating choppy, graphic drawings that reference early computer graphics while retaining a lively organic quality. His subtle use of gradients and unusual colours is especially evident in his In Plein Air series.

From his interview with Computer Arts magazine:

“I got really into the paintings of romantic impressionists, who took their canvases and paint outside, and painted what they saw – mountains, flowers and other imagery like that. I decided to modernise this method, taking my canvas – that is my computer – outside and drawing everything I could see in front of me directly into it. I’m not sure how long everything took, perhaps seven or eight hours, but I had to go back inside in-between times to charge the battery. I used Illustrator while I was drawing the image, and the colouring was done in Photoshop.”

Eggertsson also experiments with video art: see A Growing Pile of Work and Supernova.

For now, the computers in the Mac Lab have been set up to be dual-booting, which means that they are running both Mac OS and Windows. When you come to the lab, the computers may already be showing a Windows login screen. To switch to Mac OS, you need to shut down the computer and immediately hold the Option key while it starts up. This will show a screen which lets you select Mac OS or Windows. If the wireless mouse does not work while on this screen, you can select Mac OS using the arrow keys and pressing Enter on the keyboard.

When logging into the Mac Lab computers, remember to enter your username like so:
swgc\username

Computing and Communications has requested that when we are finished using Mac OS, we should reboot the computers so that they go back into Windows. This is so that Computing can automatically install Windows security updates, and so that other classes who share the lab can use Windows.

There have been a lot of changes to the Mac Lab over the summer, so please let me know if you run into any problems using the machines. Thanks for your patience!

As we progress through the semester I’ll be posting short summaries of each class here, so you can refer back to them if you need to.

We started our first class by going over the course outline. Please note that you will need a USB drive for this class, both to backup your work and to submit work for evaluation.

I would also encourage you to bring a sketchbook to class. We’ll be creating digital images in this class, but that doesn’t mean that the entire process has to take place on the computer. You might find it useful to work through your ideas on paper first, as a pencil and paper will let you sketch more spontaneously and in a more free-form way than you can in Illustrator.

We have new computers in the Mac Lab this year, Mac Pros running Mac OS 10.6 (Snow Leopard). The computers are dual-booting, so they also run Windows. For instructions on how to login to Mac OS, please see the Booting Into Mac OS post.

Our first class was mostly an introduction to Mac OS. We looked at the various areas of the Mac OS interface, including the Desktop and Dock, and using Finder to add Applications to the Dock. We also looked at using System Preferences to adjust Mac OS settings, such as setting up a secondary mouse button. When using a USB drive with Mac OS, remember to eject the drive (by dragging it to the Trash) before removing it, or your files could become corrupted.

We will be spending the first part of this semester learning to work with vector images in Adobe Illustrator. We took a quick look at Illustrator in our first class, including starting a new document, how the interface is organized into the toolbox and palettes, and how to use some of the basic tools for drawing and manipulating shapes. We’ll go over this material in more detail in the next few classes.

This is the class website for Introductory Digital Imaging. We’ll use this website to keep a record of the class as we progress, and post links relevant to class discussions. You can also use this website to access documents such as the course outline and assignments – the list of Course Documents on the left will expand as the class progresses. I’ll send each of you a username and password soon, so you can access the site. See About this Site for more!