[BAS Newsletter] 3 Corners technical notes

Mon Mar 2 09:15:16 GMT 2020

Paul has very kindly provided technical notes on our last meeting. At 
his request I have included the handout from my demonstration. Some 
members cannot read these newsletters if they contain attachments or are 
in formatted text - so apologies for the rather drab formatting. We 
shall try to get these on line soon.

Bromley Arts Society 3 Corner Demonstration Friday 7th February 2020
====================================================================

This year we commenced our 2020 demonstration programs with a very 
successful "Three Corners Presentation" provided by three talented BAS 
members (including our Chairmen) that kindly demonstrated their skills 
and artwork. The audience divided into three groups which then spent a 
short 30 mins with each of the demonstrators in turn.

We had Diana Mckinnon, who is a regular exhibitor at our BAS 
exhibitions, demonstrate how she created her very popular machine 
embroidery woodland scenes.

Alistair Payne, for whom this was his first demonstration was brave 
enough to step in at the last moment. (thank you). He gave us a great 
insight into his clay work in creating his life like sculptures of bulls 
and elephants.

Adrian Fowle, our chairman, gave a practical and informative 
introduction to Digital Art with an end to end demonstration of how to 
create a greeting card. Adrian also stepped in at the last moment for 
which we thank him.

Diana Mckinnon Textile compositions
-----------------------------------

Diana began by taking us through the stages and techniques she uses to 
create her artwork. Diana explained that whilst she was completing her 
City & Guild in embroidery she became fascinated with burning things! 
Diana loved the way it creates wonderful edges and fragments in 
textiles. She would singe the edges to create wonderful fragments of 
textiles and to help seal and form the edges.

Beautiful fragments to be used in her compositions are created from silk 
fragments. Since silk does not lock together when rubbed together Diana 
has perfected a method of glueing the fragments, and placing the 
dampened fragments between a mesh or gauze which she would then dry on 
the washing line or even the tumble dryer if in a hurry!

Diana also introduces Lurex fabric to her compositions which can provide 
a wonderful sheen effect or Lutradur fabric which can be stitched or 
stuck on to create shapes or textures which can then be painted if wished.

Compositions are started with one of her own photos. Small compositions 
are favoured for practical purposes including maintaining costs. They 
are backed with a calico material.

Depth is very important to Diana. She selects a composition where 
multiple layers can be built up to create depth starting from a softer 
painted background. She also optimizes the effect of light and shadow 
sticking in fragments to provide further texture.

Diana then introduces stitches using her Swiss Bernina sewing machine, 
using horizontal stitches for a strong line or vertical stitches for 
more delicate lines. The thread used is one created especially for 
machine embroidery.

For the final presentation the material is left exposed without glass to 
emphasize the vibrancy of the final work.

For more information and examples of her work go to dmckinnon.co.uk.

Alistair Payne Sculptor
------------------------

Alistair spent 4 5 years at art school and retired about 3 years ago and 
now enjoys creating popular animal figures. He loves creating models of 
bulls and cows which he grew up with as a lad.
He creates sculptures from a range of clays including porcelain and uses 
glazes which can produce very interesting surface colours and textures. 
His models of bulls are created directly from an inbuilt memory of their 
form. His other interest is in creating large colourful sculptures from 
polystyrene.

Alistair commenced his demonstration with a bull and riding figure. 
Using standard grey modelling clay, with a fleck or slight granulation, 
he placed a cardboard tube supported by a small tin around which he 
roughly shaped the body of the bull. He does not use any predefined 
moulds or wire supports which would expand and crack the clay if fired.

Once the body was roughly shaped the legs were added and then the head 
and tail. These would be left to harden slightly to gain strength before 
further detail is shaped and a figure added on the back of the bull. 
Later the supporting tin is removed and the underside shaped.

The clay can only be fired if it no more that œ Inch thick otherwise is 
risks splitting and cracking due to uneven drying in the kiln. With a 
small hole left in the belly of the bull the cardboard tube is left 
inside to burn off in the kiln.

Alistair uses a local kiln shared by colleagues to fire his works. Many 
of his works have a dark tone highlights which is achieved by 
strategically placing the sculpture in burning woodchip embers. This 
creates a charcoal like shading on the sculpture.

Adrian Fowle Digital art
-------------------------

Adrian provided a very informative hand out to go along with his 
excellent introduction of digital art which I will not replicate here. 
He is a great advocate of using Open Source software for which there is 
a extensive range available some very comparable to market leading 
software but all free. If you are interested I urge you see his "Digital 
Tools for Greeting Cards2 hand out which is attached.

Paul Stringfellow.

Digital Tools for Greeting Cards
================================

Summary
-------

This demonstration will cover
1) Assembly and / or creation of text and pictures
2) Arrangement on page
3) Printing
Most of it for free!
What follows is part philosophy and part practical guide in some detail. 
Feel free to ignore any bits you don’t need.

Digital Art
-----------

I think digital art should be regarded as just another medium. If you 
started with watercolour and then tried oil painting you will know that 
some of your skills carried over and you had to learn some new skills. 
You also had to invest in new paints and brushes. Probably cheap ones at 
first, then perhaps a better quality range. Digital art is much the same!

Software
-------

There is a philosophical model called Free and / or Open Source 
software, which is a bit like the Co-Op. This software is “free as in 
beer” to download and use, and “free as in speech” in its rejection of 
proprietary storage formats and control. In contrast, much commercial 
software is moving towards a model of renting rather than purchasing 
software, and closed formats. I use Open Source software almost 
exclusively and try to choose programs that work on Windows, Mac and 
Linux PCs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open-source_software

Vector and Bitmap Software
--------------------------

Most people are familiar with bitmap (aka raster) graphics which are 
used for digital photos. They store images as dots. If you enlarge them 
too much you see the familiar jagged, pixelated edges of objects. Bitmap 
images can store rich textural detail for digital art too and most paint 
programs use them. You may be able to identify a square in a picture, 
but most bitmap art programs only treat the individual dots and don’t 
“see” the square.

Vector graphics are very different. They store instructions for creating 
shapes. They can be printed at any size without pixelation and the 
shapes remain defined for later editing. However it is difficult to 
provide the detail for rich texture so they tend to be used for rather 
flat images. They work well for cartoons, comics, op art and designs for 
packaging. It is not impossible to produce detail though and I find this 
format exciting.

GIMP is the most popular open source choice for bitmap editing of 
photos. It rivals Adobe Photoshop. Mypaint used to be a  better program 
for bitmap painting and can be used with GIMP. Do not save images in 
JPEG format, they get oversimplified over time. PNG is probably the best 
general format, or use GIMP’s own internal format. Save a copy in JPEG 
format when you want to upload or send it somewhere.

Inkscape is one of several open source vector graphics programs, a rival 
to Adobe Illustrator or Coreldraw.

There are numerous courses, free or paid, to learn to use the commercial 
programs which tells you that they can be difficult! This is because 
they, and their open source equivalents, are so powerful and can do so 
much. However you really do not need to know everything they do to enjoy 
creating art with them. There are simple tutorials and books aplenty, so 
don’t let the apparent complexity put you off.

https://www.gimp.org/
http://mypaint.org/
https://inkscape.org/

Fonts
-----

You don’t have to accept the fonts your computer came with. There are 
literally thousands to choose from. Fonts are actually small computer 
programs, they have licences, costs and updates like other software. 
There are of course open-source fonts, some of poor quality. One 
unexpectedly good source of open source fonts is 
https://fonts.google.com/. Not only can you download the fonts, but they 
show you font pairs that might suit for headline and body text - 
apparently something that amateurs (like me) get wrong. They also have 
articles with good advice in them. Font technology is quite amazing if 
you get into it, but fortunately you don’t need to if it does not 
interest you.
Once you have downloaded your fonts your computer will install them, 
usually if you just click on them.

Clip Art
--------

There are photographs and artwork that you can download for free to 
incorporate into your own work, some paid and some free. See 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Public_domain_image_resources

I particularly like the vector clip art libraries. One of the biggest 
was hacked recently and had to close for a while. Try 
https://publicdomainvectors.org/

Colours
-------

There are different standards to express colour. Probably everything you 
own – phone camera, “proper camera”, scanner, printer, display – uses 
RGB or one of its subtypes. Commercial printers use CMYK instead. This 
is not the space to discuss the technical differences. Just imagine if I 
defined standard red as a rather orangey red and you had a more bluish 
red in mind, with consequent changes in other colours. We would have 
difficulty describing an art work to each other. It is possible to 
convert from one to another, but if you know you need a  commercial 
printer you can use CMYK colours from the start in software.
Even if we agreed on a colour space, most physical devices have a limit 
on the ‘gamut’ of colours they can faithfully reproduce. To handle all 
of this properly requires individual devices to be calibrated and a 
colour profile created. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICC_profile. 
Warning – it’s complicated and you (probably ) don’t need it.

The upshot is that if you are using your own printer you can tweak your 
artwork to suit. If you are going to use a commercial printer, leave 
time to talk to them and get their advice.

Hardware
--------

If you are only using clip art and text you can use a mouse to control 
all the programs. If you are going to draw anything, a graphics tablet 
with pressure sensitivity quickly becomes essential. I have drawn with a 
mouse but it is hard.
“Trust Flex Graphics Tablet with Ultra-Thin Design and Ergonomic 
Wireless Pen” is a good way to test the water. At £38 on Amazon and less 
if you look around it is cheaper than many starter sets of paint. The 
market leader is Wacom with eye watering prices for their top models. 
They and others make more moderate tablets. You want a medium sized 
tablet, not a large one.  The cable, usually USB, has to be compatible 
with your computer, and the driver program with your operating system 
(Windows or Mac etc). If you use the software I suggest here, you don’t 
need all the programs that come with it, some of which may not be good. 
Otherwise the usual purchasing rules  apply of matching your budget to 
the features.

https://www.trust.com/en/product/21259-flex-design-graphic-tablet-black
https://uk-store.wacom.com/Catalog/Pen-Tablets/wacom-intuos/wacom-intuos-m-bluetooth

Layout and printing
-------------------

A simple greetings card actually has 4 pages, usually with a blank 2nd 
page. For home printing you can get away with designing the “outside” 
and the “inside” as two images and combining them as a 2 page pdf file. 
An A5 card would be created as two sides of A4. The second side needs to 
be rotated – or else you need to set your printer’s duplex setting to 
flip on the short side of the page instead of the more common long side. 
I don’t know of an open source pdf editor that does this combining and 
rotating properly and easily. I use MasterPDFeditor from 
https://code-industry.net/ . It does cost a certain amount every year, 
which I dislike. Home printers often have a margin in which thay cannot 
print. I will show you how I manage that.

The alternative is to use a desktop publishing program, aka a layout 
program. The usual open source choice is Scribus which I find too 
complex for my needs. A word processor will often do instead. It is said 
that LibreOffice Writer is better for this than Microsoft Word. There is 
no harm in having both installed.

https://www.libreoffice.org/

In this case you create each page as a separate page – and in the 
example above set a page size of A5. You need to find the option for 
“booklet printing”, either in writer / word or in your printer driver.

https://help.libreoffice.org/6.4/en-GB/text/swriter/guide/print_brochure.html
https://support.office.com/en-us/article/create-a-booklet-or-book-in-word-dfd94694-fa4f-4c71-a1c7-737c31539e4a

This works for documents longer than 4 pages too. You will probably need 
to play with it to get it right, but once you have it becomes easy to do.
Commercial Printing is a different matter. At the cheap end of the 
market you can get laser printer quality on ordinary paper or card very 
quickly. You can have your artwork printed on mugs, mousemats, shirts, 
calendars etc. At the other end are the artists’ printers. They use 
Giclee printers – a fancy name for high end inkjet printers – and 
archival quality paper. I don’t have a lot of experience with commercial 
printing but have used both ends – successfully until preparing for this 
demo. You may have to submit your artwork with text and images 
separately, or with crop marks and areas for bleed (colour going over 
the edge deliberately so that white borders are not shown accidentally 
if the paper is cut slightly badly.) The posters I have with me have 
been printed with the crop marks on and I am still investigating this. 
(The company reprinted them for me)

As stated above, you need to use CMYK colours and may need to specify an 
ICC profile. Try to talk to the company first.
Whether printing at home or commercially, paper and ink quality 
determine how long the work will last. Pigment inks are much more 
resistant to fading in the light than dye inks.

Adrian Fowle
Bromley Art Society Feb 2020

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Adrian Fowle
Chairman, Bromley Art Society.

www.bromleyartsociety.org.uk and www.bromleyartsoc.org.uk

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