Reasons to enter:

1.  You have some work that qualifies as science and/or math themed art

2.  NO entry fees

3.  NO other fees.  Not even shipping.  Finalists and winners are represented using digital files, transmitted over the internets

4.  Cash prizes

5.  Exposure on the website and archives, and at the festival

6.  Possible bragging rights – if you win or place.  This is an International competition!

You will need:

1.  A jpeg photo of each piece ( a good one for judging)

2.  A caption for each piece

3.  A title for each piece

4.  An explanation of the math or science content/ context/ relevance of each piece

5.  Your address. email, etc (don’t worry, they’re legit)

If you are selected as a finalist they will request a high resolution tiff (*.tif) format version of your image.  A good high resolution image starts with a good flatbed scan (if the original is small enough), a high quality large size render of a digital artwork or  for large artwork a good sharp large picture using a DSLR camera (at least 14 megapixels).

They will ask you to perform color separations on your tif and send the color separated layers (CYMK as separate grayscale layers).  This is a standard menu item in some image handling software, and an add-on that is easily integrated into GIMP.

The links

To get GIMP free photo editing software go here: http://www.gimp.org/downloads/

Gimp is open sourced and also has a lot of FREE plugins.   For plug-ins and how to use ‘em:

If you win a prize they’ll send a check out to you within a few weeks along with a big goofy ribbon.

The math and science level is not super high.  This is a family oriented festival with an art contest attached, so think about descriptions of your science and math themes that will be accessible to a general interested audience.  If your work is based on specialized or sophisticated science or math, be prepared to talk people through it in your captions.

The judges also do not practice “art speak”, so try for plain English.

A good jpeg for judging shows only the artwork – no barn walls, yards, curious cats, etc sneaking in from the background.  Remember that they won’t see the original, so it’s better to get a clean image by cropping more than cropping less for a more “accurate portrayal” with messy stuff at the edges.  Most clean glare free shots are either polarized or in the shade.  This will muddy your colors and shift some of them to the blue end of the spectrum.  Brighten and color correct them back so they don’t look like they’re underwater.  And try a little sharpening to compensate for camera lens imperfections and sensor limits.

Good luck!

Related articles

• Artists Sought to Enter 2013 California State Duck Stamp Art Contest (cdfgnews.wordpress.com)
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• The Smashing Magazine 2013 Photo Contest (rehavapress.com)
• Kobold Artistry II Contest Update (koboldpress.com)
• XPRIZE: Beyond STEM: A New “STEAM” Challenge for Teens (huffingtonpost.com)
• BGreaterThanU.com Announces 2013 B>U Tee Shirt Design Contest; Winner to Receive $500 Cash Prize and $500 More for Tee Shirts Sold (prweb.com)
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• Call for entry – Science Art – “Cosmos” (nerdlypainter.wordpress.com)

Just experimenting with a free editing software called GIMP. It’s open-source, meaning the software code is freely accessible and changeable to the user’s liking.. GIMP can be used as a substitute for Photoshop, especially for Linux users, where Photoshop cannot be installed.

I just experimented with the cropping tools in this project — mainly just getting oriented with toolbar, which is somewhat similar in layout to Photoshop. I cropped out an image of the lead vocalist, Free, of the rock band ‘KidneyThieves’ and the lead vocalist of the band Marilyn Manson, Marilyn Manson, and just merged them together via adjusting the opacity.

Original Images:

Marilyn Manson

Free

Following on from yesterdays image, over the next week I have a few shots to share from a trip up the Sky Tower. Featured in a number of photos I have shown, and being about 15 years since I last went up, I thought it was about time to venture up and capture some of the surrounding landscape. Sitting at 328m tall, its without doubt the place to go for a view of virtually all of Auckland City.

We had some tickets at the ready a few weeks back, but with winter on its way (technically here now we are in June) we had to wait for a clear sunny day.

Armed with my Sony,once there I found it was so bright, I really could have done with a ND filter – but then again, I try not to cart around a massive bag of kit with me, unless its an actual trip out to just take photos.

Todays shot is looking ~South over the city. In the distance we can see One Tree Hill (left) and Mt Eden (right). When up this high, nothing looks particularly hilly – even though Auckland is anything but flat!

Another shot from above tomorrow!

I have Photoshop installed but no plugins and having never used it, I was to tired to use it instead of GIMP…GIMP was not friendly.I began the color stages with simple materials.The brass desk was too bare so I began to work. This is where things went bad. I did 5 versions beyond this, each entirely different, and I was each time unable to recreate what I had done. I had separated floor and wall, redrawn the entire sketch in GIMP with the trackball and was finishing up when I lost my first one. The following was my next step that survived. As you can see, I am patterning the desk and attempting to add shadows and depth. This was my third one that survived but my 4th design. After the next crash, I quickly did another and decided the program was shutting down, I was too tired to focus and the day is over.I like the idea and the base concept. I really liked my first and third pieces today, and am honestly too tired to judge the final one that I began the post with. I did leave a little Alice influence in with the clock and red carpeting but might add more if I did another version…not sure.

I may go in sometime tomorrow and add captions to the images, but I need sleep.

A shot from above.

Looking down I snapped the autumn tree, its colours beaming out from both the shadows and grey city surrounding.

Shot on the Nex 5N with the 55-210mm lens. In Gimp I desaturated the blue tones, giving the city buildings the mono tone.

More shots from above tomorrow.

Modena, 09022013

GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. GIMP works on many operating systems and it is translated in many languages. It has many capabilities. It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, etc. GIMP is expandable and extensible. It is written and developed under X11 on UNIX platforms.

Release notes in GIMP 2.8.4:

• Better names for the default filters in save and export
• Make tool drawing (esp. the brush outline) much more responsive
• Remember the “maximized” state across sessions
• Simplify the splash image code a lot, makes it appear immediately again
• Allow the text tool to start on an image without layers
• Various fixes for text style attribute handling
• Set unconfigured input devices to eraser if GTK+ says they are erasers
• Make libgimp drawable combo boxes aware of layer groups
• Fix item width in GimpPageSelector (used e.g. in PDF import)
• Better default values in the Drop Shadow script
• Fix a whole bunch of bugs in the BMP plug-in
• Support automake 1.13
• Lots of bug fixes and translation updates

Install Gimp 2.8.2 from here.

To install Gimp 2.8.4 in Ubuntu/Linux Mint open Terminal (Press Ctrl+Alt+T) and copy the following commands in the Terminal:

• sudo add-apt-repository ppa:noobslab/ppa-gimp
• sudo apt-get update
• sudo apt-get install gimp
• sudo apt-get install gimp-plugin-registry

Install Resynthesizer Plugin with following command (It is not from above PPA):

• sudo apt-get install gimp-resynthesizer

That’s it. Enjoy.

Source: nooblabs

Tras las visitas organizadas por la Asociación de Creadores Textiles de Madrid  a los Museos de Artes Decorativas y del Traje de Madrid, he vuelto a casa con la mente llena de ideas. Cada vez que algo me llama la atención; puede ser un coche, una puesta de sol, una flor o el estampado de una tela,  automáticamente pienso en el modo de traducirlo al punto.

Una forma es hacer bocetos a mano, otra es utilizar fotografías. Por ejemplo, de la foto de esta tela bordada del Museo de Artes Decorativas y utilizando un programa de edición de imágenes (yo utilizo GIMP) he obtenido el dibujo de un ave que se puede tejer directamente o bordar una vez terminada la pieza.

También podemos utilizar la aplicación genial (¡y gratuita!) de Micro Revolt Knit Pro. En esta página subes la imagen que quieres convertir a esquema de punto o bordado y la aplicación te la devuelve en formato pdf con las dimensiones que has seleccionado.

La ventaja de utilizar programas informáticos es que te permite escalar y recolocar diseños para vislumbrar el resultado de la pieza final antes de empezar.

En este blog he publicado fotos de cosas que me inspiran y que tal vez algún día se traduzcan en pequeñas obras de lana!

Using the techniques with gradients, I create a grey border going from black to grey from top down, then shrink the selection and do the same gradient from the bottom up. Shrinking the selection again, I fill with a red color. Then using the square selection tool, I subtract from the selection to get a cross like shape going across the circle and fill it with white, my swiss flag.

Next I add a drop shadow on the white cross to give the flag a sense of depth. Adding some text with the company website next to it makes it look very much like a logo. However, I want to incorporate some of the banking, so I decide to have an upward looking graph in the swiss flag button.

The best way to do this seems to be with the path tool. So selecting the path tool (B), I click at four points to make my graph. Next I click stroke selection and make sure the paintbrush will paint a black color. Finally I hit ok and I now have my graph.

The contest is only for 25$, as always I’ll update when I get rejected.

So, what brought on my temporary gimpitude? On Saturday I sprained my ankle while running in a ravine as part of an outdoor bootcamp, and Ive spent the week alternating between feeling better and behaving like a functional person, and reaping the repercussions of moving and returning back to my couch and my ice packs with my foot in the air. I have bailed on a work obligation, and have stubbornly refused to procure some crutches. As a result, my knee above the affected ankle hurts and has now been incorporated into the ice pack regimen, my opposite foot is starting to get upset due to the requisite hopping, and my opposite wrist is also sore for some reason. Basically, I’m half way out of commission at this point.

Ive noticed a few things this week. For starters, everybody looks at you when you limp. Everybody. If you decide to limp around, my recommendation is that you try to look hot, cause everybody is staring. Of course, you can’t, cause the only shoes that fit over the tensor bandage are your old nasty running shoes with the half missing lace so you’ve gotta dress down to match, but that’s a separate issue. The other thing is that people will ask if its permanent, and then look like they want to die on the spot after they realize that I might actually say yes, revealing their own insensitivity to themselves. What a drag it would be hearing the same question over and over from passersby. How long until the looks and questions become normal enough that you no longer notice?

made in GIMP 2.8

One activity I’m trying to start doing to combat my laziness is create wallpapers with these quotes. So far I’ve made four and hopefully will create more eventually. They are either created by Photoshop (30-Day Trial) or more recently, Gimp.

Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere. – Albert Einstein

I start early, and I stay late, day after day, year after year, it took me 17 years and 114 days to become an overnight success. – Lionel Messi

The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. – Lao Tzu

“Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must outrun the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the slowest gazelle, or it will starve. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a lion or gazelle – when the sun comes up, you’d better be running.”

My husband said it looked like it was done on hammered copper, I like that thought.

This is one of those rare moments for me of actually liking a piece I did. As I worked on this piece it just wasn’t going well, was just off somehow and all of a sudden I had a moment of “that’s it! Done.” I always have more to do on my pieces. This particular trait was one of the things prompting me to embark on this project; the need to post a piece each day limits the amount of obsessing over the piece I can do to my available time to work. Another aspect of this same requirement is that I must consistently work on my art in some form or another. This week has been rather heavier in the computer drawing than I am practiced with. I have wanted to improve my skills in this area for some time and have taken this a a time to focus and develop skills and traits beneficial to my art and life. 

On this note of introspection that could lead to a long discussion, the automaton is going to sleep. One more very early morning and then I have a brief break from such sleep banishing torments. I hope you enjoy my pieces and my ramblings, I am learning to see my art in a new way already, even if it sometimes takes posting the piece before I feel that way.

Steampunk chair based on a basic Victorian rocker in metal, done in GIMP.

I’ve always wanted to get some practice in making some gorgeous digital art but I’m held back by my own laziness. Recently however I’ve been making more of an effort, I couldn’t figure out what to draw but seeing as it was the coloring I wanted to practice I decided to give one of my favorite black and white manga a bit of color.

The manga I chose is called Rosario + Vampire (it’s also an ecchi/harem type anime), it’s about a human named Tsukune that accidentally enrolls at a school for monsters all of whom have to remain in their human forms, he makes friends with a vampire named Moka and have all sorts of wonderful adventures.

Before I start, I personally prefer to have the scanned pages vectorized to make them easier to work with. It essentially helps clean up an image by scaling the graphics and making them more distinct. You can find some vectorization programs online although you usually have to pay for the result.

From afar it may not seem like much has changed, but if you look closer you can clearly see the image has been cleared up, with virtually all noise (graininess) removed giving a cleaner picture.

When I’m happy with the result it’s time to start coloring. Many people use Photoshop but I’m not willing to fork out hundreds of dollars for it and my philosophy is that if you can get practically the same thing for free then do it, so the program I use is Gimp, a free program that’s very similar to Photoshop, it doesn’t have all the features of course but for the simple images I want to do it’s more than good enough.

I select my source colors for the characters from the anime and play around with what I think works for the environments, but of course anyone can color in a picture and if all your motor skills are developed you can probably stay within the lines too, the challenge is making the picture vibrant and dynamic.

Shading helps give the image depth, creating the illusion of a three-dimensional world on a 2D page, but it has to be consistent, figure out where you want your light source coming from in each scene and stick with it.

In the scene above there are multiple light sources, the windows and the lights illuminating the inside of the building, I decided to have my main light source coming from the buildings interior lighting. I wanted to keep in mind the world these characters are in, a school for monsters in human form, so I pictured the outside of the school as being dark and gloomy. But what’s going on in the scene itself is also important, the first confrontation between two main characters, it felt appropriate to use the lighting to emphasize their front rather than their back, particularly their face considering that both characters are very beautiful. I did things differently with the environment however, many panels have only partial borders so I wanted the color to fade as it got closer to the edge of the panel and since the school interior is almost entirely blue, I used different shades to keep the interior more interesting, I’m still playing around with the colors to see what works better. The middle panel however I did differently, since the background was undefined I used red to help it stand out from all the other overwhelmingly blue panels, I think it really helps draw the readers focus and helps establish it as a key scene in the storyline.

I’m working on more of these pages too, kind of a hobby to keep me busy when I have time and perhaps I’ll share them here at a later date.

Part 2 of the Blender 2.67 How to TexturePaint tutorial, using blender and gimp.
Part 1
Part 3

This gentleman who goes under the moniker Blender Arsenal has published a two parts video tutorial on how to use the TexturePaint feature with Blender 2.67 and Gimp. This video is first part of the tutorial. Here is part 2.

Brass, wood, and leather drink automaton drawn in pencil and colored in GIMP.

Steampunk Drink Automaton

Having a lot of time to think when training dogs or walking them around the lakes, I have a lot to discuss. However, extreme lack of sleep is beginning to tell on me and I am not certain I could be truly coherent. Tomorrow will most likely be a repeat of same automaton nature of my brain. I will briefly say I was thinking of people I have known and their diets through part of the day. Both lifestyle diets and those frequently on one diet or another. a trend is apparent showing two basic approaches to diet, regardless of details. One, is the deprivation, denial, and restriction approach. The other is a fulfillment of need, desire, or an attempt of similar.

Deprivation eating restricts some portion and often most of a persons eating, often to excess. Observation says this often leads to drastic deviations from restrictions and shortage of a sort that must be corrected by other means such as drinks or vitamins. This however, is not my point. My thought was how quite unhealthy this seems; not merely from a physical standpoint but from a mental and emotional standpoint. How does this constant focus of restriction, deprivation, and avoiding the things you crave or are interested in impact your other portions of self?

Personally, I do not diet. I have eaten fairly restricted dies, such as vegetarian, at times. But for me it is not a matter of restricting my intake, it is a result of paying attention to my system, my body, my activity, my environment, and my health to know what I need and what cravings are indicating. A craving for sugar is quite specific if you have learned to pay attention to the differences. Is it ice cream, soda, sweet tea, fruit, candy, what are you craving. What is going on in your life or system that is causing this. Now you should know what you really need. For me those particular cravings usually indicate a need for potassium, calcium, C, or a couple other things. Environment and local climate alters cravings and needs.

Anyway…back to the matter at hand. I drew a steampunk drink automaton in pencil very old using motorcycle parts as a base. I then uploaded into GIMP and added color. I made a decision to leave it partially shaded to highlight the feel of the drawing and the sketch quality. I hope you enjoy. I am also uploading a slightly different version of my color work. He runs on leather tracks set in wood and brass fittings and has an extendable, bi-rotational tray arm to maintain balance of drink tray.

Brass, wood, and leather drink automaton drawn in pencil and colored in GIMP.

An eco friendly housing company named 360 REM needs a new logo. The first thing that comes to mind is buildings with a green circle that is skewed and half behind the company name. None of the building clip art showing up on google looks any good, so I decide to go with simple rectangles bordered on three sides, top, left and right. So I set out to learn how to make that in Gimp.

Now Gimp does not really support drawing shapes with borders, but it does support strokes. Strokes allow you to select a path, then use a tool along that path, or just color pixels along it a certain color. So selecting a rectangle, I fill it with a light green. Selecting a darker green color, I go to Edit -> Stroke Selection and set the line to border my rectangle to 4 pixels wide. I then copy and paste a section of the lighter rectangle and move it down so that it covers the border on the bottom of the rectangle. Scaling and copying this “building” forms a little green city.

Next I add the text 360 REM in a bold font. Last up is the skewed circle. Using the circle selection tool again, I select a somewhat flattened oval that looks like the path I want. Next up, to get it to look like it is going behind the buildings, I create a new transparent layer. Now once I stroke a dark grey color along my oval, it is on the new layer. I then go back and erase the parts that look like they should be behind the buildings and I’m done.

The prize tonight would be 240 euros. I’ll update if I get feedback.

Update: Logo was rejected.

f/4.5, 1/400 sec, 70mm, ISO100