Starting A Digital Art Program With Open Source

An anonymous reader writes "We are running mainly Windows on our HS campus with the exception of Macs in the visual arts department, and are just beginning to get into the process of teaching using computers in the area of art. What recommendations do you have for starting a program? I am looking fo apps that will be able to be used on both our Macs and on our PCs in the Library etc., and specifically I am looking for a program (curriculum, not software) for teaching digital art concepts using the FOSS tools that are out there. I am aware of Gimp, Blender, and Inkscape, but have not seen any curriculum per se. Any help?"

Comments

Open-source revolution?

[mintrepublic]

If this kind of thing catches on, i.e. open-source OSes and other software, it could mean huge savings for schools. This might free up funds for like a shop class for geeks, where students learn how to assemble computer hardware, solder things, and resolve hardware conflicts.

Re:Open-source revolution?

[clifyt]

Then again, it might backfire.

How many artists want to use an app that is more in line with geeks than actual true artists. I've got good friends that make their entire living with this stuff. I've shown them things like Gimp and they just scoff -- and its understandable why they do so.

F/OSS software is generally software designed by geeks for use by geeks. I've seen a LOT of great sutff come out of it, but almost always, the person on the other end has been a techie first and foremost and an artist second.

I'm on the other end...I'm an artist first and foremost, and a geek secondary. I run a programming / research office for my university, but I still make more money through music activities. And I use a Mac for my personal needs -- why? because it was set up to be invisible to the end user. To a techie? its a bit infuriating at times because you can't do everything you want to do, but to others its a godsend if you can afford one (that and I generally have a terminal window open at all times so the interface doesn't get on my nerves so bad :-)

If the goal is to engage geeks -- this is a good idea. if its to engage others, I'd stay away from most Free and Open Source apps.

BTW -- I cut my teeth in 3D using POVRay on a 486DX (it was soooooooo slow on the SX), so I hope I'm geek enough not to be considered a troll.

Re:Open-source revolution?

[Ogerman]

F/OSS software is generally software designed by geeks for use by geeks. I've seen a LOT of great sutff come out of it, but almost always, the person on the other end has been a techie first and foremost and an artist second.

Hah! That's a joke. It takes just as much time to learn Photoshop and Lightwave as it does to learn Gimp and Blender. People sometimes scoff at the new generation of F/OSS graphics software because it's not what they're used to. But I find it just as difficult to use Photoshop after years of using Gimp, so I can understand where they're coming from. The key is educating the next generation on F/OSS tools from the beginning so that we can finally move away from the rip-off proprietary standbys. At the rate that Gimp and Blender are improving, there will soon be no valid technical reason why they cannot be used even for the most professional of tasks. As for the UI side of things, it would be an interesting project to develop an alternative Gimp interface designed for current Photoshop users. It's more about familiar layout than anything. In the grand scheme of things, both free and non-free software needs a lot of work to improve in the HCI area..

python gimp

[Apreche]

I know that python is pretty well integrated into the gimp. It should not be very difficult to make some sort of integrated tutorial type stuff.

Shameless Self-Promotion

[3) profit!!!]

If you're doing any pixel art on the Mac, you can use Pixen. It's doesn't really compare to something like the GIMP for large-scale images (it starts getting slow for images greater than about 300x300, especially if you have multiple layers), but for icons, isometric-style stuff, and other pixelly art, it's the best open source tool for OS X that I know of. (Of course, I'm one of the developers, so I may be a bit biased...)

Personally...

[glk572]

I like to approach art education form a goal oriented standpoint. I can speak for learning blender, and the tutorials are pretty good, I would start by walking them through the building a castle tutorial, and then pretty much set them free. Have them come up with a project, I would highly suggest starting with a building, as it is much easier to deal with than modeling living things.

I for one don't like Gimp, although it is a powerful tool, it lacks some of the most powerful and useful tools available for photoshop. Look into a site license for photoshop it is really not as extravagantly expensive in an educational license as the commercial ones.

As for a pre-made curriculum, I suspect that you're SOL. It should be pretty easy though to adapt existing self learning tutorials for your students.

Tutorials are at:
http://www.blender3d.com/cms/Tutorials.243.0. html

For learning 2D I would suggest a brief intro to vector drawing, using Illustrator, or my personal preference AutoCad. I come from a technical drawing background and find that AutoCad is my favorite vector drawing program, although it is very-much overkill.

After vector drawing I would introduce them to photo manipulation, take inspiration from the fark.com photoshop contests. Give the students a photo to manipulate and have them show their work to the class.

I would suggest that you use the format of assigning work and teaching skills on monday, free work for the middle of the week, and then on friday have the students show their work to the class and discuss their experiences.

Here at WWU in my department all design majors are required to take a course called "Introduction to Design Communication," this is a basic overview art course that teaches drawing, painting, illustration, and drafting. This was easily my favorite class I have ever taken. It is formated with the professors sharing their design work with the students, and teaching their personal techniques. The goal is to get the students up to speed so that they can begin to develop their own style.

Just remember that there is not right way to do anything in art. Start by showing the students how you work and let them use that as a launching point.

I would highly suggest the following Books/Films:
Technical Drawing by Frederick E. Giesecke et. al.
Shrek DVD bonus feature on the making of.
mindfields and all it's great making of info (http://www.artificial3d.com/mindfields/)
Any textbook on mechanical perspective (can't think of one off the top of my head)
The Blender book
and of course the Blender tutorials mentioned earlier.

Technical Drawing gives a great deal of information on mechanical drawing and is a great foundation of knowledge for the instructor to have. The Shrek DVD bonus features are a great source of inspiration for beginning artists, and also shows the students that even the pros make mistakes. Mechanical perspective is critical to understanding how we perceive depth and should be taught to students as they learn 3D modeling. Mindfields is fabulous as you can see the film and then get an in depth tutorial on exactly how it was made.

I would have to say that 2d image manipulation is much more intuitive than 3d modeling, and should be taught as a tool to rather than a goal. I would suggest visiting my own website, even though there isn't much there (they now only allow sftp now so I can't upload form dreamweaver (I'm lazy)) it has some stuff that wile time consuming is actually quite easy to do.

if you're interested in talking about cg art education my aim id is "glk572" and I'll be keeping an eye on this thread.

So to sum it up teach a foundation of skills that will allow the students to achieve their own goals. Have the students discuss and show their work. Focus on results and not methods.

Processing

[FrenZon]

I strongly recommend at least giving them the opportunity to be exposed to processing - I've had the fortune of sitting in on one of the classes at UCLA by one of its creators, Casey Reas, and the students in there (from art courses all over, most of whom had no prior programming experience) were all digging into it like rabbits into a carrot sale. Beautiful to watch.

Some students won't like it, that's a given with any programming subject, but those that do will thank you endlessly for it.

Trail blazing

[tverbeek]

I wouldn't hold out much hope of finding a curriculum based around Libre software, because what's out there generally isn't very suitable for learning digital art. The GIMP is the granddaddy in this segment, and only just reached the point (with 2.0) where I'd even show it to a creative professional, out of embarassment. GIMP 1.x was practically a poster child for poorly designed, counter-intuitive interfaces. 2.0 is probably OK for newbies to digital painting to explore with, but if you build a good intro class around it, you'll probably be the first.

I do tech support for an art school, and I also picked up a BFA there, so I have a pretty good sense of the kinds of tools needed to teach digital media effectively. I promote the use of Libre software here as much as anywhere else I've worked, but I have to admit that there's little use for it in the classrooms (except for mainstream officeware like OOo and Firefox). Macromedia's apps and Photoshop Elements aren't Gratis or Libre, but they're fairly inexpensive for schools, and meet the rest of your requirements (e.g. cross platform, curricula) pretty well.

I'm setting up one of my old Macs for sale to a student, and in trying to "add value" with some free apps they'd actually have use for, the best I could come up with was GIMP (which I'm sure they'll delete and replace with a cracked or educational-licence copy of Photoshop) and WordPress for blogging.

Libre stuff might be OK if you're just trying to help high school students get their feet wet, but if you're trying to prepare people to do this stuff as professionals, you need to teach them the software the industry uses. Employers don't want someone with digital-paint-program vector-drawing-program experience; they want someone with Photoshop and Illustrator/Freehand experience. (They'll usually settle for Windows users, but they'd rather have someone who knows his way around OS X.) And freelancers are going to want to be proficient in the best tools they can afford, and that's also going to be commercial software.

I think what you're doing is a great idea, and I don't want to discourage it, but it's definitely going to be an uphill battle. Best of luck, and if you pull it off... please share what you learn from it!

Re:Why computers?

[sakusha]

Precisely. Let me tell you a little story.

I entered Art School around 1975, about the time I started building my first microcomputer from a kit. I majored in drawing and photography, but dabbled with computers and took a lot of computer classes. The compsci department treated me like crap, I was just a dumb artist (yeah, a dumb artist that switched majors from Honors Chemistry/PreMed). But I was the first person to exhibit computer graphics and primitive computer animation at my art school. The art school Dean was very conservative and considered drawing/painting, printmaking, and sculpture to be the only valid areas of study. Even the new Photography department was considered the Black Sheep of the family, it was not art, merely technology. I got kicked out of art school during my senior year, they got fed up with me. I used to go around telling my professors that I was sick of drawing with charcoal, that technology hadn't changed since Paleolithic Man dragged a burnt stump out of a campfire and scratched it on a cave wall, I wanted a NEW artist's studio, more like a mad scientist's laboratory with bubbling beakers and sparking coils.
So I went to work, and spent many years working in prepress, computer graphics, etc. To my utter astonishment, as new computer tools like Photoshop were released, I consistently found that my traditional art school techniques (i.e. my darkroom classes) were the most valuable training I could have taken in preparation for these programs. I consistently got better results than the computer geeks around me that had no art skills.
Back around '92 when the recession hit, I decided to go back and finish my BFA. And to my astonishment, my old art school was only then just installing its first computer classroom. By that time, I had seen and done about everything in the computer graphics field, I completely abandoned doing computer graphics and focused on oil painting. And when I finished my degree, I found my CG work was much stronger. Anybody can push around pixels (or paint, for that matter) but it takes artistic skill, training, and practice to understand why an image has to be THIS way and not THAT way. If you have no ability to plan out what kind of result you want, you will have no way to create the work. You will be randomly wandering through the program trying to figure out why you aren't getting results.
I continually assert: there is NO image you can create with a computer that can't be done with conventional tools. It may take an infinitely larger amount of effort, but it could be done. The fundamentals of art production have not changed with the introduction of computers. This is why it is easier to train artists how to use computers than it is to teach computer experts how to be an artist. Artists always know what they would like to create, maybe they have dreamt of artworks that were beyond their capabilities before computers, but they still have ideas about how they would go about creating the artwork even without a computer. The same cannot be said of computer geeks, they cannot see how an artwork could be created without computers.
The moral of the story: artists need to study art, not computers. They need paper and pencils first, and computers last. My old Photo professor said that a true artist can make art despite his tools, a great photographer could take great photos with a pinhole camera, but a crappy photographer couldn't take great photos even with a great camera. Great art tools like computers are useless in the hands of someone with no artistic training.

computes and art. visual programming in realtime

[parasew]

From my opinion as a student of computer arts/digital arts, the first thing you have to ask yourself is how to include the computer in your artistic work.
I can recommend the Book "Composing Interactive Music" from Todd Winkler, as I found it not only interesting for re-thinking how to use Computers in artistic installations, but also how to completely rethink computer interaction.
Winkler proposes a framework of 5 stages which i think can also be adoped for any digital works, not only music.
The book is inteded for composers working with max/msp, a visual programming language where object boxes can be "patched" together; this style of working shows fast results, as this kind of software is working "realtime", meaning you get constant ouptput of the things you are doing or the parameters you are changing.
I am working with this kind of "patchable software interfaces" for more than five years now; and this is also teached on the University of Applied Arts in Vienna/Austria, where I am studying.
If it comes to interaction (sound-visual, sound-dancers, graphics-interface, whatever) in the field of artistic work, these tools such as
PD Pure Data (windows/mac/linux) - Audio/Video/3D (GEM,Framestein) -opensource-
Cycling74 max/msp (windows/mac) - Audio/Video/3D (also see Nato and Jitter) -free 30days demo-
Native Instruments Reaktor (windows/mac) -commercial, but has education pricing-
vvvv (win) -free-
are used from lots of the people around.
there are hell lots more, you might want to take a look at the audiovisualizers.com tool shack, or pawfal.org for example.

For some visual examples and also works, you might want to take a look at
http://www.harvestworks.org/maxreel/
http://puredata.info/community/ (mostly audio)
talking chair (vvvv+hardware)
http://www.realtimearts.net/

or you might also want to take a look at the department of digital art in the university of applied arts/vienna.
currently we are a group of people trying to bring opensource and arts together. there are also workshops and lots of projects going on: http://5uper.net

for sure there are also "standard" programs teached, which are good for working with business and advertising companies -- but if we are speaking about digital arts, that's going beyond the standard approach of software use. at least for me.

Re:Try Multiply, and try cyan

[tverbeek]

"When you mix blue and yellow paint, or put a blue glass in front of a yellow glass, you get green."

Mixing pigments works more like componentwise multiplication. In this case you get black. Now try multiplying cyan (which many non-technical people call a shade of "blue") with yellow, and you'll get green.

Speaking as someone who has actually done this, I can tell you that when I mix blue paint - even a warm, definitely-not-cyan blue like ultramarine - with cadmium yellow, I get a shade of green. A fairly dull one and a fairly dark one, but still green. If I want black, I mix that ultramarine with an equal quantity of burnt siena (a dull warm orange)... the result is deep, dark, and neutral. But you are sort of right: mixing a cool blue like cyan with yellow will get me a brighter green.

You're making the mistake of trying to apply the CMYK color scheme (which works fine with transparent inks and dyes) to the pigments in paint, and it simply doesn't work. Paints use a third system of primaries and secondaries, in which the mixing complement of yellow is violet (not blue), the complement of cyan is scarlet (halfway between red and orange) instead of true red, and the complement of magenta is a warm, yellowish green. It's similar to CMYK, but not identical. So what you learned in first grade is still technically correct: in the RYB system, blue + yellow => green.