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Articles for the ‘Art’ Category

We’ll be discussing chaos as it pertains to how to make rap beats and creation here. Worry not about the writing, though! The chaos is in the techniques and approach we’ll discuss – we’ll keep this article to a few regular English paragraphs and do nothing chaotic. I bet you’re on your toes now! What exactly is chaos in music?  Chaos is basically taking arrangement principles, music theory and electronic production techniques and meshing them all together to make something new. There is always order in chaos, but where is the line?

It is hard to know exactly what your audience will tolerate as far as chaos goes. The expected is always easiest to digest, but does not sound as sweet as the chaotic mess you can create by flipping a few switches. True? I thought so.

At the very base level, musicians create order from chaos. If you really think about it, there are millions of different frequency permutations that we can use, and yet, we’ve managed to limit chaos in music. We’ve built pianos and guitars, both of which sporting less than a few hundred notes after re-tuning. At the end of the day, we just want to make a song. We want to create something that another person will hear and label a song. This is a success already, ignoring all qualitative aspects at this point.

Musicians have long been experiencing with the automated music drum creation tools and plugins offered by manufacturers like Waves and Cubase. How come these things have not caught on?

One explanation that can be offered is that all humans have a tool to filter out chaos: our brain. Or auditory system can be fed birds chirping, dogs barking and cars rolling by, but by the time we hear the ice cream truck or a certain progression of tweets by the local avian residents, we’ll immediately respond to what we hear and associate the sounds with their sources.

Your chosen music genre already says something about you and your tolerance for chaos. For instance, somebody going into the RnB field will generally generate and hear less chaos than someone going into a gritty DnB environment. My advice to people of all genres and musical backgrounds: let chaos have some fun. Let it have some room to play because can’t stay in the shallow end of the sandbox for our entire lives and not discover what it’s like to let our brains go crazy with experimentation. Trust me, when chaos has become a part of every song you create, you will learn to control it and manifest it’s biggest rewards.

Although oil painting has been around for a very long time, even dating back to the 1400’s; it’s still relatively new compared to other forms of art. However, before oil painting came to be, paint was mixed with plaster that was found in frescoes or eggs in tempera paints. It was not until Jan Van Eyck came along, that oil painting rose to fame, as he attempted to have more realism in art.

In the early fifteenth century, Europe had the desire for a more realistic appearance in artwork. This was because before that, art was basically decorative and mythological in aspects; however, at the start of the Renaissance, artists began to realize concepts and guidelines behind ideals of color, as well as perspective. They wanted to create images and objects that were more realistic to the world around them, so as a result, artist started to paint more realistically.  
 
Jan Van Eyck wanted to mimic in his paintings what nature really is and in order to do this, he made sure to paint every detail that he could of whatever object he focused on. His attention to detail made his paintings livelier; however, methods of painting and materials could not truly bring his work to full potential. Therefore, Van Eyck developed oil paintings, which changed the entire concept of painting known to artists. Before Van Eyck and others like him, painters in the Renaissance period did not have the luxury of being able to purchase colors that were already made. They had to make paints themselves, which were made from ground- up pigments contained in plants and minerals to attain shades from the entire color wheel. These were used to form a paste called tempera paint. The issue with this type of paint was that it dried quickly and made it almost impossible to have smooth transitions; hence, Van Eyck made the decision to use oil instead, which would allow him to work at a slower pace. With oil painting, accurate paintings came about.

To further create detailed images in his paintings, he also used a tiny pointed brush and many people, as well as other artists, became impressed with his work. They too began to use oil paints and due to this, oil paintings became a very popular form of art. Although today oil colors have evolved, its principals and color theory guidelines are still the same.  If you learn about this method and use oil paints correctly, you too can create wonderfully vivid and detailed paintings as Van Eyck and others of his time did. When you choose the medium of oil painting, you’ll be able to create paintings that are more detailed in settings, through the uses of shading and in addition, create portraits that are more lifelike. With time and effort, you will be able to mimic the greats of the Renaissance era.

Learn how to create beautiful oil paintings yourself by enrolling in an oil painting workshop with artist Caroline Jasper. Caroline’s workshops include both oil painting instruction and color instruction.

In recent years, one of the most popular trends among women has been the growth in lower back tattoos. This describes the practice of having a design tattooed on the center lower region of the back just above or below the waist line.

The popularity of this tattoo placement has been fuelled by the current fashion for low cut jeans and short tops, which provide the perfect setting to display these designs.

So if you’re thinking about getting a lower back tattoo, here are some of the main advantages and disadvantages to bear in mind.

The Advantages Of Lower Back Tattoos

In general, the placement of most tattoos means that they’re either permanently on show or hidden by clothing. But due to modern clothing trends including low cut jeans and crop tops, the lower back is the perfect place for a tattoo if you want to achieve a “now you see it, now you don’t” effect. This subtle approach to tattoo placement is similar to the growing trend among men for tattoos on the underside of the forearm. Unlike a front forearm tattoo which is highly visible, an inside design will be hidden for much of the time. But once you’ve seen the design, it will be more visible.

Another reason for the popularity of lower back tattoos is the sensuality of the placement. Some people find the “should I have seen that” glimpse of an exposed lower back tattoo extremely alluring. This is a major advantage if you want to project a sexy, adventurous image.

Placing a tattoo on your lower back also means that you won’t be able to see it under normal conditions. In fact, you’ll only see it if you’re extremely flexible or when you catch a glimpse of it in a mirror. So if you want a tattoo, but don’t want to see it all the time, a lower back placement might be the answer.

The Disadvantages Of Lower Back Tattoos

Lower back tattoos carry one major disadvantage – they’re extremely unoriginal. The trend has lasted for so long that millions of women all over the world have tattoos placed on their lower back. In fact, it has become almost impossible to find a new way to place a tattoo design on your lower back.

But beyond that, certain unflattering slang terms have developed to describe lower back tattoos and the women who have them, including “tramp stamp”, and “gramp stamp”, which refers to the idea that in 40 to 50 years, the world will be full of elderly women with lower back tattoos.

So if you’re looking for something a bit more original, it’s best to avoid lower back tattoos.

Another major disadvantage of tattoos placed on the lower back is the fact that you won’t be able to see your tattoo unless you look in a mirror. This may be an advantage if you want a tattoo but don’t want to look at it all the time. But if you want to see your new design on a regular basis, avoid getting a tattoo anywhere in your back.

An Original Alternative To Consider

If you like the idea of a lower back tattoo, but want to retain an element of originality, try placing your tattoo design further round your torso, so that it sits on the sound of the body above one or both of your hips. At present, tattoos placed in this location are relatively rare, so if you’re looking for something original, it might be worth considering.

In future years this could become a popular new trend, who knows. But for now, it’s ripe for early trendsetters to exploit.

If your funny t shirts are turning out funny-looking, the problem may be your text. No matter how awesome your cool tshirt designs are when you imagine them, if your text is poorly designed, your shirts will always look unprofessional. But don’t fear! With these 5 tricks of professional graphic designers, you can quickly turn those amateur custom tshirts into perfect and polished works of tshirt art.

TShirt Design Secret #1: Choosing the Right Font
When choosing a font for your t shirt sayings, make sure to pick one that supports your message. For example, if you’re designing a funny t shirt, choose a font that has a funny feel to it. If you’re designing a sexy t shirt, choose a font that has a sexy feel to it. And if you’re designing a t shirt for a serious, professional law firm, you probably don’t want to use that font with letters shaped like kittens.

While this may sound like common sense, many new t shirt designers and would-be t shirt entrepreneurs skip this step and just pick any standard font they might have lying around. Unfortunately, it’s obvious in their results; what could have been a fun tshirt design ends up being boring and amateur-looking. If you’re careful to choose a font that represents the content of your words, however, you can avoid this fate and your shirts will always be one step ahead of your competition.

TShirt Design Secret #2: Tracking and Kerning
Most of the time, when font text is typed into a computer program, the spaces between the letters and words are a little uneven, and often a little too wide. This extra and uneven space not only makes your t shirt sayings look a bit awkward and unprofessional, it also makes them slightly more difficult to read because the words don’t visually hold together as units. Even if the viewer doesn’t notice it, the eye and the brain have to work a bit harder and that extra bit of difficulty gives the viewer a subconscious feeling of unease.

Fortunately for novice t shirt designers, this problem can be addressed by a combination of tracking and kerning, which are simply two methods of adjusting the spacing between letters.

Tracking has to do with adjusting the average spacing of letters across entire words, sentences, or selected ranges of letters. By adjusting the tracking, the t shirt artist can either decrease the average spacing between all the letters in the selected range (making the spacing “tighter”), or else increase the average spacing (”opening up” the text), depending on what’s needed. Since the raw, unadjusted spacing varies from font to font, you’ll have to decide which one is needed for your particular tshirt design. But a good trick used by professional t shirt designers is to start out by tightening the font too much (so the letters are too close together) and then slowly increasing the tracking until the words look right.

Kerning is very similar to tracking, but with one important difference: instead of adjusting the average spacing across an entire range of letters, kerning only adjusts the spacing between two letters at a time. This allows a greater degree of control than tracking, and allows a t shirt artist to fine tune the spacing between single letter pairs that still don’t look quite right, even after the text has been tracked.

In general, the best practice is to use tracking to get the entire range of letters in a t shirt slogan to look pretty good, and then use kerning to fine tune the spacing between letter pairs until your t shirt saying looks perfect.

TShirt Design Secret #3: Word Spacing
Once the letters of a t shirt slogan have been properly tracked and kerned, the next important step is to adjust the spacing between the words. Adjusting word spacing is very similar to tracking and kerning — in fact, it’s done exactly the same way as kerning and is really just kerning the spaces between words rather than letters — but the rule of thumb for proper spacing between words is a little different, and so word spacing is a whole step unto itself.

In general, the best practice when adjusting spacing between words is to visualize the width of a lowercase “L” in the font that’s being used, and then make the space between each word that wide. This means that the width of the spaces between words will be different from font to font (because the size of the lowercase “L” is different from font to font), but it also means that the spacing will be custom designed for the font in question. Creating the proper amount of space between words will support the effects of your tracking and kerning, thus helping your words to hold together better as separate visual units and improving readability.

TShirt Design Secret #4: Leading, aka “Line Spacing”
Another place that new t shirt designers often go wrong is in the leading, or “spacing between lines of text.” Leading — which is pronounced like the metal “lead” rather than like a “leader” taking people somewhere — goes back to the days of the printing press, when a person would actually use small, thin pieces of lead to create vertical space between the lines of type. These days, of course, computers handle the leading for us. Unfortunately, when it comes to t shirt text, they often handle it poorly.

When a t shirt slogan is typed into a computer program, it often starts out with a little too much space between the lines. This helps make the text look very “fonty” rather than natural, as well as making the tshirt design (and the designer) seem very amateur. With just a small change to the leading, however, that same t shirt saying can be made to look very tight and professional.

With leading, the goal is to create enough space between the lines of text so they fit nicely together and don’t interfere with one another, without creating so much space that they look artificial or become difficult to read. The eye should be able to easily jump visually from one line to the next without losing its place, and without any effort at all. While there is no real rule of thumb for the proper amount of space between lines, t shirt designers who begin adjusting the leading will quickly learn to “feel” when it’s right. In general, the best way to start is to decrease the amount of leading — tightening the space between the lines — and then keep tweaking it up or down until it feels visually balanced. When it looks natural and reads smoothly, your t shirt slogan is one step closer to the big time.

TShirt Design Secret #5: Phrasing, aka “Line Breaking”
Phrasing has to do with where t shirt designers choose to break the lines of text, and is yet another aspect of good tshirt design that’s often overlooked. Many new designers will just type in their text at the size they want, and pay no attention to which words the lines end on, and how those line breaks affect the t shirt’s readability. More often than not, this results in a t shirt that reads terribly and feels amateurish.

For example, a poorly line-broken t shirt slogan might look something like this:

I’m not a
doctor but I play
one in real
life

As you can see, it’s a little difficult to read this slogan because the semi-random breaking of logical phrases and groups of ideas causes both the eye and the brain to work harder to make sense of it all, and the result is the t shirt slogan ends up feeling choppy. With a little more thought and effort put into breaking the lines at natural points in the text, however, we end up with this:

I’m not a doctor
but I play one
in real life

Suddenly, the t shirt slogan flows naturally and is much easier to read. By keeping the logical phrases visually together, you can create a much more natural visual rhythm to your t shirt saying, and the reader is easily able to process the t shirt’s message without having to fight against poor phrasing to understand it.

TShirt Design Secret #6: A Bonus Tip (Because I Like You)
Once you’ve applied these 5 secrets of the tshirt design professionals, you’ll find that your t shirt text already looks much better and more professional than it did when you started. Unfortunately, you’ll probably also find that you’ve been staring at your text for so long, it’s become difficult to really properly judge its improvement. Such is the life of a t shirt artist!  But don’t panic!  The professional graphic designers have a couple more tricks up their sleeves that’ll help you overcome this professional hazard.

To check the spacing of your t shirt text and make sure that it’s truly perfect, you can:

-  Look at your design upside down. If you see any spaces that look uneven or inconsistent, fix them.
-  Look at your design reflected in a mirror. If you see any spaces that look uneven or inconsistent, fix them.
-  Print out your design on a piece of paper, hold it up to a light source, and look at your text from the back of the page. If you see any spaces that look uneven or inconsistent — you guessed it — fix them.

By doing any or all of these three strange things, you force your eyes and your brain to pay attention to the empty spaces between the letters rather than trying to read the words themselves. The words become abstract shapes to your brain, and you, the t shirt artist, are free to properly judge the empty spaces between the words.

So, Now What? 
As you can see, professional t shirt text design is really just a matter of creating text that not only supports your message, but also presents it in a way that is visually balanced and nicely spaced. By properly applying these tshirt design tips, your t shirt sayings will be much nicer to look at, easier to read, and miles ahead of all those amateur tshirt designs hitting the market. And, most importantly, your funny t shirt designs will finally be funny in a good way.

Now, if you’re ready to start taking your tshirt design skills to the next level — or you just need a more visual illustration of the stuff we’ve been talking about — you can find a free, simple, easy-to-follow video tutorial on tracking and kerning at Channel Shirt’s tshirt design blog.  Did I mention it’s free? Check it out!

About the Author: Much to his parents’ continuing surprise, “Hollywood” John Harris has been a professional artist, designer, and freelance writer for 20 years. He is also co-founder of Channel Shirt, where he not only freely gives away all the secrets of tshirt design that “they” don’t want you to know, he shows those secrets in action on tons of his own funny t shirts, as well as on all the best shirts from around the web.

While we may occasionally choose a work of art with a different theme, when we’re looking for a way to brighten a wall or create a focal point, we often look to art that depicts a scene from nature.

If that nature is mountains, valleys, trees, rivers and forests, then we’ve chosen a landscape. When the work depicts the ocean, it is a seascape.

In either type of art, the main subject is a wide view of the terrain with the parts arranged in a logical, cohesive manner. Whether the scene is real or imaginary is unimportant to its definition.

Sky is almost always included in the view and weather may also be an element of the composition. Storms and snow are frequently used to add a different aspect to the works and some artists specialize in scenes created with these weather additions.

Landscapes and seascapes can also form an important part of other types of paintings, where the central subject may be something else entirely, or they can be the focus of a work that includes manmade structures, such as farmhouses or ships.
 
Landscape art goes back over 1000 years, although the word landscape, which comes from the Dutch, did not enter the English vocabulary until the start of the 17th century. Landscape photography has held an important role in the art world since the 19th century. Seascape photography developed later as photographic techniques improved to the point that wave motion could be captured.

There are different traditions of landscape art in the east and west. In early works of the Roman and Chinese traditions, there were typically panoramas of imaginary landscapes with ranges of spectacular mountains. In China, the works frequently included waterfalls, while in Rome there were seas, lakes or rivers. Often the Roman style included a near figure and a transition to the panorama, while Chinese works were generally only the distant view.

A bigger difference in the two art forms was their value in their cultures. Until the 19th century, landscape painting was not a popular art form in the West, where the focus was on religious or historical scenes or portraits. In East Asia the Chinese watercolor of mountains and waterfalls was the most prestigious form of painting. As ocean travel grew, the need to create seascapes as part of paintings grew as well.

During the Impressionistic period the fascination that drew artists to explore changing light drew them to water, where light was ever changing and reflected from the water.  Monet is perhaps the best known of the Impressionist artists to explore seascapes and sea scenes during that period, creating works that are enduring and fascinating for more than the fact they were created by one of the masters of the period.

Artist Caroline Japser creates modern impressionist seascapes in her unique colorful style.

Dracula creates an aura of culture of the Victorian era. The characters – men and women – their behavior, lifestyle, ethics and aesthetics – all are deeply and truly Victorian. Bram Stoker expresses himself uniquely in his novel. Read the novel in Online Literature Library.

The personality of Van Helsing, the gentle wifely and motherly demeanors of Mina, the red voluptuous Lucy, the four lion-hearted young men – everything is classically Victorian in every detailed essence. Added the fact that Bram Stoker presented Dracula as a novel written in form of letters, journals, diaries, phonographs and similar other unconventional forms of personal expressions of the characters in the novel, Dracula has been an unconventional and yet favorite novel for many, across years and geographies.

There have been many movies related to Dracula including some famous ones such as Dracula (1931) and Dracula (1992). But the original novel remains as dark and horrifying as the enigma of its main character – Count Dracula.

Did Bram Stoker write his novel Dracula based on the infamous character Vlad the Impaler?

The following has been extracted from Literature Library Online in this context.

There are debates about whether or not Dracula was a fictional character resembling Vlad the Impaler aka Vlad Dracula. In reality, the Transylvanian background of Dracula makes him different from the Wallachian ruler Vlad. Dracula’s claim about his pride of ancestry: “We Szekelys have a right to be proud, for in our veins flows the blood of many brave races who fought as the lion fights…” – again here it might be noted that Vlad was not a Szekely. Hence the resemblance probably ends here. The only certainty is that Stoker had certainly come across the name Dracula, and borrowed it for his vampire because his source said that the name meant “devil.”

Stress is A BRAT:  5 simple steps to stop stress in its tracks

Stress can, indeed, be a brat.  Annoying, irritating and disruptive, stress causes many nagging symptoms that negatively impact our emotional and physical well-being.

When you think of stress as A BRAT, you will have at your fingertips a tool to stop stress in its tracks.  The next time you find yourself suffering from stress and anxiety, follow these five steps:

A:  Acknowledge that you are stressed.  Simply stopping for a moment and realizing, “I am just feeling stressed right now takes the edge off the anxiety symptoms.  Also, acknowledge the reason you are feeling stressed.  For example:  “I am stressed because I am running late for my appointment, or “I am anxious about the meeting.

B:  Breathe.  Take 3 deep breaths, breathing in through your nose for a count of 4, and out through your mouth for a count of 8.  In order to breathe correctly, try not to take heaving breaths through your chest.  Rather, breathe from your stomach.  Think of your stomach like a balloon:  When you breathe in, your stomach should protrude, like you are filling up a balloon.  When you breathe out, your stomach should “deflate:  Focus on your belly button inching its way back to your spine.

R:  Relax.  Make a conscious effort to relax any muscles that are tense.  Focus on your jaw, shoulders, and stomach, as these muscles often tense up during periods of stress.

A:  Adjust your thoughts to more positive, soothing ones.  For example, instead of thinking, “I’m running late and they will be upset, change that thought to “It’s not the end of the world that I am running late. Everything and everyone will be okay. 

T:  Think about something else.  If you are in the car, turn on the radio and listen to music or a talk radio show.  If you’re at home, do something to take your mind away from the stress-producing event.  Call a friend, do a crossword puzzle, or look through a magazine or catalogue.

Following these five steps will stop stress in its tracks and allow you to move on with your day. Remember that stress can be A BRAT —  and you’ll have all you need to keep that brat at bay!

Nowadays Japanese is very hot and so are the little cats called maneki neko that you can see in every souvenir shop. They look very funny and are available in all forms and variations. They are also often used as a piggy bank where people save their money.

The maneki cat sculpture shows a cat with an upright claw and is used at the entrance of stores and restaurants. There is the believe that these sculptures made out of ceramic bring luck to its owner so more and more people jump in the trend all around the world.

The beckoning cat can also be found as air fresheners or keychains and even more creative variations are made every day. If you don’t have one of them you should have a look around at your local area or you could find some cheap ones right on the internet without a doubt.

Celtic tattos are still one of the most popular types of design despite their long history. These designs have existed for thousands of years, yet more than one thousand people search for information about celtic tattoo designs every day. So why are these designs still such a popular choice for tattoos?

The Celtic people have a long and proud history. From ancient times their people have shown an artistic ability to create complex works of art. These elaborate patterns took pride of place on their stonework, metalwork, weapons and jewelry. In fact ancient celtic designs carved in stone can still be found in both Ireland and Scotland.

Celtic tattoo designs usually consist of elaborate patterns of lines, loops and spirals that are linked together in a decorative manner. Occasionally animal designs, often depicting the tiger and the lion are incorporated into the tattoo design. These celtic animal designs (often known as zoomorphic tattoo designs) differ from traditional celtic patterns as the various lines and strands of the design end in animal heads, feet and tails instead of following a never ending path.

The meaning of these patterns is not readily apparant. To find the real meaning of celtic artwork you have to look much deeper. The constant interlacing of lines and spirals symbolizes the connection between the physical and spiritual worlds. And the never ending route of the loops and spirals represents the never ending cycle of life, death and rebirth.

Celtic designs also represent the fight and the heart of the Celtic people who were renowned throughout the world as courageous warriors. And it’s thanks to a combination of these noble values and the timeless symbolism of these patterns that they remain such a popular choice for tattoo designs.

The most popular and well known of all the celtic designs are the celtic knot and the celtic cross.

Celtic Knot: This tattoo consists of decorative loops with no beginning and no end which represents the continuing cycle of life and death.

Celtic Cross: The celtic cross is usually a highly elaborate design containing many interlinking spirals and strands. Once again, the lines used to create the outline of the cross don’t have a beginning or an end, and as such represent the immortality of human life and love. The cross is also significant as the Celtic people believed it would protect them from their enemies.

Celtic tattoo designs are a great way of expressing pride in your ancestry whether you are of Irish, Scottish or Welsh descent. In fact these designs are highly popular among people from North America who have Celtic ancestors.

However, you should be aware that due to the elaborate nature of these patterns, celtic tattoo designs are not easy to create. So before you start, make sure that you find a tattoo artist who has experience in creating celtic tattoo designs. An eye for detail and the ability to place the lines and spirals in exactly the right place is vital. And even once you find a talented artist, it will take a lot of time, patience and dare I say it, tolerance of pain, in order to get your celtic design just right. So make sure that you find the perfect celtic design before you go any further.