Tag: ART

If you have an artistic temperament, but you weren't blessed with steady hands or an eye for color, Konstruct might be the app for you. Not only does the iPhone app let you produce generative art using words, warbles and whistles, but it also uses augmented reality to bring your artistic creation to life. To get started, you first need to print out the Konstruct marker and place it wherever ...

Once upon a time, creating pixel art was a completely manual process. You drew your base shape, and then if you wanted to add highlights, shadows, or blur, you had to draw them in, pixel by pixel. Piq is a Flash-based pixel art editor that lets you enjoy fine-grained manual control, while making it a bit easier to add those extra touches to your image. You first draw the image pixel by pixel. ...

First, let me disclaim that I do not read comics, nor manga, and I'm not a huge fan of anime. In fact, the only drawn-art medium that I really like is hentai. But enough about me! Today I've had the pleasure of using ComicRack, an eComics reader and manager. I don't have anything to compare it to, but according to my friends it's the best comic reader out there. I can't really tell you if ...

Drips is a fun Flash application that was inspired by the art of legendary American artist Jackson Pollock. Its functionality is very basic -- you splash random colors on the canvas and that's about it. You can select a specific color or allow Drips to randomly rotate colors every time you let go of the mouse. You can also change the background color (again, either randomly or by ...

Today I had a quick play with the Google Docs drawing tool. It's awesome, but yet there's a strong chance that you didn't even know it existed! Just head over to docs.google.com > Create New > Drawing and give it a go. Don't forget to Insert > Image -- a whole wealth of Google Images await your artistic meddling! Poke around with the tools; they're very easy to use. OK, drawn ...

A lot of people have used map software to trace out messages across the world's roads, but Nick Newcomen is the first to actually drive the routes and map them with a GPS. Newcomen traveled over 12,000 miles around the US, starting from Texas, to spell out "Read Ayn Rand" across the American landscape. His work is now the biggest piece of GPS writing ever recorded. Whether or not you like Rand, ...

In the words of its maker, Typograph is "both an essay and a tool". As an essay, it seems to be a long, wordy treatise on the intricacies of creating a "visual rhythm" for a given piece of text by correct, aesthetic use of typography. As a tool, it's very cool: you get a bunch of floating tool panes surrounding the text of the article, and you can play with the spacing and size of the headings ...

CD Art Display is a great little utility that puts the album art for the music you're listening to right on your desktop. It works with numerous players (iTunes, Foobar2000, Winamp, Helium, Windows Media Player, and more), and it shows you the album art for whatever track is currently playing with a beautiful skin. The art has to be in the album's folder, but if you don't already have it, CD Art ...

LinkedIn is the definitive social network for professionals looking to stay connected with colleagues, peers and other business relationships and keeping them up-to-date with where you're at and what you're doing. While LinkedIn's dynamic resume approach to a personal profile is a great way to share professional history and accomplishments, it's only half of the story for artist, designers, ...

YouTube announced today that it's teaming up with the Guggenheim Museum and HP to put on the first "Biennial of Creative Video" -- and they're calling it YouTube Play. The project's goal is to gather the very best videos on YouTube and display the 20 best nominees in Guggenheim museums around the globe. What constitutes the "best" in YouTube videos? They're surprisingly broad in that respect, ...

digg_url = 'http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2010/06/09/sculptris-is-insanely-cool-free-3d-modeling-software/'; Sculptris is, without question, the coolest thing I have seen all day. What was supposed to be a short spin became an hour of prodding and playing around with every tool of this incredible creation. In simple terms, it's sculpting software. It's free, and it's accessible. I once ...

HelloMovies is a quick and easy-to-use website for filtering the enormous glut of films into a more manageable list of stuff you might actually enjoy watching. Using a simple sidebar filter, you can quickly whittle down the complete list of films by genre, style, approximate release date (very approximate – think "1990's"), language, and even by films that won a major award. Once you narrow ...

I love freehand painting. While I have absolutely no talent, I love the freedom of working with paint or even crayons. It just feels nice, even if the result is nothing to write home about (in my case, at least). If you're looking to replicate the same experience on a computer, there's always Corel Painter. But on the off chance that you don't have hundreds of dollars to spend just to doodle, ...

With all of the Flash-bashing going on lately, it is easy to forget what a powerful platform it is. It's a good thing that Web tools like Soundation Studio serve as handy reminders, showing us that some very cool stuff can be created with Flash. Soundation Studio is an incredibly full-featured, desktop-like sound editor. It has a built-in library with hundreds of sound samples that are sorted by ...

(This is another "Classics" post, so to those of you who wish to make snarky comments like "oh wow, ever heard of Dilbert.com?" -- relax, I know you're super-cool and that you've already known the site for ages. I'm so proud of you!) And for the rest of the world: A Softer World is one of the best online "comics" I know. It's always the same, and always different; it's always three low-fidelity ...