Day Job Artist

Because of the power of the Internet and the Web, there are all kinds of free resources available to graphic artists of all types.  In some cases, various publishers, such as North Light Books make “teaser” tutorials available for free to promote books or magazines or just to attract traffic to their websites.  Also,  internationally famous artists and artists who are only famous in their own minds have websites where they share their knowledge and opinions.  Since these things are presented in the rough and tumble world of the web, readers have to assess the value of such “freebies” for themselves on a case-by-case basis. In general, I have found that if I look for a little while, I can find just about any opinion or approach to a technique or media.  The most valuable thing about the web is that most venues (at least the quality ones), be they blogs, e-books, magazines, or on-line stores will have opinions and feedback as part of their presentation.

This blog is not created to sell anything, but I would like to promote resources that I have found to be valuable and either free or very cost-effective.  So, here’s the first one:

Smashing Magazine and Books have a couple of free e-books available on line at:https://shop.smashingmagazine.com/downloadable/customer/products/

The first e-book, Best of Smashing Magazine is 409 pages of well written articles covering a wide range of subjects from the beauty of Arabic typography to techniques for optimizing JPEG files.

The second e-book is a collection of four articles that did not make it into volume #2 of The Smashing Book because the book was already too big but the articles had sufficient merit that the editors wanted to present them.

For Art Teachers: How does teaching affect your personal art production?

I don’t know how many times I’ve heard colleagues say “I just wish I had time to spend in my studio focused on my own work, I think it would be so refreshing!”  This is commonly followed by a comment such as “but then, I’m not sure how long it would take me to feel like I was producing something new.”  These professionals, who teach with me at a four year applied art college, have spent years working “in the trenches” of art departments, however, most were trained in an MFA Fine Arts curriculum where they were encouraged and required to explore the nature and range of their creative abilities.  This gave them a taste for that freedom which teaching the same courses, year after year, stifles.  On the other hand, I’ve heard artists who are financially successful and represented in prestigious galleries complain that they have become trapped by their own success since galleries want them to create new work that should be “readily identified by their collectors and the public” – in other words, they are asked to paint similar subjects in the same style as their previous work.