Artist Readymade...

Make yourself an Artist out of the Blue!

They all say that you need to practice real hard to become an artist. Not any more. Computers are here, and, precisely, with only a few mouse clicks, instead of boring, repetitive brush strokes, – yes!, with a few mouse clicks instead of brush strokes, you can make yourself a great artist. Amazing? Well, get ready to perform some cool mouse clicks to generate equally cool Art pieces.

Raw Materials:

Instead of investing in Canvas, Colour, Brushes and Pallets etc, start believing in your mouse and monitor. They can produce more amazing results than your real brush strokes, and again, if you are not satisfied with your creations, you can instantly tear them in to pieces through your computer’s Recycle Bin and get ready for some more experimentation. Besides mouse and monitor, you also need some cool program that can randomly generate Scenes and Designs for you. You don’t have to go far away for such programs. Your Windows Media Player and Winamp’s Visualisation, for example, can do wonder for you in creating great art. You may also need a nice screen capture utility such as freeware Printkey for capturing high quality images off your desktop. There also are some nice, Picture / Scenery generator software which you can use for creating Art pieces at random. Who knows that a randomly generated picture, may, one day, write history by piercing through critic’s eyes? And for some final re-touches, if you have some nice, advanced graphics software like Adobe Photo Shop then it will be a boon else you can always use shareware graphics software Paint Shop Pro for 30 days for free. In fact, some cool Art pieces that are displayed here have been generated with Paint Shop Pro with few mouse clicks and nothing else.

Art through Visualization:

Creating amazing art through Visualization is easy, step by step process. First, you need to install Windows Media Player 9 or Winamp 2.91 (both are freeware, support wide variety of Visualization plug-ins and available in i.t. CDs) along with some Visualization Plug-ins. They also have some built-in Visualization, which can be used for a start. Now, play some music and start the player’s Visualization. As the music being played, the visualization scene also changed accordingly. Every Visualization renders and displays its own styles of scenes. There were hundreds of visualization plug-in for each media player to choose from. In Winamp’s web site, there is more than 200 visualization plug-ins listed for free download. You have to do some experiments for selection so that you can choose the desired visualization plug-in for creating desired style of art. For Winamp, some real good ones are Winamp’s built in Visualization plug-in studio, Space, Psychocis, Technowrap, Geiss, Kinomarphic 3D plug-in etc. Now start screen capture utility. If you have no screen capturing utility installed, then your keyboard’s Print Screen key together with Windows Paint program will do the trick. Now watch patiently the visualizations that are generated in your monitor screen. You can make visualization either full-screen or in Window. For taking screen shots, it is better to use Visualization in windowed mode. Keep your finger glued to Print Screen Key or the specific key that takes screen shots of your desktop, since these visualizations changes very rapidly and are seldom repeated, and you may miss real good one. When you spot a worthy visualization scene, press the key. Your screen is captured. With screen capture utility like Print Key, you get option to select the area of visualization to store. However, at later stage, you can always crop unwanted picture areas. Screen Capture utilities have some added benefits. They capture high quality graphics, allow you to crop Visualization Scene prior to capture and lets you save directly in variety of picture file format.

If you have used Print Screen Key to copy the screen shot of your desktop, then start Windows Paint program, click on Edit and then click on Paste. You can also use other Graphics software like Photo Shop or Paint Shop Pro to paste the captured screen-shot image. Now crop the image with its crop tool by removing unwanted areas of picture and save it. Your Art piece is ready to display electronically, make printout, set as your Computer’s wallpaper or make Photographs. All digital colour photo processing Lab can now process and print your digital art in any size you want. But be aware, if you want to try to make large print out of small picture, your final print will be fuzzy, lack details and will be grainy. You will need advanced graphics software for resizing your small graphics in to big one without loss of quality.

Art through Art generator programs:

Some fractal programs perform complex mathematical calculations to draw complex, yet rhythmic, beautiful, colourful pictures called Fractles. There are several Fractal Generator programs. One particular, worth mentioning here is WinCIG, (http://www.hoevel.de/a ) Windows Chaos Image Generator, which is fast, delivers pretty good images and can show pictures in full screen mode. The programs also allow you to export generated picture file in Bitmap format. Further, WinCIG lets you create Images in Various colour palates that ranges from Black and White to VGA and Fire colours. Another Picture generator program worth mentioning is Gliftic, (http://www.gliftic.com) which help you create Pictures automatically. In Gliftic, you have to assign certain inputs such as colour scheme etc, and you are done. There are Wizards called “Draw me a Picture”, “Wizard generates image” and “Wizard tickles images” which generates images and manipulates them for you till you are satisfied with result, all with only mouse clicks. Simply go on mouse clicking fury to generate images, which this program generates by merging and combining images from its internal databank of images and colour schemes etc. Once the image that you think appropriate appears, you can further refine it through its tickle wizard, again with more mouse clicks, and finally, your Art piece is ready.

Art - ready-made!

Modern Graphics software makes you an expert artist out of simple mouse clicks. With its Filters (Photoshop) and Effects (Paint Shop Pro), you can do wonders. For example, if you want to create a portrait of yourself, get a photograph of yourself through conventional means, scan it and save it as graphic file (you can digitally download it directly through a Digital Camera also). Now load this picture in any of this graphic software. Experiment with numerous Artist effect or filters as the case may be, and watch the result. If you find result un-acceptable, un-do your step and then proceed again. Finally, you will be able to create your portrait from your plain photograph. In no time, with few mouse clicks, you become a portrait artist! Paint Shop Pro gives you option to draw with its unique picture tube. Select some tubes from its built in picture tube (picture tube can be prepared out of any picture file) randomly, apply them in a blank new file, and in no time, you will be able to draw beautiful pictures. No need to practice, just some experimentation with mouse clicks!

The steps mentioned above makes you a Modern Artist having touch of Abstract painting styles. Though you can make never-before-thought-or-dreamed millions of stunning pictures with equal numbers of colour compositions with these methods, still if you want to make some realistic Art, you will need to revert to traditional style of painting. Yes, even with your mouse, you have to pick Paint Brush tool and have to do some practice to draw a lustrous lips.

Screenshot descriptions:

Artist01.jpg Start Winamp, play some cool music, start its Visualization and Watch patiently. When a pleasant and worthy figure appears, take screen shot. Later, crop the image for more impact and cut-paste several for a big one.

Artist02.jpg The shining Sun, a shot from Winamp Visualization.

Artist03.jpg The Hypnotic Sun, a screenshot from another Winamp Visualization.

Artist04.jpg The Siberian Landscape, generated automatically through Visualization.

Artist05.jpg Another Landscape

Artist06.jpg Dream Sequence – the cool Art is generated through Winamp Visualization plug-in named- Space.

Artist07.jpg Cool colours – Art through Visualization: Can you create Art like this with your hands?

Artist08.jpg Nature Watch : Fractals in action - a picture generated by Fractal Program.

Artist09.jpg Fire in your eyes – this picture is generated by WinCIG

Artist10.jpg Autumn has arrived. This scene is generated automatically with some mouse clicks through utility Gliftic.

Artist11.jpg With Paint Shop Pro’s Picture tubes, this beautiful realistic Scene was created only with some mouse clicks and at some rare occasions, random mouse pointer drag.

Artist12.jpg One click wonder! Load any photo in graphics software and apply effect or filter. The photo will transform in to pure art piece.

Artist13.jpg The effect Black Pencil is applied on the image of Actress Amisha. The final result appears as the portrait has been drawn with black pencil.