Archive for the ‘Visual Art’ Category
Color Harmony Paintings Achieved Through a Split Complimentary Color Scheme
Do you wish you could paint more color harmony paintings?
Have you tried using the color wheel to achieve your color harmony paintings?
Color Harmony Paintings
Believe it or not learning to paint color harmony paintings is not as hard as it may seem at first. Many find that after using the techniques I give you here, they are able to see the world in a totally new way as they learn about color. Here are some suggestions to get you started. Once you have the basics down it will be easier to use these instructions to fit your needs, paint distinctive, and stimulating paintings. Today we learn to tell the story of color as we make harmonious paintings.
Using the artist color wheel is the place to start with your color harmony paintings. From here we learn to create a pleasing arrangement of color, producing rich, vibrant paintings.
I want to make a painting using the primary color of blue. There are many different pigments of blue to make as you will see on the wheel. As you turn the wheel many different combinations will be seen. So, let’s make a tint, tone and shade of blue. Choose Cobalt Blue for this exercise.
First make a puddle with blue adding just enough water to be fluid enough to drip off the end of your brush.
From this puddle make another puddle use enough water to make it very soupy and it creates a tint.
From the original puddle make another puddle and take enough to mix with grey making a tone of blue.
And, third, again from the original puddle make another puddle and take enough to mix with Ultramarine Blue and Burnt Umber to make a lively black or dark color creating shade.
As we continue to learn to make color harmony paintings, decide what colors to use with blue. Turn your wheel to the Illustration of Color Relationships or Harmonies side, decide if you want to paint a complimentary, split complementary, triad or tetrad color scheme.
For the sake of simplicity choose the split-complementary color scheme and find the triangle in the center, turn the dial to blue and notice that the complementary colors are yellow-orange and red-orange. These are tertiary colors, in other words one primary color and one secondary color mixed together.
As you see, choosing harmonious colors is the first step to color harmony paintings.
Great Ways To Improve Your Photography Skills

One of the great things about photography is that everyone can do it. While not just anyone will be able to take professional level pictures, the amateur can follow a few tips to produce photographs that he or she can feel very proud of. Browse the following tips to improve your pictures today.
Get closer when you are taking photos. Especially when you are taking a series of shots, from which you will chose the best, get in there. The better your scene fills the frame, the better the overall picture will be. Take several shots, so you can get the nicest shot possible.
Be aware of whether or not your photos are over or under-exposed. You can figure this out by learning how to read and interpret the histogram on your camera. It measures the exposure of each shot and will let you know if it is over or under-exposed so that you can prevent that next time.
If possible, avoid using the flash that you find on most cameras nowadays. It tends to give the subject ‘red eye’, and it removes a lot of the shadow that can create depth in a picture. If you have to use a flash, such as an indoor nighttime shot, keep your subject away from walls. This way you won’t end up with an ugly black shadow that resembles an outline.
Make sure you have the right lighting before taking a photograph. Lighting is perhaps the most important factor in producing a good black and white photograph, because it affects the texture, contrast and shape of the image. Side lighting can produce some dramatic photographs as it creates shadows and highlights the edges of shapes.
Change the direction of your camera’s flash to avoid the appearance of red eye. When a flash goes off directly in line with someone’s eyes, the result can be red eye. Reducing red eye will improve the quality of your pictures and give your subjects a more realistic appearance.
When photographing people, try to avoid having anyone that they know standing on the sidelines and watching the photograph being taken. It will almost always lead to feelings of self-consciousness if your subject knows they are being watched. This will, in turn, lead to unnatural, posed images that nobody will like.
Blur can ruin an otherwise, great picture. There are a few ways you can fix blur. One way is to assure the camera is still. You can do this by using a tripod or bracing yourself so it is easier to keep the camera still. You can also use your camera’s action mode. This will automatically adjust your camera’s speed settings and help stop the blur.
Select what will appear in your photograph. A good picture should be like a small window showing a certain aspect of your subject. Do not try showing too much. If you want to give a more general impression of something, take a series of pictures rather than a single photograph with no real focus or details.
Give your subject something to look at to avoid direct eye contact with the lens. You are sure to get more natural looking photos if you do not have them looking directly into the lens. Have them focus on something behind you or looking to one side or the other.
So much goes into taking a picture that learning about it from a written text may seem cumbersome. Getting out there and practicing some of the tips listed above, will clarify their meaning much better. Photography can become more meaningful if you are prepared with the proper equipment to capture the perfect moment.
Branding Information You Need To Know Before Branding Your Company
Do not underestimate the power of company branding. Branding is an important part of a company and how it’s represented. You can do it yourself, but in a likelihood, if your strong suit is not in design, you shouldn’t be creating a brand that people will recognize you for. You need to have something that attracts people to your business, not scare them away. In order to create a brand however, you need to have a great understanding of what your company does, who is your target market, and how you differ from the competition. As a graphic designer who has been in the industry for a couple years and knows a thing or two about designing a brand, I have accumulated quite a few facts that photographers need to know before searching for a graphic designer to design their company branding. It’s not just about creating a cool design, it needs to represent everything the company is trying to represent in a visual way that customers will recognize and remember.
Here are a few points that every company should know before seeking out a designer.
1. What type(s) of services/products do you offer?
Graphic designers use this information to create a look that reflects your industry and your style. If you like to make your photos look high-key and airy, a graphic designer now knows to create a light and airy branding using pale pastel colours or minimal colour to reflect your style.
2. Describe your Target Market.
Graphic designers need to know what your clientele your company will be marketing to. If your clients are adventurous and will do anything crazy in order to get the photos, you can get more adventurous with your branding with colour, lines and text to create a look that attracts the adventurous couple. If they are high-end and reserved, your branding will have a more classic approach. You always want to create a look that will attract your ideal customer.
3. What are your branding colours?
If you are choosing your own colours for your branding, make sure you choose colours that you want representing your company 10, 20 years from now. The whole point of branding is creating a look that is timeless, and will last the lifespan of your company. They can be your favourite colours, or colours that show up in your photographs often. For example, if your photos look vintage and have a lot of yellow and beige tints, you can use yellow or some other pastel colour with beige for your colours.
4. Describe your ideal look in 3 words.
These are not necessarily going to be words used in your tagline, they are mostly the 3 words that best represent how you want your company to look like. For example, bright, airy and fun, are three words that graphic designers can use to create something that has a fun little design with a pop of bright colour on a neutral background.
5. Who are your main competitors?
It’s always good to know who your main competitors are in an industry. You can’t necessarily say “every photographer” is your main competitor, because they are not! Your main competitors are generally people that have similar style, look and feel to their photos and company that you have. They could have the same grunge, dark look that you have, or perhaps they have similar style in posing. It’s whoever you feel are in the same class as you are.
The reason why your designer needs to know this is they will research into your competitors and try to create a brand that sets you apart from your direct competition.
6. What are your thoughts about their logos/branding? How do you want to differ?
This question just gives you the chance to examine your competition and to examine your own company. There are always qualities that you will like in another companies branding, so make a list of everything you like and especially what you hate. The worst part of creating a design is finding out that is exactly the type of design your client hates. This is one of the most important bits of information that designers need from you because they can’t see into your mind, so you need to let us know, so we can create something that is awesome!
7. How does your company differ from your competition?
You need to know your qualities and how you differ from your competition. It could be something like your customer service, your proofing gallery, your turnaround rates, your editing process, your lighting style, your poses etc. All of this information is good to know, because it could shape the way the branding will feel. If you want good customer service, the branding will have a friendly, warm feeling to it, so clients feel welcome and comfortable while looking at your photos.
Answering these questions and doing a little research for yourself, will help create an awareness of your industry and competition. It allows you to keep current, see what others are doing and how you can do it better and stand out! The photography industry is a huge one, and it’s really, REALLY important to set yourself apart. It’s a competitive world out there, so the least you can do is have an awesome brand to go along with your amazing photography and make yourself stand out amongst the competition.
Why Buy A Photo Book When You Can Make Your Own
The key factor which usually marks a photo book out from all the others with which it shares a shelf is the luxury quality of the materials used. The pages are invariably printed on thick, glossy photographic paper and bound and covered to the highest possible standard, making them objects of desire in their own right, leaving aside the actual content of the photographs.
Personalised photo books take the kind of standards usually only associated with expensive, professionally produced artefacts and apply them to the images of the customers own choice.
The advent of digital photography has made it possible for the ordinary person to take photographs in numbers, and of a quality, which would once have been the preserve of professionals only. What this means is that events such as birthday parties, weddings, holidays and family days out can be recorded for posterity in a depth which would, until fairly recently, have been impossible.
The ‘problem’, to coin a phrase, caused by this abundance of imagery, lies in choosing which of the many photographs taken are the ones which you want to keep and then opting for a means of storage. All too often, people find that their pictures are stored in a myriad of different places – some languishing in files on their computer, some still on the camera memory card. Others printed off and put away in tins or drawers – and so when the time comes to look through them and relive the memories, or else show off their favourites to someone else, it’s difficult if not impossible to do so. What this problem highlights is the fact that our photographs are precious to us.
They are often more than just two dimensional images on a piece of paper, they are memories, moments in time which have been captured forever and which, every time you look at them, have the power to transport you back to a time and a place where you were happy. Personalised photo books are a way of storing your photos which reflects just how much they mean to you, and which makes it easy to keep them in perfect condition and look at them whenever you want to. The technology now available to anyone who takes digital photographs means that putting a photos together is a quick and incredibly easy process. All that’s needed is to upload the relevant pictures to the website you’re using and then utilise the specialist software to put the book together.
People often choose to print and publish a book like this following an event such as a wedding, or as a means of capturing a baby’s first year of life or the special moments from a holiday of a lifetime. One other good example to use is a book which captures a major renovation of a part of your house, such as fitting your dream kitchen. The photos included could include shots of the room before the work starts, the gutted shell when the old kitchen has been ripped out and then the slow, difficult process of putting a new kitchen together. Once you’ve chosen and uploaded the relevant pictures, you could then choose every other feature of the book, such as its’ shape and format, the number of pages and the type and design of the cover- will it be a plain, luxurious leather covered book with ‘Our New Kitchen’ or a full colour shot of the finished artefact? The choice is entirely in the hands of the consumer, as is the matter of whether you need to include any text alongside the images.
Perhaps you want to write something like ‘We had a hard time pulling the old cooker out’ or perhaps you feel that the picture of you sweating, straining and putting your back out tells the story well enough. Photo books can be used to capture and keep any event, from the fairly mundane to the massively life changing, and make both wonderful gifts and precious keepsakes.
There are really no limits to the ideas which can be turned into photo albums or books . Whether you’re a professional photographer wanting to showcase your work, or a proud parent finally deciding to collect all the favourite pictures of your kids in the one place, personalised photo books are a wonderful means via which to store and enjoy your most precious memories.
Portrait Photography Tips – Ways To Gain Sharp Portraits
There are main factors affecting the sharpness of the portrait, namely, the shutter speed & the focus point.
Getting a sharp portrait is important because no matter how nice your exposure, composition, lighting is, if your portrait is not sharp, it is not a nice portrait. To make matter worse, there is small you can do to correct blurred picture due to camera shake in the coursework of the post-process stage.
In the event you are handholding the camera & the shutter speed that you use is slow, there is a high chance of getting a blurred or soft picture due to camera shake. Of the best ways to keep away from this is to make use of a tripod when you need to make use of slow shutter speed.
Shutter Speed
Plenty of camera manufacturers have come up with technologies to permit photographers to make use of slow shutter speed & correct the picture blur in the lens. These technologies are called Vibration Reduction (VR) for Nikon & Picture Stabilization (IS) for Canon. According to these camera manufacturers, using these in-the-lens correction technologies will provide the photographer blur-corrected images of about three – four stops worth of camera-shake compensation.
However, in the event you do not have a tripod with you & must handhold the camera while shooting, a rule of thumb to make use of is that the shutter speed that you use cannot be slower than the focal length of the lens. For example, in the event you are using a 100mm lens, you ought to not use any shutter speed slower than 1/100s.
In the situation where you don’t have a tripod & must reduce the shutter speed below the focal length of the lens in order to get the correct exposure, try to increase the ISO in lieu of reducing the shutter speed to get the correct exposure. This is because there is application like noise ninja that can reduce noise in the post-process stage but there is small you can do in the post-process stage if the picture is soft or blurred.
Focus Point
First & foremost, the photographer must have auto focus point choice turn OFF in the camera because if he or he allows the camera to automatically select the focus point, the camera might select the wrong focus point & it will lead to an out-of-focus portrait.
In portraits, the eyes of the subject must be sharp & in order for the eyes of the subject to be sharp, the focus point of the portrait ought to be placed in-between the eyes on the nose bridge of the subject.
Some photographers use the “focus & recompose” process & it may lead to soft images when they are shooting with wide aperture like f/2.8 & below. This is because the depth of field will be shallow & any sizable movement after focus is locked will lead to soft images. Therefore, try to shoot with smaller aperture like f/5.6 & above & select the AF point that is closest to the eye although the centre AF point tends to be more sensitive in the event you require to make use of the “focus & recompose” process.