A Virtual Paintout for Digital Artist’s

As an artist one has to choose a specific genre to even have a chance at getting a piece of the market.  At least that is my opinion, rarely does one find an artist equally talented with landscape paintings in oil and portraits in watercolor or pastel also. That doesn’t mean we turn our backs on other media or subject matter, it just means the bulk of our time is spent with the subject matter and media that we like best.

I love social media marketing and internet tools almost as much as I love being an artist that produces digital art. I came across Kentucky artist Bill Guffey several months ago and am just now getting back to writing about his awesome project that involves media tools.  Bill is a traditional media artist using some internet tools. Thanks goes out to Charlie Parker from lines and colors for his post a few days ago that reminded me of  Bill Guffey.

Bill came up with an awesome idea for a virtual paintout using google maps street views. We are mimicking the virtual paintout using digital art tools for our group project on digital paint magazine blog. So cudo’s to Bill for the inspiration and setting the stage. You can see a really nice article about it here at lines and colors as well as read about it on Bills blog.

Group Digital Art Project

I have been thinking about doing something for awhile with art from various social media properties. I have been inspired by various social media applications and the unique personal images people use for there profile pictures. Very cool.

If you are a people person this will be a fun exercise as you will have a chance to study some folks from a unique perspective. A few days ago I came across a blog post from a blog I had not been reading for awhile, lines and colors. In the article Charlie profiled artist Matt Held and his Facebook project as well as Bill Guffey’s Virtual Paintout. I will write and article on those fun projects in a few days.

So here is what we will do. The first month we will use Facebook. The exercise is to find and paint an image from a profile picture listed on Facebook. Image size at this point doesn’t matter although a small image is what we want sent to us (2×3 or so at 150 would be fine.)

The goal here is to continue to develop our digital chops and improve our digital art while getting to know the very useful and awesome marketing power and SEO chutzpah of some social media sites. You can use artrage or Corel Painter, even do a photoshop painting, the use of any art software or plugin is welcome.  Digitally paint or draw a portrait and send the image to tim@digitalpaintmagazine. Tell us your name and website or URL as well as the software and any plugins used. We will post some of them on the blog here.

For those who chose to participate I will send a special report specific to the social media site we are using. If you want to participate without publishing your image that is ok also, just let us know you dont want your creation published.

Ok so here is the schedule for a few months.

September 11-October 11 Facebook Profiles

October 11-November 11 Landscapes from Google Maps Street Views

November 11-December 15 Twitter Profiles

BTW-Mark K. made a comment on a different post about copyright infringement. He is  correct, I am certainly not advocating that you just snake someone’s image and paint it without permission. I made an assumption that people would use common sense and ask first. Bad to make assumptions. Make sure you have permission from the person who owns the profile. Don’t be a ding dong.