"Mike's - Scissors and Peace"
By Harlow Ballard

MOCA celebrates the art and life of Harlow Ballard -- “The artist is always himself without apology or defensiveness.” Learn more about Harlow on MOCA
Interested in PRIMITIVE ART? Read this article on a previous "Mary's Page"

Attract High-End Buyers
by Alyson Stanfield

How does one connect to the buyer agents of high-end customers?
How does one get into the loop of being looked at?
Everyone wants to know. So, my short answer is “persistence,” but let’s dig deeper....

1. Network everywhere.
You have to meet new people, a lot of new people. You should be out networking not only with people who are potential buyers but also with people who know potential buyers.These might be other artists (yes, artists know potential buyers), but they could also be people who hang out at your usual haunts: museum lectures, group meetings (especially if you have a niche), church and school functions, political rallies, and the like. Meeting new people means expanding beyond your comfort zone. You never know where you’ll run into someone who could become very important for you in the future.

2. Work your contact list!
Stay in touch with the people you meet.Connections are critical to your success. How often are you reconnecting with the people you know? The most alarming weakness in most artists’ marketing is not using their contact lists to maintain personal relationships. Make sure everyone you know is aware of your art and who your potential buyers are. When your connections come across a good match, they’ll think of you first.

3. Get a website evaluation.
You need good “Internet exposure.” You can’t just have a website. You have to work that site through consistent blogging, Facebooking, Twittering, emails, and newsletters. You need a strong, well-constructed professional presence. Templates and blogging platforms make it easy for anyone to build their own sites. Words rule on the Web, but you have to know how to use them to your advantage.

FINAL WORD: Outside of the major international art fairs that attract the world’s elite collectors, there’s no single place you can show up and be seen. What you need is true grit. It takes persistence and determination, which is why the life of an artist isn’t for everyone. Don’t try something once or twice—or even every so often—and think you’ve failed. In fact, don’t think of it as “trying” at all. There is no try, Do It!

Source: Michele Renée Ledoux, Silent Enough

"Once" By Harlow Ballard

What Your Inner GEEK Really Needs To Know -- File Formats!

As with any other file, graphics information has to be stored electronically, in some format that records the arrangement of each speck of color in the image. How effectively that is done varies with the graphics file format, some being memory efficient, some good for poster-like spreads of color, some better for photos and some likely to lose information as the file is compressed or exported.

The technicalities of file format are for geeks, but you do need to know the properties of the main formats, and how to exploit them.

Files have to be read, of course, and that reading or interpretation differs slightly from browser to browser, and also between the Mac, Windows and Unix platforms. Some dozens of graphic file formats exist, but the ones you'll mostly be using are GIF, JPEG, PNG, RAW, EPS and TIFF, plus the proprietary formats employed by the software you use: Photoshop, Paintshop Pro and Serif PhotoPlus. All file formats have their pluses and minuses.

GIF: Graphical Interchange Format:
GIF compression uses pattern recognition to compress, and is best used for flat spreads of color as it reduces everything to 256 colors. When used for photographs, however, it will reduce by four times - without losing information: GIF is a lossless format. GIF has two other advantages: the images can be transparent, and they can support animation. For transparency, one color is designated as the 'chrome key color' and this the browser recognizes by replacing it with the background. GIF employs two compression techniques on images: CULT (Color Look Up Table) and LZW (named after its originators Lempel, Ziv and Welch). The first indexes (creates a CLUT and references colors to it) and can reduce up to 60%. The second finds patterns in the image and indexes them, creating a look-up table that is not stored with the file but can be recreated at will by the browser. Photoshop's ImageReady facility can compress a GIF file further by losing some of the information: an often acceptable stratagem with large files. To overcome the 256 color limitation, GIF can dither the image, i.e. create a tiny checkerboard of web-safe colors to approximate to the color desired.

JPEG: Joint Photographic Experts Group:
JPEG is ideally suited to photographs as it can store up to 16 millions colors, (though black and white may come out better with GIF). Compression ranges from 10:1 to 100:1. At maximum compression, therefore, a 4 MB photo will reduce to a 40KB file, an obvious boon for web displays. The cost is the information lost on compression, and it's therefore usual to keep a backup copy of the original JPEG file, or to save it in a lossless format like TIFF. JPEG files can be in RGB or CMYK, but are not transparent and do not support animation. JPEG's compression proceeds into six stages. 1. Brightness and color are separated. 2. The color space is encoded and reduced by two. 3. The image is divided into 8 by 8 pixel blocks. 4. The components in each block are divided by an individual quantization coefficient. 5. The coefficients are encoded. 6. Compression parameters are saved with the image.

PNG Portable Network Graphic Format:
PNG gives the best of both worlds: lossless compression with up to 16 million colors and 256 levels of transparency. PNG also possess a Gamma correction function that ensures images will be equally bright on all platforms (Mac platforms display slighter darker than Windows). PNG are not displayed by older browsers, however, and the files can be much larger than either GIF or JPEG. PNG does not support animation.

RAW:
RAW files preserve the settings on your camera for things like sharpness, saturation or even the ISO setting. These can a. be read and changed by later versions of Photoshop — so that you have the chance, in effect, of retaking the shot through the software alone. Unfortunately, RAW files are enormous, even larger than TIFF.

TIFF Tagged Image File Format:
A popular format for storing graphics in a lossless format for printing. Files are large and there are various types of compression: Hoffman, FAX CCITT 3, Packbits, LZW and uncompressed. Color information can be stored either as RGB or CMYK.

Encapsulated PostScript Format:
EPS is the primary graphics format for imagery rendered as a Postscript image. The files are large but can be black and white or color.
Source: PXMagic.com

"January Sun at Antrim " By Harlow Ballard

Announcements:
We are pleased to announce that JD Jarvis and Myriam Lozada-Jarvis will be joining the Museum of Computer Art as our new Education Curators. This role will further the mission of the museum and its practices.

Expect to be hear a lot more from and about this duo, but in the mean time you can gain insight by visiting their website at Dunking Bird Productions.

Events and Happenings:
Call for digital artists!
MOCA: Museum of Computer Art Digital Art Summer Festival 2010
This is another of our prestigious events, an international exhibit, competition and sale of fine digital art and photography in our Brooklyn NY gallery, including exhibit of all art in our virtual online museum. A wonderful opportunity for artists to advance their careers and expose their art to a sophisticated New York audience.
Click here for full information, prizes, dates and fees

QUOTE:
Submitted by Jan Kölling this week:
“The great philosophical questions are actually banal, because everyone asks them. In fact, the only reason they’re considered ‘great’ is because everyone asks them." :::S. Gögel:::

This page posted 10 May 2010
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DIGITAL GLOSSARY OF TERMS