How to Get Exposure For Your Artwork

This week I received an email from an automotive concept artist in Canada who had a question about how to get exposure and possibly sell their artwork.

I replied but my email came back as failed. I think the email address was entered incorrectly on my contact form. I thought I would post this so hopefully he’ll see it and know I did try to reply to his question. Continue reading How to Get Exposure For Your Artwork

The World’s Biggest Vehicles

Want to know what some of the largest vehicles are for land, sea and air?  I received the article “The World’s Biggest Land, Sea And Air Vehicles” in my Daily Digg this morning.

Whoever put this together did a great job! I like how they included size references of a person and a truck so you get a better idea of the sizes.

Check it out – The World’s Biggest Land, Sea And Air Vehicles

Article on me at Auto Restoration 101

Steve Nicholson over at Auto Restoration 101 contacted me to let me know about an article he did on me and my artwork. Steve has over 20 years experience in antique auto restoration and street rod fabrication. His work has been featured and displayed at SEMA, Good Guys, Pebble Beach Concours D’Elegance, and much more.

Steve also runs a couple of sites, one of which is his art site “Just for the Art of it”. There he displays all kinds of cool items which he makes from recycled parts, like the Oldsmobile timing gear and valve spring wall clock that is painted tangerine.

One of my favorites is the Spark Plug hubcap clock. It’s made from an aluminum hubcap and has 12 spark plugs that represent the hours.

He has these and other items for sale on his Etsy.com site.

Thanks for the article Steve!!

Fink Model Kits For The Petersen Museum

My friend Weldon just completed building twelve of Ed “Big Daddy” Roth’s Revell’s Fink Model Kits for the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles, California.

It’s amazing the detail he puts into these kits. You can see images of all twelve in the Finkster Forum on EdRothWorld.com.

Weldon has also put together a poster made up of photos of these models. He sent me one and they are really cool!

Hanging Out With The Big Boys

Steve at All American Dynamics sent me an e-mail to show me how his new logo compared with the big boys.

He sent me a link to Purdue University’s website. On their website is a page showing the corporate partners for the Industrial Advisory Board. Sandwiched in between the Ford logo and Honeywell logo you’ll see the All American Dynamics logo.

Not only is it impressive to see the logo you designed with these big names, but is also impressive to see someone you know on such a board. Very cool, Steve!

Amazing Scale Model Photography

This is a photo from Michael Paul Smith’s photo set on Flickr. What’s impressive about this photo is that the cars and the buildings are models. He takes these amazing photos of car models without the help of Photoshop. He says he uses the oldest trick in the special effects book and that is to line up the model with an appropriate background.

See the rest of his photos here on his slideshow.

Photoshop The Host – Chris Duke of Motorz

Chris Duke of Motorz posted on his Facebook page a request for anyone to Photoshop Peter of “Family Guy” onto his new “Season 3” photo.

Chris is a cool guy that I have gotten to know on Facebook and from his show Motorz so I thought I would take him up on his request.

The trick was getting the shirt to fit around Peter’s neck in a natural looking way. After a few tweaks here and there I was pleased with how it turned out.

Chris just posted an article titled “Photoshop The Host” with all the details. See the image I did at the top of the page beside Chris’s picture and at the top of the images below.

You can give it a try too, he has details on his website. Whether you do artwork or not check out Chris’s videos on Motorz. You can also check him out on Facebook and Twitter.

The Best Configurator Of The Year

mustang-customizer-wide-format1

The new 2010 Mustang Customizer is out and it is one of the best configurators I have played with this year.

So what makes this configurator better than the others? First of all it has lots of options. Options for the car, options for the background and also options for different effects you can apply to the car like a burnout, dirt, and smoke.

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mustang-customizer-wheels-red

mustang-customizer-hood-menu

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The other nice thing is that it loads fast. Sometimes when configurators have as many options as this one, it will take forever to load.

mustang-customizer-menu

The one little thing I think could have been done better is the parts side navigation. I kept having to chase down the “selected parts” link once the box resized itself. It would be great if it stayed the same size or either expanded just from the top down.

It also has nice share options so you show your friends what you created. Here is a link to one of the Mustangs I did. If you go and create one, come back and post it in the comments so I can check it out.

Better JPEG Optimization

If you are like me and use Photoshop to save images for your website, then you have seen Photoshop’s jpeg quality settings.

jpeg optimization settings

The basic idea with these setting is that the higher the setting, the better the image quality and the lower the setting the lower the quality. Along with the image quality is the file size. The higher the setting also means a larger file size and lower the setting means a smaller file size.

The balance is to have the best image quality with the lowest possible file size.

So a common practice, and one I have used over the years, was to go with a middle-of-the-road setting of 50. That way you got good image quality without having a file that was large and made your site load slow.

I recently came across this great article from Sergey Chikuyonok that I wanted to share called “Clever JPEG Optimization Techniques“.

The thing that stood out for me in this article was when Sergey wrote that when you save an image in Photoshop under 50, it uses an additional optimization algorithm, so if you are saving an image that has small, high-contrast details it is better to set the quality setting to at least 51.

In the article, there are some images to show you the difference between that 50 and 51 quality setting. You will be surprised at the difference.