monsteravariegata:

Do you like not spending huge amounts of money on them?

This website has a huge collection of high quality vintage illustrations that you can download FOR FREE

They got pretty much everything!! Vintage maps, mushrooms, flowers, trees, bugs, birds, corals, fish, palm trees, feathers, tropical fruits, you name it!!

They even got some works of my dude Ernst Haeckel on there!!!!

I could go on and on but I suggest you check it out yourself. Personally, I will be covering my entire apartment with these once copyshops are open again. But even if you don’t want to do that, just browsing all these beautiful illustrations is a great way to spend your time. 

Have fun and stay save!

(via thesmegalodon)

locus-p0cus:

sliceosunshine:

esoanem:

spooky-octagon:

fierceawakening:

digitaldiscipline:

griseldajane:

Glaze is out!

Tired of having your artwork used for AI training but find watermarks dismaying and ineffective?

Well check this out! Software that makes your Art look messed up to training AIs and unusable in a data set but nearly unchanged to human eyes.

I just learned about this. It’s in Beta. Please read all the information before using.

ALT

Art thieves already hate it:

Dude, if you’re stealing, you deserve to have the data poisoned. Because you could have asked and you didn’t.

The link is only in the original post inside an image, not as text, so here it is as plain text: https://glaze.cs.uchicago.edu/

and the paper about how it works: https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.04222

As links (because some of us are on mobile and can’t easily copy and paste to our browser), those are:

https://glaze.cs.uchicago.edu

&

GLAZE: Protecting Artists from Style Mimicry by Text-to-Image Models

Recent text-to-image diffusion models such as MidJourney and Stable Diffusion threaten to displace many in the professional artist community

arXiv.org

A bit of a TLDR for some questions I saw in the notes:

The team that created Glaze is from the University of Chicago. Their names are each listed in full on the Glaze download website. (This group of students/professors did this for their SPRING BREAK 😱 so go give them some love lol)

It is free to download. No, they won’t ask for or raise money from/for this project.(stated by one of the lead professors of the project).

Glaze is designed to protect artists’ STYLE–which a bunch of ai people have been deliberately fine-tuning their models to mimic (and specifically of current living artists–small or big).

It currently does not protect against composition/trace-like theft (as seen when run through img-to-img) but that would be protected by copyright anyway while STYLE is not.

The University Team has stated that they are dedicated to continuing to improve the tool, like fixing bugs (like overheating older computers by taking up lots of energy when Glazing–it currently runs on CPU so they’re trying to change that to GPU, I believe) and expanding the type of protection given to artists (like working against img-to-img theft).

It currently only works directly on your computer (phones not advised due to current overheating issue, no tablets, or iPads, and no website runthrough since that would be insecure to breaches/scraping/hacks)

It currently works best on painterly artwork, but can still be used on other forms (team is working on improving this)

IT WORKS BY calculating the changes each image needs for the best protection against style theft by AI, and adds tiny changes throughout the piece, so that your style will, for example, confuse the ai into seeing van gogh. But the ai thieves will see a regular image in your style, feeding it into their model labeled as your work (thus starting the “data poisoning”).

Do not post the original unGlazed piece of your artwork after posting your Glazed version (obviously)

The Team worked directly with over 1,000 artists that were being impacted by the ai theft. Because the team listened to those artists, Glaze accounts for regular art thieves too (i.e. Glaze can’t be removed/cropped etc. like signatures or watermarks when reposted. It’s just part of the image, so even if it ends up on another site and scraped, the Glazing is still in effect)

When you run your artwork through Glaze, no information is sent back to the Team. (Aka, no scraping on their part. The app receives information from the Team (like updates) but no information from you is given to them through the app. Basically Team servers —> You and NOT Team servers <-–>You) One-way data street.

Brief misunderstanding happened over an open-source license for the front-end part of the app. (Used open-source coding for front-end, not knowing that code’s use-license states it is only for other open-source uses, not closed-source (the back-end code of the app is private to prevent counter-counter measure developments)). The Team took down the app until they replaced the front-end code with code written from scratch by the team. They are now not in violation of that open-source license since they are no longer using it. (you have 30 days to remedy a license breach once informed; they did so in 2)

The Team is currently in touch with Japanese artists to better expand the tool for use to protect their art styles

From what I understand of it, Glaze is an AI tool designed to be anti-AI (Think Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 2: one Terminator robot vs. all the other Terminators 😂)

You can download it from their website and also contact them through email there with any questions, problems, or bugs. The website: https://glaze.cs.uchicago.edu/

reblogging this every fucking time it comes across my dash

(via thesmegalodon)

queensimia:

onecarefulowner:

suchirolle:

rileyav:

don’t save as jpeg

as a former yearbook editor and designer, let me explain this further

if youre only planning on posting your art online, them please save it as .png ;this is also better for transparencies as well

BUT

please, if youre planning of printing your art, NEVER use png. it makes the quality of the image pretty shitty. use jpeg or pdf instead. and always set your work at 300dpi to get a better printing quality - this means, the images are crisper and sharper and theres no slight blurriness. i had a talk with my friend who is currently taking design, and pdf is much better to use when youre working with a bigger publishing company because it still has the layers intact, but if youre only planning on printing your stuff at staples or at some small publishing store, the jpeg is the way to go.

this has been a public service announcement

I’ve replied to this once before but I see it’s doing the rounds again.

This is all utter bullshit.

I’m sorry but if your qualification is working on the school yearbook, you have no qualifications. Do not pretend otherwise. As a former professional photo manipulator for advertising brochures, I can say that you’re not comparing apples to oranges here - if anything, you’re comparing fruit to farmyard machinery:

• JPEG is a lossy format. It is suitable for web imagery because it sacrifices detail for reduced file sizes, but in doing so it introduces artifacts that weren’t in the original; if you load a JPEG for editing, then save it as a different JPEG, then you’re adding more artifacts formed from those first artifacts. Do this often enough and you end up with a horrid glitchy mess that looks like a puddle’s reflection after a stone’s been thrown in. You’ve seen those memes that have 3 or 4 different “found at” tags along the bottom, that look like fingerpainted copies of the original? That’s why.
  
• PNG is a lossless format that comes in two primary flavours, PNG-8 and PNG-24, which use 8 and 24 bit colour respectively. 8-bit colour is what you have in GIFs, a limit of just 256 different colours in a predetermined palette, usually automatically chosen by your software when saving. These files will look the same as GIFs, potentially with large patches of solid colour instead of the usual gradual shading seen in 24-bit imagery. This is usually better for small banners or pixel art, as it can yield smaller filesizes than GIF format. (There is an animated version called MNG but it has very little web support, hence the continued use of GIFs.)
• PNG-24 is great for larger images where detail is as important as colour depth, as well as printable RGB images and (if supported by the client) full colour images with gradient transparencies. It most certainly does not make “the quality of the image pretty shitty,” as it preserves every nuance. File sizes can be smaller than JPEG for small images, or significantly larger for large images.
  
• PDF is a container file, whatever you put into it will be pretty much preserved as it was, so you gain nothing but lose nothing.
• TIFF is what you need to be using for archival or print-quality imagery. It has support for multiple layers, multiple colour channels (RGB as well as CMYK, which is essential for accurate print rendering), and everything is preserved exactly as it was seen on-screen when being composed. There are compressed versions available, they use similar methods to PNG in order to maintain detail without sacrifice; next to whatever your graphics program uses natively, this is the most interchangeable format available for professional use.
• DPI is important only when used in combination with image dimensions; in and of itself it serves no purpose. If you make a brilliantly detailed 640x480 image & set it to 300dpi, you’ll receive a brilliantly detailed 2 inch x 1.6 inch print. This is great if you want to make a postage stamp, but not if you’re creating an A4 flyer! Determine the image’s dimension then set the DPI accordingly; 72dpi isn’t hideous especially for text-heavy work (it’s ~3 pixels per millimeter), and 150dpi can be suitable for many images. Unless you’re interested in photo realism, 300dpi is usually overkill - for our hypothetical A4 flyer, you’d need a file of 2490x3510 pixels for edge to edge printing, with a correspondingly high memory requirement and filesize even if using a compressed format.
• Keeping the layers intact is utterly unimportant for print work unless you want to use a separated colour print method that requires multiple passes to lay down each ink. If you send a file with all the layers, masks, etc. off for printing you’re liable to get it sent back unactioned, as they won’t want to take responsibility for choosing the wrong elements for printing. Save your work with everything intact, then save a flattened copy especially for printing purposes - this is one of the reasons Save Copy As… is a common option in graphics manipulation software.

This has been a Public Service Rebuttal.

FUCKING THANK YOU

As a designer who’s worked a few years for a newspaper, I cannot begin to tell you how much OP’s post (edit: response, technically) made me cringe. I would have killed to get a photo as a TIFF for once instead of having to tear apart PDFs only to find a 50x100px 72dpi shitty JPEG inside for the 5 millionth time…

JPEG and PNG are best suited for web formats (and it is perfectly fine to save your web version as JPEG, that’s what it’s goddamn for). You will make a designer cry if you send a web-safe JPEG for print, however. And if you have a vectorized logo saved as EPS (or even better, AI), you will make that designer’s year.

As someone who has worked in design for print, web, and engraving and has likely done so longer than Former Yearbook Editor up there has been alive: the very best thing you can do is ASK WHOEVER YOU’RE SUBMITTING ARTWORK TO WHAT FORMAT AND RESOLUTION THEY NEED AND THEN, CRUCIALLY, SEND! WHAT! THEY! ASK! FOR!

I know I’ve reblogged this before, with this very addition, but every time I see this post That One Response makes my eye twitch.

(via jamminsamblog)

thefrogman:

thefrogman:

Tony & Chelsea are wonderful photography teachers. They just released their 7 hour training series for free on YouTube. This instruction is as good or better than an expensive college course.

If you have any interest in learning photography, this is a fantastic place to start.

As Tony explains, this is much better than bouncing from video to video getting an out-of-order photography education.

One thing I would like to add…

Once I got to a certain point on my photography education I realized almost all of the popular tutorials only taught beginner to intermediate level practices. Most of the stuff on YouTube is just the basics.

So, if any of you end up liking photography and decide to stick with it and keep learning, there is a place that has more advanced training.

Visual Education by Karl Taylor is another wonderful resource for photography training. It does require a monthly subscription, but if you are that far along on your photography journey, it is a small investment to level up your skills.

Karl taught me almost every advanced photographic skill inside my brain. He is a master at shaping light and his product photography is so amazingly photographed, some think it is CGI at first glance.

So learn the fundamentals with Tony & Chelsea.

And if you want to go Super Saiyan with your photo skills, Karl Taylor will get you there.

jaeharuart:

Facial Mapping Guide for Drawing Better Faces that took waaaay too long to put together….. (this is published on my Artstation linked on my LinkTree too in case the quality is too bad to see here)

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/JaeHaruArt?fan_landing=true

LinkTree: https://linktr.ee/jaeharuart

(via uselessarttips)

agentromanoffsir:

neocities guide - why you should build your own html website

do you miss the charm of the 90s/00s web where sites had actual personality instead of the same minimalistic theme? are you feeling drained by social media and the constant corporate monopoly of your data and time? do you want to be excited about the internet again?

try neocities!!

what is neocities?

neocities is a free hosting website that lets you build your own html website from scratch, with total creative control. in their own words:

“we are tired of living in an online world where people are isolated from each other on boring, generic social networks that don’t let us truly express ourselves. it’s time we took back our personalities from these sterilized, lifeless, monetized, data mined, monitored addiction machines and let our creativity flourish again.”

why should I make my own website?

web3 has been overtaken by capitalism & conformity. websites that once were meant to be fun online social spaces now exist solely to steal your data and sell you things. it sucks!!

building a personal site is a great way to express yourself and take control of your online experience.

what would I even put on a website?

the best part about making your own site is that you can do literally whatever the hell you want! focus on a specific subject or make it a wild collection of all your interests. share your art! make a shrine for one of your interests! post a picture of every bird you see when you step outside! make a collection of your favorite blinkies! the world is your oyster !!

here are some cool example sites to inspire you:

recently updated neocities sites | it can be fun to just look through these and browse people’s content!
space bar | local interstellar dive bar
creature feature | halloween & monsters
big gulp supreme
peanutbuttaz | personal site
dragodiluna
linwood | personal site
patho grove | personal site

getting started: neocities/html guide

sound interesting? here are some guides to help you get started, especially if you aren’t familiar with html/css

sadgrl.online webmastery | a fantastic resource for getting started with html & web revival. also has a layout builder that you can use to start with in case starting from scratch is too intimidating
web design in 4 minutes | good for learning coding basics
w3schools | html tutorials
templaterr | demo & html for basic web elements
eggramen test pages | css page templates to get started with
sadgrl background tiles | bg tiles
rivendell background tiles | more free bg tiles

fun stuff to add to your site

want your site to be cool? here’s some fun stuff that i’ve found

blinkies-cafe | fantastic blinkie maker! (run by @transbro & @graphics-cafe)
gificities | internet archive of 90s/00s web gifs
internet bumper stickers | web bumper stickers
momg | gif gallery
99 gif shop | 3d gifs
123 guestbook | add a guestbook for people to leave messages
cbox | add a live chat box
moon phases | track the phases of the moon
gifypet | a little clickable page pet
adopt a shroom | mushroom page pet
tamaNOTchi | virtual pet
crossword puzzle | daily crossword
imood | track your mood
neko | cute cat that chases your mouse
pollcode | custom poll maker
website hit counter | track how many visitors you have

web revival manifestos & communities

also, there’s actually a pretty cool community of people out there who want to bring joy back to the web!

melonland project | web project/community celebrating individual & joyful online experiences. Also has an online forum
melonland intro to web revival | what is web revival?
melonking manifesto |
status cafe | share your current status
nightfall city | online community
onio.cafe | leave a message and enjoy the ambiance
sadgrl internet manifesto |
yesterweb internet manifesto | sadly defunct, still a great resource
reclaiming online social spaces | great manifesto on cultivating your online experience

in conclusion

i want everyone to make a neocities site because it’s fun af and i love seeing everyone’s weird personal sites that they made outside of the control of capitalism :)

say hi to me on neocities

(via symphoniclolita)

adorkastock:

It’s time to start making art for Pride!! And I’ve got ✨SOME SUPER GAY POSE REFERENCES✨

100% of the profits from my Pride Pack 2023 will be donated to the following orgs, split evenly:

🌟 The Trevor Project @thetrevorproject

🌟 The Theater Offensive

🌟 Transgender Emergency Fund of Massachusetts

This pack will be available through the end of June 2023.

If you pay with credit or debit card more of your funds will go to the donation because Stripe has a lower processing fee than PayPal. ;D

This is a $1+ pack so you can choose the amount. There are 99 references including a whole folder with white flag poses for you to add your own colors.

My goal is to raise $1000 for each org so every dollar helps!! Please reblog to help spread the word!

HAPPY DRAWING! 🏳️‍🌈✨🏳️‍⚧️

(via adorkastock)

$18 for 39 ebooks right now