Art and creativity
"Such shallow single-minded herd mentality,
It's everywhere, you simply cant escape into some deep abyssal cavity,
Nowhere to run to hide, no way to end the vast stupidity,
It's like a sea that just goes on and on into infinity."
It's something I wrote in my PDA at school.
I'm constantly appallaed at how unoriginal the world can be at times. This is not generation X. It's generation ctrl+x. Cut, copy, paste. Why innovate when you can take? Just read some words and download some things, rip them off, tack your name on it, and call it your own? It's one thing to do it to things like processes or abstract ideas or unpatented methods, but to do such a thing in art? I can hardly consider it to be art.
Signature graphics are one thing I'm pretty aware of as far as the state-of-the-art is standing. The state of the art as I see it now, it's possible to become top-notch with no artistic skill whatsoever. It's as easy as 1, 2, 3. Get Photoshop CS2 crack, read tutorials, download fonts/brushes/stocks like crazy. Do those and you can compete with some of the most respected graphics artists around, I'm sorry to say.
Style is my entire life of graphics. I make every sig to have a specific style, a certain feel to it. That feel is not grunge. I see enough grunge, I want to see something else. Something so totally removed from grunge and hopefully everything else out there that it deserves it's own category. Take something ubiquitous, cut it in half. Rectangular background with a 1px border? Hell no. Make an amorphous blob. If it's normal to have your name off to the side in approximately size 20-40 font, then screw normality, make your name 117 pixels high and dominating the entire sig. Where one person bevels text, you should make it glow. Where one person would give a shape a solid color, you should give it texture and feel. Place the elements to not just coexist and not interfere, but place them so that they cooperate and combine and complement each other, drawing attention to one another. Make every letter, every stock, every pixel something worth taking a second look at. Make every element come together to form a feel.
In the end it doesn't matter if you can make something awesome in less than 4 minutes.
"Life is short. Art is long."
I've always thought that following the trends that everyone else follows was a dumb idea. But why is that, and why does it matter?
Everybody knows that people are stupid. And everybody knows that stupid people do stupid things. The irony of peer pressure is that it's stupid people trying to convince you to do what are usually stupid things, usually for stupid reasons.
The mind is a conceptual computer, not a numerical one. At it's most base level, yes, it does work based on math and physics, but at a higher level it is amorphous and not suited for mathematical computation. It's much easier for someone to understand the concept of pouring one glass of water into another than it is for them to add the exact volumes of the two glasses together. Because of the brain's abstract, conceptual, almost random nature people are capable of creative thought. Computers are not capable of creative thought. There is no way to equate the two, humans create, computers are tools that complement humans' skills and amplify them. The closest a computer can come to art is generating a random number.
The greatest ability is creativity. Creativity is a change to the norm. All changes to life have been made by creativity. The good and the bad. Often imitating others' creativity in the process. After all, the brain only knows what it is taught and can logically conjecture from it's teachings, so all creativity should be based on that which exists, even if it exists only in the mind of the artist.
Without creativity, where would humanity be? Probably extinct, an victim of natural selection and its lack of physical ability. And look where humanity has come. The single most prominent, most dominant creature on the earth is the Human. Effects of this creature can be witnessed from orbit, from the surface, even some places underwater. Humans have spread to fill each and every last niche this planet has to offer.
How did it come this far? Creativity. Invention. The bow and arrow. The plow. The boat, the car, the computer. All inventions based on creativity, so completely new and previously unforseen, and the inventions that have most revolutionized the world. They did not happen by accident, but by genius, and they have brought humanity up from a pack of hunters to become the species with such uncontestible influence over it's surroundings that it alone decides the species that live and die. It is the only creature where it takes just one to bring about an end to the world.
And yet, today, there's a notable lack of creativity. People follow blindly in the footsteps of failures before them. Some take that which belongs to others and claims it for their own. Humanity in this state is an uncomprehensibly bad thing. It is losing its grip on what made it so strong. When traction on the foundation of power is lost, it causes panic. Panic is frenzy which causes mistakes. Mistakes made by the only creature able to end the world is a very bad thing.
It's everywhere, you simply cant escape into some deep abyssal cavity,
Nowhere to run to hide, no way to end the vast stupidity,
It's like a sea that just goes on and on into infinity."
It's something I wrote in my PDA at school.
I'm constantly appallaed at how unoriginal the world can be at times. This is not generation X. It's generation ctrl+x. Cut, copy, paste. Why innovate when you can take? Just read some words and download some things, rip them off, tack your name on it, and call it your own? It's one thing to do it to things like processes or abstract ideas or unpatented methods, but to do such a thing in art? I can hardly consider it to be art.
Signature graphics are one thing I'm pretty aware of as far as the state-of-the-art is standing. The state of the art as I see it now, it's possible to become top-notch with no artistic skill whatsoever. It's as easy as 1, 2, 3. Get Photoshop CS2 crack, read tutorials, download fonts/brushes/stocks like crazy. Do those and you can compete with some of the most respected graphics artists around, I'm sorry to say.
Style is my entire life of graphics. I make every sig to have a specific style, a certain feel to it. That feel is not grunge. I see enough grunge, I want to see something else. Something so totally removed from grunge and hopefully everything else out there that it deserves it's own category. Take something ubiquitous, cut it in half. Rectangular background with a 1px border? Hell no. Make an amorphous blob. If it's normal to have your name off to the side in approximately size 20-40 font, then screw normality, make your name 117 pixels high and dominating the entire sig. Where one person bevels text, you should make it glow. Where one person would give a shape a solid color, you should give it texture and feel. Place the elements to not just coexist and not interfere, but place them so that they cooperate and combine and complement each other, drawing attention to one another. Make every letter, every stock, every pixel something worth taking a second look at. Make every element come together to form a feel.
In the end it doesn't matter if you can make something awesome in less than 4 minutes.
"Life is short. Art is long."
I've always thought that following the trends that everyone else follows was a dumb idea. But why is that, and why does it matter?
Everybody knows that people are stupid. And everybody knows that stupid people do stupid things. The irony of peer pressure is that it's stupid people trying to convince you to do what are usually stupid things, usually for stupid reasons.
The mind is a conceptual computer, not a numerical one. At it's most base level, yes, it does work based on math and physics, but at a higher level it is amorphous and not suited for mathematical computation. It's much easier for someone to understand the concept of pouring one glass of water into another than it is for them to add the exact volumes of the two glasses together. Because of the brain's abstract, conceptual, almost random nature people are capable of creative thought. Computers are not capable of creative thought. There is no way to equate the two, humans create, computers are tools that complement humans' skills and amplify them. The closest a computer can come to art is generating a random number.
The greatest ability is creativity. Creativity is a change to the norm. All changes to life have been made by creativity. The good and the bad. Often imitating others' creativity in the process. After all, the brain only knows what it is taught and can logically conjecture from it's teachings, so all creativity should be based on that which exists, even if it exists only in the mind of the artist.
Without creativity, where would humanity be? Probably extinct, an victim of natural selection and its lack of physical ability. And look where humanity has come. The single most prominent, most dominant creature on the earth is the Human. Effects of this creature can be witnessed from orbit, from the surface, even some places underwater. Humans have spread to fill each and every last niche this planet has to offer.
How did it come this far? Creativity. Invention. The bow and arrow. The plow. The boat, the car, the computer. All inventions based on creativity, so completely new and previously unforseen, and the inventions that have most revolutionized the world. They did not happen by accident, but by genius, and they have brought humanity up from a pack of hunters to become the species with such uncontestible influence over it's surroundings that it alone decides the species that live and die. It is the only creature where it takes just one to bring about an end to the world.
And yet, today, there's a notable lack of creativity. People follow blindly in the footsteps of failures before them. Some take that which belongs to others and claims it for their own. Humanity in this state is an uncomprehensibly bad thing. It is losing its grip on what made it so strong. When traction on the foundation of power is lost, it causes panic. Panic is frenzy which causes mistakes. Mistakes made by the only creature able to end the world is a very bad thing.
posted by Keti 'Kotaree at 9:42 PM
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