On the Art Beat

A brush with art, the penny-pinchers way.

One warm, sleepy Monday afternoon, way back in August 1911, Leonardo da Vinci's famous masterpiece, the Mona Lisa was snucked from the Louvre in Paris. The thief, an ordinary house painter called Vincenzo Peruggia, managed to keep it tucked away for almost a year before he caught and the painting recovered. The weirdest part in the whole tale? More people came to the Louvre in those 12 months to gaze at the blank space on the wall where Mona Lisa had once hung, than had visited the place in the last 12 years!

People have conjectured ever since that the real Mona Lisa was never actually found and the current one dangling in Louvre is a fake. Maybe. Maybe not. I am no one to comment or argue this. I am here for another cause. To lead you to a palette of some wonderful binary offerings that you can employ and deploy creatively on digital canvas...


Blender
They say, creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes; art is knowing which ones to keep. With this Open Source proggie for 3D modeling, animation, rendering, post-production, interactive creation and playback, you can create a lot of “mistakes”. And some wonderful new-age art! It can be used for various professional applications ranging from architectural/industrial work, web design, character animation, visual effects, product modeling and presentations etc. Rigging, rendering, shading, UV unwrapping, physics and particles, editing and compositing, real-time 3D/game creation… Blender does it all. Apart from Windows 98, ME, 2000, and XP, Blender has versions for Mac, Linux, FreeBSD, SGI and Sun Solaris.

This is pro stuff man. You gotta go to the website to grab all the details.
www.blender3d.org/cms/Home.2.0.html


Paint.NET
From the bountiful we cut to the bantam. Paint.NET is an Open Source image and photo manipulation that started out at Washington State University as an undergraduate senior design project mentored by Microsoft as it as intended to replace MS Paint. But it goes far, far beyond the infantile Paint you have seen. It has easy and intuitive interface, supports layers, special effects, unlimited undos, and a variety of useful tools (splines or Bezier curves, magic wand, clone stamp, text editor, zoom, recolor etc.). Special effects include blurring, sharpening, red-eye removal, distortion, and embossing, 3D rotate/zoom effects to add perspective and tilting. Image adjustments included help you tweak an image's brightness, contrast, hue, saturation, and levels. Paint.NET runs Windows 2000, XP, Vista, or Server 2003.
www.getpaint.net/index.html


Inkscape
Another Open Source app, Inkscape is vector graphics editor. In contrast to raster (bitmap) graphics editors such as Photoshop or Gimp, Inkscape is like Illustrator, Freehand, CorelDraw, or Xara X and uses the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format. Features include shapes, paths, text, markers, clones, alpha blending, transforms, gradients, patterns, and grouping. Inkscape also supports Creative Commons meta-data, node editing, layers, complex path operations, bitmap tracing, text-on-path, flowed text, direct XML editing, and more. It’s XML, SVG, and CSS standard compliant. A skinnier cousin of its full-featured commercial cousin bhaiyas, it is more than adequate for crafting web graphics, technical diagrams, icons, creative art, logos, or maps. Almost. Go fetch.
www.inkscape.org


PhotoPlus 6
If the complexities of Photoshop confound you, come hither ladies and gentlemen. As an image and photo editing software, PhotoPlus 6 is pretty powerful, yet pretty simple to use. Like Photoshop, it enables you to create, manipulate and enhance photographs, bitmap graphics and web animations. It features creative tools like paintbrush, airbrush, clone, smudge and erase. A digital darkroom to enhance, repair and tweak photos by adjusting brightness, color hue and saturation, contrast, sharpness etc. The layer effects let you add bevels or drop shadows for a 3D look on text or other image elements while a layer manager lets you alter and preview specific image layers. It also allows you to easily edit or create animated GIFs for the Internet or presentations.
www.freeserifsoftware.com/software/PagePlus/default.asp


PhotoFiltre
Another neat, easy to use (and free), image retouching program. It has over 100 filters that you can play around with as you go up the learning curve. The toolbar comprises the industry standard: Pipette, displacement cursor, fill bucket, aerosol, brush, drop of water (blur), cloning stamp, smudge and magic wand. Apart from the regular brushes (round and square in different sizes), PhotoFiltre also has some interesting variations in the form of oblique line, leaf, star, etc. A PhotoMasque module lets you create advanced contour and transparency effects on your images by using preset masks. And automatisation module allows you to apply basic functions/corrections (conversion, image size, framing) to a group of images. Why not start by touching up the Mona Lisa, Mr. Picasso?
www.photofiltre.com