The Artistic Burn Pile – is it a chain around your neck or a archive of ideas that just never fully developed?

If you are a 3d artist, 2d artist or photographer having a “burn pile” is imperative. A Burn Pile is where the bad, ugly, and half born belong. You don’t want a project to become a chain holding your creativity down ever time you see it. But should you cast that idea down the river Sphinx? Digital storage has made the decision to burn pile some so much easier. You can now create a digital image (by taking a digital photography of a dimensional item or just saving your bad images if you are a photographer). Storage is very cheap now and if some time you want to revisit something that has been destroyed physically or deleted from your active files if you are a photographer, all you have to do is look at your digital backup.This takes discipline and a management program like LightRoom – but in the end it will relieve the stress of dimensional artist who must physically destroy something because of the room an unwanted/unfinished project takes up or deleting a photograph off the disk drive to make space. Backup drives are inexpensive now and very large in capacity. Make a visual backup of your burn pile so you are ready for the moment when resurrection is needed.

Imagineering

Walt Disney created the concept of Imagineering and I think it is a powerful process for the artist to expand their creative process. We’ve all hit the creative wall and many have heard the phrase “thinking outside the box”. Well that’s great but how do you do it. You can check out the Wikipedia on  Imagineering, but I’ll show you what it means to me as a artistic photographer. I do lots of standard landscapes, cityscapes, and wildlife imaging but when I think I am getting stale I turn to digital art to help me imaggineer better still images. I look at still images I have taken and try to develop an alternative reality for that image. I use a combination of Photoshop/LR and On1 software to create this  Imagineering alternative vision. Here are a few results of what I have done to refresh my standard vision.

The African Queen

A standard image that did not have the visual impact I thought it would turned into the African Queen through Imagineering. Copyright 2012, all rights reserved on all images

Down The Rabbit Hole

A simple Jack Rabbit image was nothing to see, but using Imagineering I saw Alice’s place

So the next time that brick wall stops your vision try Imagineering to help you scale it…..

Negative Space – Giving definition to your images

Even in Nature Art white space is important to provide subject definition.

For those in commercial art, trying to get the client to accept white space is often a difficult process. Yet, when properly used white space can help deliver the essence of a subject. When you create 2 dimensional art think about how isolation can define the character of your subject as well as reduce visual noise.