Skin of Stars

Hey, just wanted to highlight an article in Kent Online that my friend Jay linked me to. Its about a pair of local artists who are trying to bring a little love to Margate this Valentines Day. The main reason I’m bringing this up is that I know the work of one of them, Selina Tolfree, and I very much like what she does. Because of that I’m urging you all to hunt out her work where you can (I’ll try to update with links at some point) and have a look for yourselves.

Not only has Arts and Elbows not posted -in several months, but I’ve also noted that the IOTA website has been taken over by cybersquaters, with the last record I can find (thanks to the waybackmachine) is in April. Whats going on?

I’m in the process of building an arty website for one of my modules. Truth be told, almost every other one of my modules includes building a website but this one is quite nice as I get to have some fun with it… infact the website ones are always more fun, certainly more fun than computer networks or social research theory. Anyway, I digress, the point here is the arty bits.

Now, I’m not so great at art, the best I can draw is a stick man and certainly not like Lowry did! I’m not even that fantastic at using art packages (my preference being the GIMP). Still, with design you always need to use a graphics package so I do my best to wing it. Luckily I have assistance in the form of resources from deviantArt, so I thought I’d share this little trick.

I always go for the GIMP brushes, but there are brushes for other package, like PhotoShop. Firstly you need to find them. You go to deviantArt.com, then click categories in the top left-ish, then pick resources from the droplist, then application resources then, in my case, GIMP brushes. You can then just browse through them finding ones you like and downloading them.

To add them to GIMP go to the GIMP’s programs folder (its a hidden folder in your home/user for linux so press ctrl+h to see it, you windows boys will have to look for yourself but I presume it’s in Program Files) open it, then open brushes, then just paste them in from the zips.

Hey presto, you’re an instant artist!

I seem to be involved in a bizarre case of identity theft. This is not the usual credit card scam though, oh no. I seem to have been dragged into the seedy underworld of Margaret Withers art. Yikes, I may have even been copyrighted! Oh the humanity!