UbieArt Blog

When designing a website layout your first priority is the positioning of different elements on the page. Ensuring your audience can access all areas of your website is very important. However, second to this, I beleive is the color scheme. Colors are a powerful tool. They can represent conotations, emotions and feelings giving the visitor an imediate first impression of your website. As we all know, first impressions are often everything. Personaly, I am more likely to stay and see what a nice looking site has to offer. Saying this, some not-so-well designed sites often have fantasic content. The only reason they don’t look great is because they will have been developed before the Web 2.0 era.

You may think choosing colors for your site is easy and an obvious decision. However, it is not! Different colors go well with other colors and some just look horrific. For your main text color you will want either white or black 99% of the time. Links, headings and subheadings should be a color that fits or contrasts with the most prominent color.

I think today’s art post shows good use of color well. A simple layout which looks very sleek and mature due to color use. Red and gray have always been a favorite of mine.

I have decided to change the path the Ubie is taking. The idea of it being a ‘public’ art blog hasn’t really worked. In the future Ubie will be a personal art blog just for me. The reason being that when it was public, it didn’t feel right to post my own work to often, which needed to be done in order to give the site content. Hopefully this way I can give the site lots of good content on a regular basis without feeling intrusive.

Also, expect a new layout soon, as this one is hurting my bandwidth a little with all the images!

Its been a while since I have posted anything here. I have been very busy with freelance design and other development opportunities. However, after glancing over the statistics for this site, I thourght It would be best to get it going again. Last month boasted 800 unique visitors and this month promises to be more. If thats not incentive enough to submit your work and be exposed to nearly 1000 people I don’t know what is.

I have a few pieces of ‘more practical’ design work I will be publishing over the next few days. These include web designs, forum layouts and logo’s.

Heres the first one. A green forum layout!

Click for full size image.

This layout was designed in photoshop, it took around 2-3 hours. Techniques mainly include use of gradients. Don’t really know what else to say so I’ll end with a tip for designers.

Tip: When designing layouts for websites or forums, remember to turn Anti Aliasing off on text. This will give a truer representation of the final coded outcome as anti aliasing isn’t possible as live web text.

Not long ago was my school graphics exhibition. I was lucky enough to get a very good spot to display my work. In total i have 5 boards, 2 are A1, 1 is A0, 1 is A3 and the last is a custom narrow shape. The boards are based around the projects i have completed as part of my graphics GCSE course over the past two years.

The idea of the exhibition is that everyone in the year who does an art and design subject puts their work up for display. Their are two primary purposes for this. One, is to ‘impress’ the examiner by presenting your work in a smart way. The second is for the exhibition evening this Thursday where students and parents are welcomed to come and see all the work produced.

Here are some photographs of my work took on the evening.

More photographs of other peoples work to follow.

I thourght some of you budding artists and photographers might like too see this if you haven’t already, I will try to explain it in my own words too but the picture alone is insane…

Ok, this sort of looks like a coincidence right? Lightning storm runs into a volcanic eruption? Wrong. This is a volcanic lightning storm. It works on the same principles as a normal lightning storm being that tiny pieces of ice in the atmosphere collide with each other creating static electricity which builds up and is eventually disbursed as a bolt of lightning. In this case its rocks and dust, not ice that are creating the static. This is a very rare phenomenon and a photograph as good as this is even rarer.

(Click for full size image).

This image was created by railgunlwt (Railgunlwt.deviantart.com). Time taken 2 hours.

This is one of my many speed paintings in photoshop with my Wacom A4 tablet. There are a few areas i need to work on, including reflections and proportion. Notice the size of the trees in comparison to that of the mountains, this may not seem that bad, however mountains that small wouldn’t have snow on top. Realism aside the picture has nice color tones and the foreground-background is perfect.

Ubie.net has been officially running as an art blog for 3 days now. That may not seem like a lot, but we have achieved a great amount. Firstly i would like to inform you that in this small amount of time we have already been indexed in Google! Personally, this is the shortest amount of time for any of my websites to become indexed, one site Wiioodle.com has been going for almost a month and still has not been indexed!

Our second success was a huge 78 unique visits in the first 24 hours of being live on the web, over the past few days this has steadied out to around 30-40 per day, thank you!

All this and we haven’t even finished the site (don’t tell anyone!). Internet explorer users may notice a glitch with the navigation, we are working on this problem and hope to have it fixed very soon. Please get in touch with us and let us know what you think of the new layout - thanks to Smarter Templates for the original theme we edited.

Now we are up and running we need your work! Please submit any artwork you wish to be featured on the site, provided it covers all the rules we will guarantee to publish your art!

Thanks for being apart of our launch!
Ubie.net team.

(Click for full size image)

These images were created by James Clarke (JrCDesigns.co.uk). Total time taken 2-3 hours.

I made these two in photoshop and illustrator. I started in illustrator using the pen tool to create the ‘VENDETTA’ text (second picture) from scratch. I also used illustrator to create the dragon like figure at the top of the first picture. After using illustrator i was pleased with the result but the clean cut, crisp images didn’t suit the image of the band so i took them into photoshop. I built up a background using photographs of fire smudged and layered together. I used the eraser tool with a 1px brush to create the scratched effect in the first picture. In the second i just smudged the text outwards. “Time For” in the second image was not made in illustrator but a font in photoshop.

The pattern around ‘Vendetta’ was also made in illustrator. As you can see, the second image was used as a backdrop for the first to create a familiar style throughout. The grungy style works well for the image the of the band of which is no longer together.

(Click for full sized image)

This image was created by James Clarke (JrCdesigns.co.uk). Time taken 1-2 hours.

I created this purely in photoshop using original stock photography and textures. The background is scanned in from an old book i found, i really like the text at the top of this. The main building was a photograph of a huge modern skyscraper in Vancouver, Canada. To put it simply, i distorted it to the left, and removed one side. I then put a threshold over the picture and cut out the background leaving just the building on the canvas. Then i scanned in another section of writing, this time from the novel “Lord of the Flies” - the book used is of no significance to the art, i just liked the way the text looked up the side of the building. What took the most time with this piece was the colors, it took a long time to get these vibrant, powerful colors that I’m happy with.

This image was created by Wipeout (Wipeout55.deviantart.com). Time taken 1 hour.

This signature was created in photoshop using a range of brushes to create the brilliantly textured background. The brush layers have been set to blending modes to allow the under light source to shine through. Unlike most signatures, which are a a mess of unrecognizable brushes, what i particularly like about this are the ‘X’ shapes that are clearly visible in the background. The lighting is perfect and creates a fantastic burning atmosphere which relates perfectly to the war theme of the signature.