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 webslinky: art online
This week, drawing the line. It didn’t take long for the web to become a place where the artistically inclined can flourish – where those blessed in the ways of putting stylus to touchpad can share their achievements and find support. Long-running amateur art community DeviantART was doing social networking for teenagers with “alternative” tastes long before MySpace’s Tom invented the concept of having friends, though no-one thought of it like that at the time. Like spiritual relation LiveJournal, though once sneered at in some quarters, it has matured into a supportive, creative institution that serves its passionate users very well. These days budding illustrators have many more platforms to choose from for sharing their works, from general social networking sites to newcomer communities like Amateur Illustrator, which is likely to have broader appeal than DeviantART. The web has also created new opportunities for more experienced up-and-coming artists like Jon Burgerman and Ian Stevenson who can now directly sell their work via their websites, while experimenting with interactivity and multimedia at relatively low cost. But you don’t even need to have achieved underground notoriety to find an audience for your art, so long as it’s good enough. For instance you could submit a design to the increasingly popular Chicago-based “etailers” Threadless - a cross between a shop, a gallery and a community. If the community votes for your design, it could be printed onto clothing which is sold on the site - and then modelled by people who bought it. Meanwhile Britain’s Moo and Click For Art both offer comparatively low-cost printing and distribution services for budding artists, with Moo specialising in the very small (think cards and stickers) and Click For Art offering traditional prints for your wall. As technologies and art converge online, so the possibilities for artistic expression increase in evermore unexpected ways. For instance, the dangerously compelling Flash “toy” Line Rider, which allows the user to draw on the screen and then watch as a little man on a bike drives along the lines, has bizarrely become a YouTube phenomenon: users hand-draw intricate “tracks” and record the little man racing along them in time to music. Some of the tracks are really quite incredible.
David Thair
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related info
 useful linkswww.amateurillustrator.com www.jonburgerman.com www.ilikedrawing.co.uk www.threadless.com www.moo.com www.clickforart.com www.official-linerider.com
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see also
 webslinky #152life after flashmobs  webslinky #151ghosts  webslinky #150healthy eating  webslinky #149dressing up  webslinky #148island life  webslinky #149 embarrassment webslinkyarchive books  books and comics archive Author interviews and reviews from 2002 to 2008. art  art archive Watch artist interviews and see images from British exhibitions. |
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