African and Oceanic Art From the Barbier-Mueller Museum, Geneva: A Legacy of Collecting

ART REVIEW | 'AFRICAN AND OCEANIC ART FROM THE BARBIER-MUELLER MUSEUM, GENEVA'

Putting ‘Primitive’ to Rest

By HOLLAND COTTER

Published: June 5, 2009

This show, an unabashed masterpiece display, is a gold mine of historical data and a connoisseur’s delight.

Cuba Obscura - Pinhole Photographs

These are a collection of Pinhole Photographs taken in Cuba during December 2006 and January 2007 by Brian Barry. They were printed as Photo Intaglio etchings between September 2007 and January 2008 in Cork Printmakers.
Pinhole photography (or Camera Obscura) is photography stripped back to its rudimentary beginnings. Pinhole Camera consists solely of a light-tight box with a tiny pinhole at the front which acts as a lens, thus dispensing with roughly 150 years of innovation and technological advancement. Read more...

New Acropolis Museum, Athens

Opening Ceremony Video Projections directed by Athina Rachel Tsangari
"Reflections" -- Large-scale site-specific video projections accompanying the opening of the New Acropolis Museum in Athens, Greece, on June 19-23, 2009.

Conceived and directed by Athina Rachel Tsangari. Animations by: antidot design studio, HAOS Film, Nomint motion design, and Oval Image. Music by Stavros Gasparatos.

Greece: Parthenon (Room 18)

Playwright, author and British Museum trustee, Bonnie Greer celebrates the enduring beauty and humanity of the Parthenon Sculptures
447 – 432 BC

The Parthenon was built as a temple dedicated to the goddess Athena. It was the centrepiece of an ambitious building programme on the Acropolis of Athens. The temple’s great size and lavish use of white marble was intended to show off the city’s power and wealth at the height of its empire.

MATCHING COLOR

by Steven Waxman
Entire books have been written on the subject of matching color. However, for now I’d like to throw out a few general rules to help start your discussion with your printer.
First of all, don’t choose color on your monitor. Color on a monitor is made up of red, green, and blue phosphors (light). Ink color, on the other hand, is made up of cyan, magenta, yellow, and black ink. The colors within the realm of light do not match the colors within the realm of ink.
That said, there are exceptions to every rule. If you can (rigidly) control the lighting conditions under which you observe color on the monitor, and if you have the money for color calibration software, you might be the exception, and you might come closer than most people to actually matching your monitor colors to the final printed colors. You would also need the time to calibrate your monitor on a regular basis. Color management from monitor to ink-jet proofer to offset press is possible with today’s technology. I just wouldn’t advise it unless you have a lot of extra time and money.
Instead, choose color using printed ink samples. Pantone color swatch books can be purchased online, and in graphic design and art supply stores. Sometimes they can be obtained for free from your printer. Some of these books show you the Pantone colors (PMS colors) next to their closest process color match. And they will probably even show you the percentages of cyan, magenta, yellow, and black that you will need to convey to your printer to reproduce these colors.
To be safe, provide a printed sample showing the exact color you want. If it’s a PMS swatch or process match swatch, or if it’s just a printed sample you’d like to match, the safest way to communicate color is with a physical example of the color.
This is particularly appropriate if you are trying to match the colors in a corporate logo. In this case it would be a catastrophe if the colors on the printed sheet didn’t match your company’s chosen logo colors exactly. Therefore, your printer can take the samples provided and read them with a color spectrophotometer. This device will analyze the hue (rather than the density, which is what a densitometer reads) and break the color down into its component percentages of C, M, Y, and K. Your offset printer can then advise you as to the proper percentages to enter into your image editing, drawing, or page composition art files. Once you have updated your art files with this color information, they will yield the color builds you want and expect, and there should not be any surprises with the final printed job.
In addition, your printer may advise you to add one or two PMS colors and avoid a color build altogether. If your printer is using a six-color press to print your four-color job, and if the fidelity of the logo colors is crucial, your several hundred dollar expenditure (more or less) to add PMS inks to the two unused units on the press might be a wise allocation of funds. After all, color does vary a bit throughout a 4-color press run—unless you substitute PMS match inks for the crucial process color builds.
One final thing to remember is that a color spectrophotometer is expensive and not every printer has one. So ask first. But in general, your printer is your best ally in matching color, and presenting him with a printed sample you like makes his job much, much easier.
*[Steven Waxman is a printing consultant. He teaches corporations how to save money buying printing, sells printing services, and teaches prepress techniques. Steven has been in the industry for twenty-five years, working as a writer, editor, photographer, graphic designer, art director, production manager, and print buyer.]

Student Ideas - Raniel Dantic

This drawing was made for a postcard assignment made to mimic a style. I chose to mimic Art Nouveau, well John Dyer Baizley for the most part. He is a current artist whom I have solely recognized for his album art and poster design. I am interested in the way he collages beautiful imagery with gore. The idea of combining opposites is an obsession of mine. My drawings are just doodles in which some occassions become an elaborate composition. There is never a process or an idea. Along with most, I have recognized drawing to be a meditation and without the right mindset I find it impossible to draw a line.
the 'postcard' assignment
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v145/afrocentric/Poster.jpg?t=1248193300

revised for flyer
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v145/afrocentric/BuffClout2.jpg?t=1248193300

Raniel Dantic
canigetopen.blogspot.com

New Logo Design: X-MEN

Check out the whole design process involved in Marvel's new X-MEN logo. Pretty straight forward. I was trying to anticipate what they'd WANT as opposed to what I thought would be the coolest. But I set out to come up with something that would run off the page. I like breaking the trim on covers for some reason. Blambot Comic Fonts & Lettering
NATE PIEKOS graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Design from Rhode Island College in 1998. Since founding Blambot, he has lettered comic books for Marvel Comics, DC Comics, Oni Press and Dark Horse Comics as well as dozens of independent publishers. In 2001 he became type designer to Harvey Award Winner, Mike "Madman" Allred, and has had his designs licensed by such companies as Microsoft, Six Flags Amusement Parks, New Yorker Magazine, The Gap, and many more. Nate's work has not only been utilized in comics, but on television and in feature films as well.