I published four collages today, I really enjoyed the time I spent making them.

– Goggies & Froggies
– The Loss of Perseverance
– Close Encounters of the Closest Kind
– Adherence to Certain Principles

All licensed under the CC-BY-SA-NC 3.0/US, credits can be found on my FlickR page and their EXIF info. The most complex of the four:

Title: “The Loss of Perseverance”

A little girl discovers a few trapped planets and decides to help them by making enough space for them to escape. Finally, she says goodbye to them by watching them fly free, joining the galaxy.

Part 1: “The Discovery”
Part 2: “The Escape”
Part 3: “The Goodbye”

Title: “Bestowing Mercy” (larger version here)
License: Creative Commons BY-SA-NC 3.0/US. Click for 36″x18″ version. Credits in the EXIF metadata.

And a bigger view of the third (and arguably best) part:

Title: “The Goodbye”
License: Creative Commons BY-SA-NC 3.0/US. Click for 12″x18″ version. Credits in the EXIF metadata.

Here’s another one I did a few days ago, called “The Jump“.

I will upload the high-res versions of all of these when Paypal clears my upgrade to FlickR Pro (I’m running out of bandwidth on this blog).

I thought long and hard, so I’m now selling some of my Creative Commons BY and BY-SA collages at Society6.com. I’m not looking into making any money out of these collages, so the prices are as low as possible. I’m just trying to make it convenient for those who don’t own big printers to get access to the pieces they like (if they do).

My original (naive) idea was to make the high-res versions of the collages available to all, so people can then go and print them as posters at minimum expense. But not only people don’t own big printers, but apparently it’s very difficult to find a print shop these days that does photo-quality prints at low prices, or at big sizes. I mean, I found some print shops that ask for $80 to print at the 24″x36″ poster size. Consider that it doesn’t cost the print shop more than $10-$12 to do this job. So buying online at Society6.com is a bargain comparatively, and a huge convenience (free shipping too). The other advantage of Society6 is that they also do t-shirts, hoodies, pullovers, iPhone, iPod, iPad, and laptop skins.

Alternatively, a 24″ HP printer costs $1100, but that’s overkill for most people.

Of course, the high-res versions of these collages, and Creative Commons licenses that I use will remain. Just because I started selling my artwork for buyer convenience reasons, it doesn’t mean that my artwork is not free for all (including for read-write remixing by other artists, not just for read-only printing). I don’t believe in art as a job, neither I expect to sell anything, to be honest. I never charged a single band that I made a music video for here in the Bay Area either. I do charge, and I have charged, for (what I consider) non-art though.

I’ve searched online and I found none. So I made my own graphical guides, and I’m now sharing them to help those who also work with digital visual art. These guides can help with the composition of images, guiding the artist where to place objects in the work (although, rules are made to be broken, so don’t treat these guides as the absolute).

How it came out when I didn’t use (left), and when I did use (right), visual guides

The resolutions of the transparent PNG guides below are for 12″x12″ and 12″x18″ posters (square and long), but if you’re working with the other standard poster sizes (18″x27″, 24″x36″, or their square equivalent) simply resize these inside your document as a new layer, the guides will stretch out and fit perfectly — as long as you’re using the right poster resolutions (included below).

Square poster, click for the larger version

Long poster, click for the larger version

The resolutions for standard poster sizes, set at 180 dpi, RGB gamut, sRGB colorspace:
24″x36″ = 4320×6480
24″x24″ = 4320×4320
18″x27″ = 3240×4860
18″x18″ = 3240×3240
12″x18″ = 2160×3240
12″x12″ = 2160×2160

My tutorial on digital collages is here.

There are two versions of this work.

Update: And the “uncensored” version… 😉

Title: “Naked woman in bed, uncensored”
License: Creative Commons BY 3.0/US. Click for 12″x18″ printable version. Credits in the EXIF metadata.