Academic Aesthetic

In today’s podcast I try out Google SketchUp, a cool program available for Windows and, yes, now for Macs as well.

A while back another DEN member (whose name I forget – sorry!) blogged about Google SketchUp, a free program that makes it very easy to design in 3D and export your creations into different formats including Google Earth. My initial response was that it looked like a cool program, but I was disappointed that they didn’t have a version that would run on a Mac.

(Remember, I’m one of those crazy people who don’t do Windows.)

Well, they finally developed their Mac version, so I decided to see what the fuss was about.

Google SketchUp required me to log in as an administrator in order to install it, which was annoying but not too much so. Still, that does mean that if you want to put this on the computers in your classroom you’ll either need administrative privileges or a method of asking your Technology Coordinator nicely.

With that unpleasantness aside, I opened the program and was greeted with a window offering to teach me all the basics using three self-paced tutorials. I won’t go through all the steps here, but let’s just say it was very intuitive and user-friendly.

The only problem I really encountered once I got SketchUp running was the absence of hot keys. Many programs have key combinations that act as shortcuts for certain repetitive steps. The different tools in Photoshop, for example, each have a key assigned to them so that you can switch between, oh, say, the pencil tool and the eraser tool without having to move the mouse around too much.

When you get used to hot keys, you really get used to hot keys. However if you’re the type that always goes to the top of the screen to pull down a menu, you won’t even notice that problem and my whole rant’s been for nothing.

There is something I noticed that I think is infinitely cool, though: SketchUp uses three point perspective. For those of you who haven’t had an art class in a while, artists figured out that if you take parallel lines (like the sides of a road) and stretch them off into the distance they appear to get closer together the further back they went. This illusion, when copied in their paintings, helped create a feeling of depth that hadn’t existed before. Simple examples would have all of their parallel lines meant to move back in space meeting at a single point, or vanishing point. The lines didn’t have to go all the way to those points, mind you – they just needed to be angled so that if they were longer they’d touch the vanishing point.

More complex artworks can include two vanishing points, and the photorealistic ones include three points. Three vanishing points, three dimensions, that’s not a coincidence, by the way.

Now where was I? Oh, yes. SketchUp uses three vanishing points, so if you draw a large box you’ll notice that none of the lines are in fact parallel – but it’ll still look realistic. I think that makes SketchUp a great program for art lessons on perspective. It takes an abstract concept like three dimensions on a two dimensional surface and does the difficult stuff for the student, so they can get a better idea of what drawing with a vanishing point should look like.

I don’t think SketchUp should replace handing the students paper, pencils, and rulers for a perspective unit, but I do think it would be a nice way to warm them up before they start the hard work.

In today’s podcast I show just how easy it is to create a new blog.

Yesterday I decided to make a new website.

Don’t fret, I’m not getting rid of AcademicAesthetic.com any time soon, but I enjoy making Artist Trading Cards so much that I decided to make a site for sharing my favorite ones.

Of course I could just post them on my Flickr account, but their pesky 200 picture limit, along with their “Focus on photos, not anything else!” policy left me thinking I should pick another resource.

So once again I turned to Blogger.com. One of the neat things about Blogger is that you can have more than one blog on the same account, so after I logged in I just clicked on the little button that said “Create A Blog.”

Then came the hardest part – figuring out a name for the new blog. I felt “Artist Trading Cards” was self explanatory enough, but wouldn’t you know it, someone had already registered a blogger blog as artisttradingcards.blogspot.com. After playing around with a few other names I registered artistcards.blogspot.com and I was ready to go!

Sorta.

You see, there’s nothing wrong with the default templates for Blogger – I recommend them, in fact, but I wanted something a little different. I also didn’t want to spend as much time customizing this new blog as I did my Academic Aesthetic one. For the solution, I turned to Google.

A quick search using the words “Blogger templates” found a site conveniently titled Blogger templates. They didn’t have millions of looks to choose from, but they had one I liked and that was enough. I copied the code and went to my new blog’s settings page. A quick click on the “Template” tab later I was pasting the new code in, and after clicking on the big button that said “Republish,” my blog had a brand new look.

Now granted, I did a little more after that: I tweaked the RSS feed using Feedburner, added a web counter to see how many visitors I get, and slapped a Creative Commons license on the whole thing. I also changed the default links listed in the sidebar to ones in which I was more interested, but that’s content for another podcast.

The moral of this story is that if you’re holding back on blogging because you think it’s too hard, don’t. I may do a little more modifications to my site than the average person, but the majority of my work yesterday was nothing more than copying and pasting. If you can use Microsoft Word, you have more than enough skill to fool around with Blogger.

Oh, and if you’re interested in that new blog I made, I intend to post a new Artist Trading Card every weekday. I’ve already got a month’s worth ready for posting, so I don’t need to worry about running out of content any time soon.