[OpenArtBox]

I'm an arts and Technology student at The University of Texas at Dallas, and I'm writing a blog about open source art/design software for one of my classes. Three of my blog posts have to be interviews, and I'm having trouble actually finding people to interview. One of my biggest problems is that people say they'll let me interview them, but then they don't respond to any further messages I send them ;;

I'm starting to run out of time, so this is my plan. I figure if I put out a general interview on a few different forums related to open source art/design software and ask for anyone and everyone to answer my questions as a response to my post, hopefully, I'll get more responses than I actually need faster than I could have found one more person to interview otherwise ;; After all, people love to talk about themselves on forums, right?

You don't have to give me any personal information, and really, it's intended to be just a brief interview. You don't have to go into too much detail, although I would be more likely to use your responses if they consist of more than just a few words or one sentence. A short paragraph in response to each question would suffice.

The URL of my blog is OpenArtBox.blogspot.com, btw, if you'd like to check it out.

So if you'd like to help me out, all you have to do is answer the following questions in reply to this post:

1. If you could, please give me a little background information about yourself. This doesn't have to be too personal. Something like, "I'm a (student/professional artist/programmer/etc.) and I live (in such and such city, state, country, general area of the world, etc.). I like open source stuff, etc."

2. What operating system do you use? If you use Linux, which distribution? In what ways do you feel that your operating system/Linux distribution of choice meets your needs as an artist/designer especially well?

3. Which open source art/design software packages do you
use? What, in particular, do you do with them? Do you use open source products in a professional capacity, for school, or just for your own enjoyment?

4. What do you like about the open source software that you use? Which features do you find particularly useful?

5. What proprietary (non-open source) software packages have you used for art/design, and how do they compare to the open source packages you have used?

*Make sure to let me know what you want me to call you in my blog, if you want me to call you anything other than your screen name from this forum.

Please note that by replying to this post, you are giving me permission to use your responses in my blog, and also to edit your responses if necessary (for length, spelling, grammar, etc).

Thank you very much, in advance. If I use your interview in my blog, I'll let you know!

[Griatch]

Sure, always good to support OSS in small ways.

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1. If you could, please give me a little background information about yourself. This doesn't have to be too personal. Something like, "I'm a (student/professional artist/programmer/etc.) and I live (in such and such city, state, country, general area of the world, etc.). I like open source stuff, etc."

I, Griatch, am Swedish. Professionally I am a scientist, an astrophysicist working on planet formation computer simulations. Doing art is just one of my many hobbies. As a programmer, one of my side projects is being the lead maintainer for the open-source Evennia game server package. I'm also creating music on my keyboard and writing short stories. Art-wise I do digital painting, almost exclusively things out of my own imagination. Examples can be found in my DA gallery here and on YouTube. I'm also dabbling in making comics. Being active in the open-source art community on GimpTalk.com (where I am an administrator) and other similar sites for many years now, I have also created many tutorials on using open-source software.

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2. What operating system do you use? If you use Linux, which distribution? In what ways do you feel that your operating system/Linux distribution of choice meets your needs as an artist/designer especially well?

I am a Linux user, both at work and for private use. At work I use Debian stable and at home I use a distribution called aptosid, which is basically Debian sid (unstable), but with a thin layer of review in front of it to make it stable to use while still being able to use the bleeding-edge software.
Linux has excellent support for Wacom graphics tablets, and the range of programs available is more than adequate for most levels of artistic users, including professionals (of which I know quite a few that do perfectly well using free software).

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3. Which open source art/design software packages do you
use? What, in particular, do you do with them? Do you use open source products in a professional capacity, for school, or just for your own enjoyment?

The nature of astronomy is that essentially all software is custom-built for very specialized equipment by the scientists themselves, and this meant open-source was a defacto standard among astronomers long before anyone had actually coined the term. There is a long tradition of open-source within many scientific fields I think. It simply helps to speed development and favours the scientific review if others can use your codes, check what you did in detail and verify your results.

For hobby/art purposes, here's a selection:

My main painting tool is MyPaint, it's a specialized procedural brush generator which is very powerful for creating brush strokes. It is intentionally limited in scope and meant to be used in conjunction with GIMP.

GIMP is what I use for post-processing and detailing of an image. It has all the features you need to modify and tweak colours, but also some very useful functions for painting. Before finding MyPaint, I did all my painting, from beginning to end, in GIMP without any trouble. MyPaint has better brushes, but GIMP has all the rest you need to create a finalized image.

Inkscape is a vector drawing program which is very good. I use it primarily for lettering comics and doing instructive diagrams and the like.

I keep wanting to really get into Blender, the 3D modelling software, but at this point I've done little more than fiddled with it. I also use Xfig (another vector program) and a bunch of others. Krita is another painter program which is coming strongly (focusing on natural media simulation), but which I've not yet really gotten into.

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4. What do you like about the open source software that you use? Which features do you find particularly useful?

Apart from the features outlined above, I enjoy the fact that I can have a potential influence on their development. To take MyPaint as an example: There was a feature I liked to have - it was a simple tweak, so I simply added it to my copy of the code to use. Showing what I did to developers caused it to eventually go into the main MyPaint distribution. But even if the devs had decided against it, I could have kept using my private tweaked version working just the way I liked it. You cannot do things like this with a proprietary system.

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5. What proprietary (non-open source) software packages have you used for art/design, and how do they compare to the open source packages you have used?

Oh, I've tried a few. The only one I use semi-regularly is Google Sketchup, which runs fine under Wine emulation. It has probably the easiest-to-use UI of any 3D package I've seen. It's very useful to quickly testing out complex shapes from different angles. I have tried some demo versions of Photoshop and Painter and I'm sure they are great, but the lack of Linux support mean they aren't viable options for me even if I was willing to pay their hefty pricing schemes. Open-source software does all I need it to do.

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*Make sure to let me know what you want me to call you in my blog, if you want me to call you anything other than your screen name from this forum.

Should you decide to use this, you can refer to me simply as Griatch. A link to my DeviantArt gallery on www.griatch-art.deviantart.com would be nice too.
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Griatch

[OpenArtBox]

Thank you so much, Griatch, for your response! So far, you've been the only one to respond on any of the forums I've posted to, and your answers are just what I was looking for. I'll gladly link to your deviant art page, and I'll post a link to the interview here once it's up on my blog.

EDIT:

The interview is up on my blog now. It ran long, so I've broken it into two parts:

Part I

Part II

This post has been edited by OpenArtBox: 28 November 2011 - 07:06 AM

[Wolverine]

I never did see this If you still need more, I'd do the interview aswell.

[OpenArtBox]

Wolverine, on 30 November 2011 - 11:33 AM, said:

I never did see this If you still need more, I'd do the interview aswell.

Actually, as of the moment I do still need another interview, so I would appreciate it if you did. I've got one other interview going on over email, but again, I'm having trouble getting timely responses. If I don't manage to get an interview completed by Friday night, I'm seriously thinking of writing a fictional interview with Tux the Linux penguin - not sure my instructor would find that funny, but if I don't have enough blog posts, I'll automatically fail the class ;;

Everything does need to be up on my blog by Friday night, though, so I'd need it by Friday afternoon at the latest in order to use it for my assignment - however, I am thinking of continuing with the blog (and trying to improve it) after the semester is over, so even if I didn't end up being able to use your interview now, I could put it up later on.

[Demented]

1) I'm a professional student programmer. I live in a general state of the world.

Sorry, bad joke. Let me start over.

1) I'm just a lowly artist wannbe working my way up to an art hobbist. No professional training or anything. So far I've been self-taught, though I'm looking into taking some classes to round out my pitiful knowledge. I live in the US, lower east coast. I love open source. If nothing else, the concept of thousands of people working to create free software to benefit the whole of humanity is an appealing thing.

2) I run Linux. I keep Windows 7 around for a few things like games and Netflix, but I spend most of my time in Linux Mint. I used Windows for a long time, and slowly started accumulating lots of FOSS like Firefox, GIMP, MyPaint, Audacity, etc.. One day I realized that most of the software I used was this weird thing called "open source". I looked into it and discovered that there was an entire open source operating system. I dabbed a bit with Debian on an old clunker and was hooked. It would be a year or so before I tried out Linux on my main computer (a Dell Latitude C600), but the moment I got to Debian's desktop, I knew it was something I just wanted to have. It was a GNOME 2 desktop, if you care.

Like I said, my programs were all already open source, so I was happy to find that everything I was used to was already on Linux. All of my needs were met before I even knew about it. I have a new machine now, and have only been using Linux full-time for a couple of years. It's a Gateway ZX4800 and came with Windows 7. The reason I mention this is that Windows 7 refused to let me use my tablet's drivers without forcing its own crappy driver instead. So I got a slow response time, buggy cursor issues, and random breakage where the tablet wouldn't work at all. I had to go around and start disabling Windows services in order to get my tablet working. But by doing that, I couldn't use my touchscreen. I was very pissed that I was being forced to choose what hardware I could use due to what I considered to be a greedy and unnaturally enforced monoculture. It was either use Window's broken software, or trash one of my devices. I think that's part of what drove me to take the plunge into Linux after years of dabbling. So far, it's been a bit bumpy, but a much...I don't know..."cleaner" experience, I guess.

3) I use (hold on, let me check...) MyPaint, GIMP, Inkscape, recordMyDesktop, OpenShot, Audacity, and MakeHuman; in that order, from most frequently used to least. Plus there are a few other things not directly used for art, but which help, like Firefox, or the Wacom drivers. I don't use them professionally, although I've thought about if I ever could (Wishful thinking, I know). For example, I see great artists like David Revoy, Ramon Miranda, and our very own Griatch the Scandinavian Tyrant, who all make use of libre software to create amazing works of art. Open source has come a long way in the short time I've known it. I see no reason why it shouldn't be professional grade, besides a shortage of free time or developers. But with the explosion of open source recently, both are increasing exponentially. Shouldn't be long now.

4) It's free, Free, and freedom. I can download as much as my bandwidth will allow, rip out the guts, throw my own version together and turn around and hand out copies. That's the whole point, and the greatest strength of FOSS. It cannot be tamed, confined, restricted, or killed off. It's the best kind of virus. A meme of grand ideals, if you like. I'll put up with the occasional silly bug for that kind of freedom. Plus, being able to read and write to almost any format imaginable has it's perks. My iPod cries if I try to put anything other than MP3s on it. Just sayin'.

5) I've tried out Photoshop. It's nice, but I'm not crazy about it. It seems too heavy and bloated for my needs. In MyPaint, I can spin my canvas around like a top and not lose a bit of speed. I tried that in Photoshop, but had to enable some video card options first. Then it was just too sluggish to use and lagged when I tried to rotate the canvas. I'm not saying Photoshop is crappy, but if it were open source, that problem would have had five developers giving six resolutions each within a week. FOSS is flexible, man. It's great. But this isn't "hate on commercial software" day. The official Wacom driver package is much nicer than the current open source one. The latter is good, but still a bit rough and unsure of itself. Plus, it doesn't have per-application support or built-in OLED functions yet. Go with what works. For me, that's mostly open source.


You can just call me "Demented" or "D" if you like. Sure, feel free to use my answers however you like.

This post has been edited by Demented: 30 November 2011 - 09:41 PM

[Griatch]

@OpenArtBox

Looks fine. Only thing is that you seem to have switched some sentences around the second part of my interview which looks a bit strange.

@Demented

Scandinavian Tyrant eh?! Nice replies though, a fine depiction of the joys of switching to open-source software.
.
Griatch

[14Stones]

do you need anymore? i would be glad.

[Demented]

Griatch, on 01 December 2011 - 09:07 PM, said:

Scandinavian Tyrant eh?! Nice replies though, a fine depiction of the joys of switching to open-source software.
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Griatch

Well, you do oppress us with your superior painting abilities. Seriously, I feel like I'm being bankrupted by your artistic taxes. Leave some for the rest of us!

[OpenArtBox]

Griatch, I fixed the sentences that I accidentally fixed. I'm not really sure what happened, there. Thanks for pointing that out.

Thanks, Demented, for the interview. I'll post a link once it's up.

If anyone else wants to do an interview, I could probably use one more.

EDIT: Demented's interview is up now, also in two parts: Part I, Part II

This post has been edited by OpenArtBox: 02 December 2011 - 08:08 AM

[Demented]

You omitted the word "crappy"?

Well, anyway, glad to help. I hope I didn't sound like some rambling airhead. You could see about getting interviews from actual artists like the guys I mentioned earlier. I'm sure they'll give you infinitely more interesting responses.

[14Stones]

OpenArtBox, on 22 November 2011 - 03:49 PM, said:

1. If you could, please give me a little background information about yourself. This doesn't have to be too personal. Something like, "I'm a (student/professional artist/programmer/etc.) and I live (in such and such city, state, country, general area of the world, etc.). I like open source stuff, etc."


Well, I am a Pakistani student hoping to go into arts. I live in Ontario,Canada. The open source things I use are Gimp, Free Screen Recorder.

2. What operating system do you use? If you use Linux, which distribution? In what ways do you feel that your operating system/Linux distribution of choice meets your needs as an artist/designer especially well?

I use Windows XP. I dont exactly thiink Windows is anything really that speacial, but it gets the job done.

3. Which open source art/design software packages do you
use? What, in particular, do you do with them? Do you use open source products in a professional capacity, for school, or just for your own enjoyment?


I use (as stated in 1) Gimp, Free Screen Recorder. I mostly use Gimp for image editing (witch I have just started btw) and Graphic design. I also use them for my own enjoyment, and a bit of practice as to when I start PhotoShop in grade 6 or 7.

4. What do you like about the open source software that you use? Which features do you find particularly useful?


I like how Gimp is pretty easy to understand, it has lots of simple, effective tools and things.


5. What proprietary (non-open source) software packages have you used for art/design, and how do they compare to the open source packages you have used?


I use Macromedia Flash MX Trial, witch in no way compares to Gimp as it is an animation program.


*Make sure to let me know what you want me to call you in my blog, if you want me to call you anything other than your screen name from this forum.

Please note that by replying to this post, you are giving me permission to use your responses in my blog, and also to edit your responses if necessary (for length, spelling, grammar, etc).

Thank you very much, in advance. If I use your interview in my blog, I'll let you know!

Just call me 14stones

Oh and sorry if it is not enough info.

This post has been edited by 14Stones: 03 December 2011 - 04:25 AM

[OpenArtBox]

Demented, on 02 December 2011 - 09:47 AM, said:

You omitted the word "crappy"?

Yeah, my instructor's kind of conservative...

Thanks again, everyone, for your replies. I posted this on BlenderArtists and InkScapeForums as well, but this is the only forum where anyone responded. GimpTalk is definitely gets my vote for "Most Helpful Forum"

This post has been edited by OpenArtBox: 03 December 2011 - 05:29 AM