digital-tools

You just spent forty hours meticulously mixing the perfect shades of glowing neon pink and deep, dark ocean blue on an expensive canvas. The painting looks breathtaking in your studio. You take out your smartphone, snap a quick photo to post on Instagram, and look at the screen in horror.

The bright pink looks like dull, sick peach. The deep blue looks black. One side of the painting is glaring with white light, and the other side is hidden in a dark, yellow, murky shadow. The canvas looks physically warped and crooked.

Capturing the true, vivid color of physical art is incredibly difficult because cameras see light entirely differently than human eyes. If you want your digital portfolio to accurately reflect your vibrant, physical work, you must control the environment. Here is the professional guide to photographing your art.

There is nothing quite as satisfying as dragging a brush pen across high-quality paper and creating the absolute perfect, flowing script word. Your flourishes were flawless. Your pressure control was masterful.

And then, tragedy strikes. To celebrate your perfect lettering, you decide to watercolor the background, but your brush accidentally slips, you spill water on the ink, and the masterpiece is ruined forever.

If you create beautiful hand lettering, you must learn to separate the "drawing" phase from the "coloring" phase. Professional illustrators do not color their original physical drawings; they digitize the black line art and color it on the computer. This ensures the original artwork is protected, and opens up an infinite world of digital color palettes. Here is the step-by-step guide to digitizing your lettering.

As a crafter, inspiration rarely strikes when you are sitting perfectly still in your studio staring at a color wheel. Inspiration usually strikes randomly: during a walk through a damp forest, while looking at a rusty peeling door in an alleyway, or while watching a spectacular summer sunset.

Nature and architecture provide the most complex, beautiful, and perfectly balanced color palettes on earth. The challenge is translating the chaotic beauty of a real-world scene into five useable colors of yarn, paint, or paper.

Fortunately, pulling a color palette directly from a photograph is easier than ever. Whether you want to use digital software or train your own eyes, here is the complete guide to extracting perfect color schemes from the world around you.

Understanding the theory behind the color wheel is incredibly important for any artist or crafter. Knowing why complementary colors work, or how to mix the perfect shade of brown, is the foundation of good design.

However, sometimes you just do not have the time or the mental energy to sit down and mathematically calculate a split-complementary color scheme. Sometimes, you just want a computer to hand you five beautiful, perfectly balanced hex codes so you can start painting.

We live in the golden age of digital design assistance. There are dozens of incredibly powerful, mostly free websites designed to do the heavy lifting of color curation for you. Whether you are building a website, painting a mural, or planning a quilt, here are the top 5 digital tools you need to bookmark immediately.

Every crafter knows the danger of Pinterest. You log on to find a simple pattern for a scarf, and three hours later, you have pinned 400 wildly different images ranging from gothic architecture to pastel cupcake recipes.

Pinterest is an incredible, bottomless well of inspiration, but if you do not use it strategically, it will completely paralyze your creative process. When starting a new project (like designing a quilt, planning a wedding, or renovating a craft room), you must transition from "mindless pinning" to "curating a mood board."

A mood board is a highly focused collection of images that establishes the exact aesthetic, texture, and—most importantly—the color palette of your project. Here is the exact, step-by-step process for using Pinterest as a professional design tool.