How to Protect Your Images with Metadata

Protect Your Images with Metadata

There is little you can do to stop someone who is determined to steal your images. Watermarks are easily removed and website scripts are defeated with a simple screen grab. These attempts only mar your work and make your site difficult to navigate.

In this tutorial I’m not talking about protection from image thiefs, I’m talking about protection from lost opportunities. Times when your images are inevitably downloaded, blogged, cropped, reblogged, faved and saved, and end up orphaned on someone’s hard drive, ffffound, imgfave, tumblr, or email—especially when that person likes your work and would really love to hire you, if they could just figure out where the image came from.

This happens more often than you think; art directors are constantly grabbing images whenever and wherever they see them, but seldom have the time to organize them and make note of where they came from (they should really be using Evernote). Months or even years down the road they might find your image floating in a random folder, uselessly renamed li4tceEqMb1qe.jpg by Tumblr, your name & website address croppped by an ignorant blogger leaving TinEye with no results.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could tuck your name, website and keywords and copyright information into every image to avoid this situation? You can—using Metadata.

Metadata is data about data—like the Created and Modified dates you see attached to every file on your computer. It’s like a little text file appended to files only adding a few bytes to the total file size. You might already be familiar with EXIF metadata added to JPGs by digital cameras, scanners and phones. The metadata I’m talking about in this tutorial is IPTC, but all you need to know is that by the end you’ll be able to embed your name, website, email, phone number, address and copyright into every image—automagically.

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Richard Chasemore

Jango Fett

Traditionally painted cross-section of a space ship from Star Wars Episode II

There are many unique forms of technical illustration out there.  Some illustrators from time to time get to expand the realm of technical illustration by depicting not only what exists in our real world and what makes it work, but get the opportunity to reveal the inner workings of fictional vehicles and worlds.

Richard Chasemore has worked for various clients throughout the years producing detailed work and is well known for his works featured in DK publishing and Lucas Books’ Star Wars: Complete Cross Sections and Star Wars: Complete Locations.  I recently had the opportunity to ask him a few questions:

What is your background? What inspired/got you into the field of technical illustration?

I did a four year course in technical illustration at Bournemouth and Poole College of Art and Design.  I came across the course quite by accident when I jumped on a school bus that took me to the Art College and when I saw the technical illustration department I just said to myself that’s what I want to do.

How did you start working for DK publishing? What were some of the projects that you did for them?

I was working on the See Inside series of books for DK when Hans started work on the Star Wars Project and I was brought in to help out.

What led you to produce the Star Wars Complete Locations and Complete Cross Sections books as well as  later works for Indiana Jones?  What was it like working for Lucas?

The locations books were incredibly hard work, but great fun as was the Indiana Jones arts.  Everyone at Lucas Films were amazingly kind to us, letting Hans and I work in the art department alongside their amazing artists.  We did meet Mr. Lucas and he was a really nice guy.

What is your process like?

Starting with very simple pencil works, building up to a complicated finished pencil which is then inked and painted in gouache.

What was your favorite thing you’ve worked on or best experience you’ve had so far as a technical illustrator?

I am working on Incredible Cross Sections Clone Wars at the moment which is all done in 3D and is looking amazing.

Any advice to technical illustrators just starting out?

Just keep working, day and night!

Richard’s work can be found at RichardChasemore.co.uk

Step-by-Step Isometric Aircraft

Ninian Carter - Isometric Aircraft

Award-winning editorial and news graphics artist Ninian Carter shares his processes for producing a complex isometric illustration of a water-bomber aircraft in Adobe Illustrator. Ninian also generously makes his Illustrator file available for download at the bottom of the page so you can open it up and explore.

By no means is this a do-as-I-do tutorial, but it looks like he uses a scale-shear-rotate method similar to Cody Walker’s Advanced Isometric Tutorial.

How to Create an Isometric Grid in Adobe Illustrator

How to Create an Isometric Grid in Adobe Illustrator

This is a very quick and easy tutorial for creating an isometric grid in Adobe Illustrator, which you can then either work directly over in Illustrator or print out for freehand sketching.

If you want to skip the tutorial and get working in isometric right away, download these completed grids in PDF format, ready for printing or import into Illustrator or Corel:

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Animation Resources for Technical Illustrators

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Xhdy9zBEws

If your new year’s resolution was to learn how to bring your illustrations to life with motion and interactivity, you are in luck. Below I’ve gathered some resources, tutorials and inspiration to get you started on your journey.

Adobe Flash

For better or for worse, Flash has been around for 15 years. While rival technologies may be digging its grave, Flash remains the most intuitive animation tool for users of Adobe Illustrator — and 15 years worth of online tutorials and forum discussions make for an easy learning curve.

Both made by Adobe, Flash and Illustrator work pretty well together (although, not as well as you might expect). Like Illustrator, Flash is vector based and can import .AI vector artwork along with bitmaps and video files. Illustrator can export .SWFs for Flash, and later versions (AI CS3+) can even include symbols, animation clips and dynamic objects.

In addition to animation tools, Flash also has a programming language called ActionScript (AS) with which you can make your animations interactive. There are three versions of ActionScript (AS1, AS2, AS3) which are not cross-compatible, each more esoteric than the last. I find AS2 to be the right mix of natural-language programming and breadth of possibilities, and seems to have the most tutorials too.

Resources:

Create Flash Animations Entirely in Illustrator
Illustrate and Animate a Bouncing Ball
Kirupa – Flash & ActionScript Tutorials
AdobeTV – Learn Flash CS5 Professional

Adobe After Effects

AE is a beast of a program; it’s like the Photoshop of video. It’s used for 2D & 3D motion graphics, editing, compositing, post-production and special effects for video, TV and film. And like Photoshop it can be used to create entire projects from start to finish, but its real strength is in manipulating and compositing assets made by other means, such as Illustrator and 3D applications.

AE takes just about anything you can throw at it — AI, EPS, PSD, PNG, PDF, MP3, WAV, AVI, MOV, even camera movements from popular 3D software — and spits out a wide variety of video formats.

Although AE does allow you to control animations and effects with scripting, it only exports video meaning no interactivity with AE alone.

Resources:

Intro to After Effects
Build a Car Racing Scene from Photographs
Greyscale Gorilla – After Effects Tutorials
AE Tuts
AdobeTV – Learn After Effects CS5

Ai to Canvas

Ai to Canvas is a plug-in for Adobe Illustrator produced by developers at Microsoft. It enables Illustrator to export vector and bitmap artwork directly to a new HTML5 web element called a Canvas. Canvas-enabled browsers (latest versions of Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera) can then interpret and render that content for viewers.

The advantage over simply exporting images for the web is that artwork in a Canvas element remains vectored and can be animated and manipulated with JavaScript code. In fact, Ai to Canvas allows rudimentary animation simply by renaming your layers.

The fact that Canvas doesn’t rely on a browser plug-in (like Flash does) means that your animation & interactivity will run regardless of the viewer’s installed components. This means content presented in a Canvas element are viewable on Apple’s iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch, since they disallow browser plug-ins. I made this HTML5 demo to try it out.

Resources:

Ai to Canvas Plug-In for Illustrator
Ai to Canvas Samples & Documentation
Canvas Element Tutorials & Documentation

Use What You’ve Got

You don’t necessarily need a fancy program to create rich animated and interactive media. Photoshop is equipped with an animation palette suitable for creating flipbook type animations; Here’s a primer.

Failing that, try to be creative with the tools you have. Here are two web pages that feel animated, using only static assets:

Ben the Bodyguard
Lost Worlds Fairs: Atlantis

Have a tool or resource to recommend? Let me know in the comments and I’ll add it to our Resources page!

Tutorial – How to Draw Hands

I can’t remember how or when I came across this tutorial on drawing hands by illustrator Joumana Medlej, but it’s been an invaluable resource. It neatly summarizes everything I’ve ever learned from anatomy books and life drawing lessons on the construction and depiction of a palm & five digits. The style is clean, concise and technical, and the examples explore the hand’s full range of motion and various viewing angles.

Bookmark it. You’ll find that it’s handy.

Presentation Techniques by Dick Powell

Presentation Techniques by Dick Powell

Presentation Techniques by Dick Powell

The second of Marc Gellen‘s book recommendations is Presentation Techniques by Dick Powell, first published in 1985. Whereas Technical Illustration – Techniques and Applications was more of a textbook of tools and techniques, this book is a practical guide to accurately drawing and rendering for the purpose of communicating design ideas. While both books are reminders of how much illustration has changed in 20 years in terms of media and style, I think this book’s techniques are well presented and still relevant today.

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Technical Illustration: Techniques and Applications

Technical Illustration: Techniques and Applications by John A. Dennison and Charles D. Johnson

Technical Illustration: Techniques and Applications

Marc Gellen was looking for recommendations for books on technical illustration on Twitter, but ended up providing me with the recommendations. Fortunately, all three books he suggested were available from my local library. I thought I’d give them a brief review here for the benefit of anyone whose public (or private) library might be lacking on the subject.

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