Guidelines for Submitting Artwork

Creating digital images

In order to submit your assignments for this course, you will be uploading digital copies of your artwork to Flickr, an online image hosting site. This and the following guidelines will help point you to resources for completing this course sucessfully.

In order for your instructor to evaluate your artwork effectively, it will be important to prepare precise, faithful images of your work. The good news is that with proper care, you can create high-quality images using an ordinary digital camera or scanner.

Whatever tools you use, your object is to produce a digital image that is

Accurate
The image should be depicted from straight on, with natural, even lighting. Colors should be adjusted as necessary to match the colors of the original piece. Edges should be straight and cropped if necessary.
Detailed
The image should be large enough to show the texture of the original in close-up (largest) view. It should be free of blurring and grainy artifacts that can mask fine points.

Here is a great example of a good image from an exhibit of high school artwork. Notice that the angles are straight and without distortion, and that the lighting looks even. If you select “Actions > View all sizes” you can click on the original size and see the texture of the canvas and paint in the original artwork.

This example shows a less successful image from a different high school exhibit. Notice that the artwork is photographed behind glass, causing reflections across the image. The angle of the photo distorts the work, and the edges are not even. And if you use “View all sizes” to look at the original upload, you can see that the image is not in sharp focus, so that the finer texture of the artist’s work is hard to see.

Computer art images

Many assignments in the course give you the option to create an artwork using a computer graphics program. In such cases, you obviously do not need to create a digital image. But you will need to make sure you save your work in JPEG format, with a filename including “.jpg” at the end. You may need to use the “Save As” command or “Export” feature to create the JPEG file; if you are unsure of how to do this, try a web search for instructions (for example, “save Photoshop CS5 file as jpeg”). Once you have saved your JPEG file, skip to the section on uploading your image in the menu at left.