Welcome to the first edition of Magpie's Nest! This is a newsletter where I collect and feature all kind of shiny treasures found around DeviantArt. I promote interesting news, projects, contest and challenges I have come across recently and share amazing artworks from traditional art gallery as well.
As I love talking with you and would like to know you a bit better, there is also a little question for you at the end of this journal. Feel free to answer it in the comments area! Other thoughts and comments are welcome too.
Sparkling News and Projects
At the moment a hot topic in the community is the ongoing site revamp. I am pretty sure many of you have already heard about it or at least noticed weird things happening in your inbox - or as it is called nowadays: Notifications. Check out these journals to catch up what's going on and to hear what community thinks about the changes so far:
Watch, Notifications, and Mobile Updates
Watch connects you with the people you watch by creating a sequential stream of activity, including deviations, journals, favourites, status updates, and more.
Today, we’re introducing some changes based on community requests: the ability to filter Watch, improved display of group deviations and favourites in Watch, and, by very popular request, separating group deviations in notifications.
Customize Watch Using Filters
We often hear from the community that deviants want to filter or dive into specific types of content on Watch. We’re happy to introduce a set of filters that let you customize what you see in Watch.
This is not a permanent feature, but we think you’ll enjoy the experience until Watch evolves into a more personalized feed. Our goal is to make Watch a personalized platform to discover and consume what’s interesting and relevant to you. Your choices and usage of
Top Community Feature Requests and Our Responses
In May, we introduced the DeviantArt Timeline as a method of communicating with deviants and providing transparency about what’s planned for our collective future. During the site simplification process that followed, we received a number of comments from deviants asking why we were working on the features presented on the Timeline instead of other things. Many of the features brought up in these comments are ones that have been requested for years. We want to be more transparent about these suggested features, why some of them haven’t happened yet, and why some of them may never happen.
These requests are from past Site Updates, the Suggestions Forum, surveys, and individual requests we’ve received.
Not
Community voices Vol. 2: Site simplification
Welcome back to the Community voices, first edition filled with opinions! This time we are talking about Site simplification.
I advise reading these journals before reading opinions!
SnazzyDoodle - beta tester
Site simplification doesn't make a lot of sense to me. The article was confusing and hard to read as always. I take it that they are renaming categories, which is ok, and updating notifications to real time, which is great, but I'm not sure if the big deal about it is really well deserved. I think dA is focusing their attention to the wrong areas when they make these changes honestly, the simplification is fine, but they should be working to make the site more of a community and to support new artists, so whenever I see such an unimportant overall change it really just bothers me that their time isn't going to something more important.
Dear DeviantArtDear DeviantArt,
DeviantArt is my favorite website of all where I can spend 10 to 30 hours a week. It’s the place where I can meet other artists and where I can get help, find tutorials and resources and feature other people. This is by far the easiest site to use lately. You don’t have to answer 50 questions or create your own thumbnail to submit art. You can check your friend’s art without scrolling endlessly through pages and pages of everything; kitchen sink included.
I like good changes. They are un-boring. I am always eager to see the next step. You did great things in the past, and others not in my liking. It’s normal, we cannot please everyone. I still miss the page footer. But every time you announce a change, I’m anxious about losing an important tool for my daily activities here. I’m afraid DeviantArt will become like other websites I lost interest in. I’m worried to lose something I love so much.
Because I
There are also awesome mentoring projects going on! Would you like to have your own buddy who teaches you certain areas of art or would you like to share your knowledge and become a teacher or mentor yourself? Check out the Project TeamWork 2015 which is happening during June and July or take a look at the ongoing Seniors' Mentoring Project from seniormentors:
Project: TeamWork 2015It's that time of the year again: the TeamWork project is back!
For all those who don't know the project yet, here are some answers to all the questionmarks over your head.
Brace yourselves, this journal will be a long one. :bademoticon:
What is the project about?
The aim of this project, hosted by Artistle, is to team up two ( or more) artists to achieve a close and individual learning-experience.
One of the group will be the teacher, whereas the other(s) will be the student(s). (But our teachers will learn through this project just as much, I'm sure)
Teachers will present assignments to their students and provide them with tools, techniques and lessons to achieve the goal they both decided on. In the end we'll present all the finished assignments in a big chat event and on our group page!
There are also prizes to be won, but more on that later in this journal.
We will provide all t
SMP: The Seniors' Mentoring ProjectCommunity Week
seniormentors
Have you ever found yourself working on an art piece and wishing that there was someone who could guide you through a tricky photoshop process or tell you which pencil to use to get the shading effect you want? Sure, YouTube tutorials and various internet resources can be helpful. But there is something different about having an actual person who can mentor you and help you progress with your craft.
Enter seniormentors stage left!
The Seniors' Mentoring Project (SMP), which operates through the seniormentors group, is an active mentoring group run by DeviantArt's senior members. The ones with the little medal next to their username. The goal of the group is to provide an enriching learning relationship to help deviants develop skills in their artistic medium of interest.
The group was revitalized at the beginning of Spring 2015 and has been thriving ever since. A variety of Senior Mentors spanning many of DA's
And speaking of journeys, why not to take a voyage to some other unknown gallery as well? Take a look at the tours other people have made from this Master Journal and make your own spin of the feature!
Infrared Photography - The Gallery is here! After many years of discussions and lots of patient waiting from the Infrared Photography community we are pleased to announce that it’s finally HERE! The Gallery Photography -> Infrared is now live! So what does this mean? Infrared Photography is a beautiful technique used to achieve what is often described as a magical scene. The definition of Infrared Photography for the purpose of submitting to the gallery is written below..
"Infrared photography is style that predominantly uses the infrared portion of the light spectrum to create images on photographic film or digital sensors."
For more examples of Infrared Photography check out the Devia
Voyage to the unknown: Master JournalWith the amount of people jumping in on this new "Voyage to the unknown" project, I wanted to create a master journal where I will collect all of the journals that have been put together following my initial post! This journal serves the purpose of explaining the project, and collecting everyone's journals, so feel free to include it in your new "voyage to the unknown" collections, and please leave a comment with a link to your awesome journals so I can feature them here!
The concept:
The idea is to browse through 1 category or sub-category that you don't necessarily visit frequently, or that you browse the least, and collect some of the art you find stands out! The point of this is to challenge ourselves and discover new art in the process! I'll personally be tagging people in each issue to follow suit and do their own, however, don't feel obligated to respond to the tag. I just want everyone to know I'd love to see them do their own spin of this feature <
Glimmering Contests and Challenges
Looking for inspiration and new things to draw? How about mysterious mermaids, unique equines, firebreathing dragons or hipster penquins? Or would you like to design a brand new creature that doesn't even exist yet anywhere else but in your imagination? Check out these contests and challenges, maybe some of these tickles your imagination:
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Unique-Equines Monthly Challenge - June 2015Thank you everyone for participating! We had a difficult time judging the entries in order to decide the winners because everyone did a great job and brought some awesome creativity to the table. Unfortunately we only have 3 prizes, but we hope just participating was worth the effort.
So, without further ado, the winners are:
1st place: TrollGirl with
2nd place: Khimera with
3rd place: Platyadmirer with
Hello everyone,
this month we're starting new monthly challenges where we'll encourage you to participate in fun activities and/or art creation through our group.
To kick things off, we're going to bring back a theme we did many years ago, back in the early days of UE. This was really popular when we ran it all those years ago and it's a perfect way of bringing that spark UE was built on back to the group!
Your Task: Create a line art of a
Firebreathing Contest - Win Points (ENDED)THEME OF THE CONTESTDraw or Paint or Sculpt a Red Dragon with a welsh flag next to it (because the Welsh dragon is the coolest thing ever
)
Examples;
RULESDEADLINE
14th of JULY (that's a month)
PRIZES
[I'm looking for people to donate points/faves/llamas/features to the prize list, I will fe
dAWishingWell Mascot Contest - ClosedThe RulesAny DeviantArt member can participate. You don't have to be member of the group.
Getting cozy in your comfort zone? It is good to learn new things now and then so why not to try out a new media or technique! Never tried creating photomanipulations? These handy journals will get you started right away:
10 tips for photomanipulation newbiesThis is a reprise of an earlier article!
We have a lot of newbies to the photomanipulation community, and I wanted to welcome you and address some important tips for helping integrate you into our community.
1. Watch or join CRPhotomanipulation. This is the hub for all official photomanipulation contests and activities. It is also a place where you can submit your artwork (1 per week) to help get exposure. This is a great way to bring art to our attention. We really want to get to know you and your work!!
2. Watch your photomanipulation CVs. Right now that's me and AbbeyMarie. This is not a sad plea for attention or fishing for watchers! We have information about things going on in the community at-large that might not come through CRPhotomanipulation. We are looking out for you!
3. Hone your craft. DeviantArt has a lot of really spectacular tutorials for you to use. There are also other great sites out there that
Quick Photo Manip Tips and TricksPhoto Manipulation Week
For the last week, I've reached out to you guys to find out what kind of tutorials you would be most interested in seeing! Once I collected the topics, I reached out to as many artists that I could find that were advanced in those topics to help write a "mini" tutorial full of tips and tricks for you guys.
"Overall Painted Look"
:iconSummerDreams89:
"My techniques is pretty much simple and the soft painted look can be achieved quite easily. What I do is:
Using a spot healing brush I remove spots, if any from the skin.
Then use a mixer brush over it using the following values:
Wet: 17%, Load: 15%, Mix: 17%, Flow: 18%, which not only smoothens the skin but also softens it.
At the end of it all, I dodge and burn wherever necessary. Alternatively, I use a white brush of low opacity somewhere between 30-35% and paint over the highlights, then apply a Gaussian blur of 15-16 pixels. and for the shadows I go over them with a much lower opaci
Photo Manipulation Tutorial Feature!Photo Manipulation Week
Eye tutorial by EliseEnchantedTUTORIAL - LIGHTS by MirellaSantana
Depth of Field Photomanipulation Tutorial Part 1 by kuschelirmel-stock Sad Look Tutorial by LadyEvilArts Mermaid Tail Tutorial by AbbeyMarie Bird Blending Tutorial by BenjaminHaleyTutorial - Illuminated Window by neverdying Demon Eyes Ps Tutorial by LadyEvilArts Walkthrough: Hellila photomanipulation (eng) by Dferous
Skin Into Coal Tutorial by AbbeyMarie
Simple tip for blending by sara-hel
Twinkling Artworks
Since this is the very first issue of Magpie's Nest, the legitimate topic for the very first feature is magpie! There are many old beliefs and folklores about this common black and white bird - most of them negative especially in western stories - but I find this vocal and intelligent bird charming.
Enjoy epic artworks of this charismatic bird,
Magpie:
What's your favorite bird?
Mine are crane and curlew.
Skin by Dan Leveille
