How to Steal Like an Artist

"Every artist gets asked the question, 'Where do you get your ideas?' The honest artist answers, 'I steal them.'"

Artist Austin Kleon recently posted "HOW TO STEAL LIKE AN ARTIST (AND 9 OTHER THINGS NOBODY TOLD ME)," a presentation on the nature of creativity and inspiration. Enjoy.

Art Babble, A Source for High Quality Art Videos

What an amazing resource! Art Babble is a searchable collection of art and art history videos created by over 30 art museums and other insititutions like PBS's Art|21 series. It is especially strong on contemporary American art, but the videos are also on photography, Chinese art, and much more.

If you find some gems, Please post about them in the comments!

A Useful Translation Tool

Anyone who has tried to use online translation tools knows that sometimes they produce acceptable results, and sometimes gibberish.

Lexicool is a directory of 7500 dictionaries and glossaries that lets you find specialist dictionaries and glossaries that should have a better chance of translating art historical texts correctly. Their "Arts/Music/Crafts," "Photography/Printing/Publishing" and "Education/Culture/History/Geography" categories would be the most helpful for the research we do.

Link: http://www.lexicool.com/

Google's Image Recognition Service

Wouldn't it be great to snap a photo of a piece of art with your phone and see similar images? Recently Google launched a smartphone app that does just that, named "Google Goggles." 

Unlike other services it offers, Goggles is not something that you can use with a PC or Mac; it only works on camera-enabled Android, Blackberry, and Apple mobile devices (iPhones, iPad2s, or iPods). Here's a video of how it works:

Did your ears perk up when they talked about art? Mine sure did. Unfortunately for us, it has some limitations. Here's what it will and won't do:

• The image can only come from your phone's camera, not its photo "library" or folders.
• For now it works best for objects that don't change shape, like text, logos, artwork, or facial features.

If you don't have the right kind of phone, there are some services that can do the same thing from a PC.

• Gazopa, which will let you upload or draw images for searching.
• RevImg, which searches images you upload.
• Tineye, which searches for the EXACT image. This can be useful for checking to see if other people are using your artwork without permission.

Give it a try and tell us what you think about it in the comments!