Power to the [Creative] People

Readers may be a little tired of me going on and on about HTML5, and subsequently bashing Internet Explorer. The good news is that the latest in neat-o tech that is the subject of this post also works in IE while mainly being powered by HTML5 (I have no idea how they swung that). More good news: this new tool gives real, hands-on access to HTML5′s capabilities.

I’m talking about Muro from DeviantArt. I’ve been a member of DeviantArt for years and recently used their digital to canvas printing offering to donate to an exhibit honoring a legend from my hometown. The site has been a creative haven for digital artists since 2000, and now on their 10th anniversary they are giving creative powers to all with Muro.

The image above was created in about 5 minutes. You might say, “Yeah, it looks it,” but I think it could pass for some of the graffito-inspired pieces featured in avant-garde galleries around the country. The brushes available in the online tool do most of the work for you and the filters do the rest (zomg, filters!). Most astoundingly, if you have a Wacom tablet, they provide a link to a plugin to let you go wild with your design. In the hands of a real artist, the possibilities are fairly limitless.

You can export your creation, but the saving gave even a hard-boiled techie like myself a bit of trouble. Once your image pops-up, you need to right-click (control-click on some Mac’s) and choose “Save Image As…” from the menu. Of course, if you have an account and are signed in, you can submit your creation to DeviantArt.

Oh, did I mention this works on an iPad? Yeppers. And it’s even easier to save your image. Just hold your finger on the image for about a second and choose “Save Image” which sends the art to your photos. I’ve tried Adobe Ideas (the free iPad app from the makers of Photoshop), but it doesn’t have anything close to the massive capabilities of Muro. Also, it exports as a PDF- yuck.

I only mention the latter because we are now seeing that a well-designed web-tool can rival apps that only work on certain devices and, thus, can appeal to a larger audience. How does a seemingly unknown entity like DeviantArt get the jump on a giant like Adobe, or even Google Apps, etc.? As yet, there’s no easy way to use Adobe products on Linux (Muro works there, too), which keeps many free-thinkers from going that route.

*Now for the bad news: there’s practically no reason to put-off making art. Slackers – Assemble & Go! ….or, like… whatever.