Spoonflower.com?



In this post, I’ll be showing you how to take any of your Aviary creations and have it printed on fabric for all your crafting needs!

You can use any of Aviary’s tools to create your design.
Here’s the design I made for my fabric!

AviaryFabric.egg by meowza on Aviary

IMPORTANT NOTE: Spoonflower prints their fabric at 150 dots per inch. In simplest terms, a 300 pixel tall image will be printed at 2 inches. A 450 pixel tall image will be printed at 3 inches. Etc. Make sure to do your math.

The design I used in my example was made on a 600 px by 600 px canvas in Raven, the vector editor. So that means my fabric will be printed at… let me see… carry the one… Oh! 4 inches by 4 inches, square.
Fret not, you can always preview your pattern later in Spoonflower’s uploader.

After you’ve created your design, export (File > Export) the image to your computer as a PNG file.
Then, log in to Spoonflower and go to Designs > Upload to upload your creation to your Spoonflower account.



Then, you’ll be taken to the product page where you can preview your fabric pattern and determine what type of fabric and what size you want it on.
You can also play around with the various tiling settings for your pattern as well. Experiment!

I’ve ordered from Spoonflower a number of times in the past and the color you see on the screen is usually pretty much the color they print. So you need not worry about crazy color differences from the printer. It’s pretty remarkable how accurate they are.



Then, place your order, pay for your fabric, then sit back and relax and wait for the mailperson to bring you your own custom fabric! Your upholstery never need be non-custom ever again!

Here are a few projects that my fiancé, Brandi, put together using the custom fabric I created in Aviary. She sure is swell!

A nifty little handbag to carry all your eggs,


And a matching coin pouch!


So, go on and give it a try! Order some custom fabric today and let’s see what you make!]]>

We’ve launched this initiative by adding Login support for some of your favorite sites: Google, Yahoo, Twitter and Facebook!



If you’re a new Aviary user, signup is now as simple as providing a username.



If you already have an Aviary account, you’ll be able to manage your linked accounts via the linked accounts page under Profile Settings.



We’ve also spent some time enhancing the find friends feature to take advantage of these social API’s.

Over the next few days we’ll be rolling out an update that will allow users of supported sites to find their friends on Aviary without providing any additional credentials.

Keep an eye out for more exciting features soon.

ps – If there are any additional social features you’d like to see in our future, feel free to contribute in the comments below.]]>

blogpost about where she draws her artistic inspiration from.

I thought I would share my inspiration. A few weeks ago I went to an event called HackNY where I was inspired by students, who are without a doubt, the future of the NY Tech Community.

At HackNY students from NYU, Columbia, Rutgers, CSI, CUNY and other schools were presented with a handful of APIs from a number of local NY tech startups. The students had to come up with fun and interesting projects within 24 hours. After 24 hours, the projects were judged by a panel of judges and the participants.

Two of the students, Max Stoller & Tal Safran chose to work with the Aviary API to create Aviary Tennis.



Aviary Tennis allows users to upload photos and then add awesome props, like mustaches and funny hats.



Team Aviary Tennis won the people’s choice AKA the Awesomeness Award and they even got a free bow tie mustache award as well.



They also were chosen to present at the NY Tech Meetup last week and got some good laughs. They are now up for the chance of winning free tickets to TechCrunch Disrupt

To help them out please vote for them here:

http://www.meetup.com/ny-tech/polls/233447/

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April 3rd – 9th

Leakime

>Leakime This talented artist is equally creative in all apps and you’ll enjoy his gallery. Leakime also draws well which makes for some cool Raven creations. Some favorites:

If you haven’t already seen it Check out this staff spotlight interview with our fearless leader Avi

Check out some of these egg-celent images from the Easter round up.

Critiquing you own work using the MRZMFGTI method. (Patent pending)

Curious about our online vector editor’s various file types? Alessandro explains which are supported by Raven.

Tip – Close path in Aviary’s online vector editor

In the last update of Aviary’s online vector editor, the close path feature was added. Now when you have an open path (has a break) selected, choosing the Freehand or Bezier tool will highlight the end vertices. This allows any new path draw between these two vertices to close the path (make it continuous). Make sure the vertex is highlighted in red when starting and finishing you connecting path or it won’t close.

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When working for periods of time on an image, it’s easy to get lost in your tunnel vision, seeing what you think is on your canvas rather than what is actually there. In this post, I’ll be showing you a few methods you can use to help critique your own creations by using my tried and true MRZMFGTI (just rolls off your tongue!) formula.

1. Mirror – One of my favorite methods to get an additional look to a creation is to mirror the image. Artists in the olden time days used to use a method of holding a mirror up to their art work to gain an alternate point of view. Now with Aviary, you don’t need the use of fancy reflective surface technology. You can temporarily mirror your image by flattening it (Layer > Flatten Layers) and flipping it horizontally (Edit > Transform > Flip Horizontal). Then, after you’ve examined your work, simply Undo back to your image’s original state.


2. Rotate – It is easy to gloss over key components of your image, because in your mind, you know what the image is supposed to look like rather than what it actually looks like. Another method to help overcome this is to rotate the canvas by 90º or even 180º. By looking at your creation from odd angles, it’ll help you to objectively view your work to see if the color and form of the composition are working.



3. Zoom – How well does your image “read”? A good practice to examine the overall composition of your piece is to study your image at various zoom levels. By zooming out and seeing your image at a thumbnail size, you can objectively test your creation’s instant readability. I like to employ this method to all sorts of creation types. It’s most effective when used in materials such as advertisements and logos. When you only have a split second to grasp a user’s attention, you want to make sure your image is instantly readable.


4. Multitask – It’s too easy to get caught up in a single piece you’re working on. Working on more than one piece simultaneously allows you to take breaks from your current piece, while keeping the creative energies flowing on another. While taking a step away to work on a new piece, you may inherently solve problems by accident in your previous piece by discovering a new method or new strategy while putting together the elements of additional works.


5. Frame it – Using your fingers, form the shape of a frame and view individual areas of your image. Isolating different areas may help you to see where you may be erring, while at the same time aid you with additional compositional cropping strategies.


6. Grayscale – It’s easy for us to see the neon things in our images. One great way to check the compositional readability of your image is to set your image to black and white (Image > Desaturate). This forces us to view the image completely by composition alone, and makes it a lot easier to see where we may be off with our lighting and shadow cues.


7. Turn Away – Have you been staring at your image for hours and tried all the methods described to no avail? Then turn away! Stop looking at your image for a moment. Something that helps a lot is to turn your head away and stare at the wall for 5 seconds, then glance at your image again. You’ll be surprised at little nuances that you notice in your image that you never paid attention to the whole time you were looking at your image. This practice allows you to take a glimpse at your image almost from a prospective viewer’s eyes looking at the image for the first time.


8. It’s Art – Tried all of it and still can’t get your image looking right? Well then accept your mistakes, call it art, and hope people understand it in 20 years.

Do you have any other methods for critiquing your own work? If so, let’s hear ‘em!]]>

IMPORTING FILES
Aviary’s vector editor can import a number of file types, but please note some have limitations.

- JPG / JPEG & other standard bitmap image types

- PNG These lossless files also support transparency and are better for importing images without compression.

[NOTE: The SVG importer is somewhat limited because of the complexity of the language. We can import almost all of the geometric forms. The problem with importing SVG files are the linked resources (we can handle them, but in a limited way) and the way svg defines color and styles. We can handle SVG files with paths/polygons/shapes/etc... so long as they are composed of solid colors. When the shapes are composed of color gradients they will not always be interpreted correctly (this is something we are actively working on adding).

- PSD (photoshop native) From the photoshop .psd file we import only the flattened bitmap instead of individual layers.


EXPORTING FILES
We can also export to a number of file types in the latest version.

- SVG 1.1
- EPS 3.0
- PDF 1.x
- PNG

Both the SVG and EPS exporters have limitations due to the complexity of the languages. Again, the main limitation are the gradients: color gradients aren't exported correctly with those formats). We'd recommend that if you are looking to export a Raven creation to a vector format, you do it to the PDF format, as it is the most complete and should be able to export almost all aspects perfectly.

The only known limitations of our PDF exporter are:

1) The blending modes: not all the flash blending modes can be converted into pdf blend modes.

2) Gradients with transparency ( we hope to solve this particular issue ).
It should be noted that all 3 vector exporters ( eps, svg and pdf ) have another limitation that is out of our control: embedded fonts.

We cannot export embedded fonts because Flash does not provide direct access to a users' font library. So as a workaround, we will automatically convert text into geometric paths during the conversion, preserving the look of the text, but not the ability to edit it using a keyboard. Of course, we do keep the .EGG format for all saves, so you will always be able to make future edits in Aviary directly.

What types of files are you editing? Can't wait to see what you are creating! ]]>

Egg hunt.egg by Chicca69 on Aviary

Jelly beans.egg by Redstar on Aviary

Grafitti Eggs.egg by LCStarEyes13 on Aviary

easter guinea pig.egg by IAmTheLeader on Aviary

Easter Egg.egg by Beanepatch on Aviary

eggg.egg by jerlyn on Aviary

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March 27th – April 2nd

janellearlene

janellearlene’s conceptual art is very inspirational. Dark colors, rich with texture and abstract shapes created from everyday images always leave me wanting more. Not familiar with janellearlene? Visit her gallery, there are many wonders to be discovered. Here are some favorites

Announcing, Aviary’s new marketplace for ultra-rare birds. Start your collection and support Aviary.

Tip – Simplified color sampling in Aviary’s Color palette Editor

Aviary’s swatch editor gives you the tools to sample colors directly from an imported image. However it can get difficult to sample individual colors let alone knowing with to pick. Simplify the colors in the image by using the Pixel Width parameter to average colors and make them easy to sample.This feature could almost make a color palette from your image.

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Aviary was going free recently, some people didn’t understand how we could stay in business. What they didn’t know is that we had a killer business model in mind all along. As of today, April 1st, we are finally proud to roll that out.

Announcing, Aviary’s new marketplace for ultra-rare birds: http://aviary.com/birdstore



Featuring a wide array of the world’s rarest birds, Aviary’s new bird store initiative is a sure bet towards profitability. Best of all, we set pricing on the rare birds in the millions of dollars. Our competitors need literally millions of customers to just break even. With pricing set at upwards of 7 figures, we only need to sell a handful endangered birds a year to be insanely profitable!



So don’t be the last on your block to own a critically endangered bird classified as high-risk.

SHOP AVIARY’S NEW MARKETPLACE TODAY FOR ALL YOUR ENDANGERED AVIAN NEEDS!]]>

March 19th-25th

supernova1992

supernova1992 is blinding us with awesome creations, including one of my all time favorites, Chrome Guy. Take some time and go through his gallery, you’ll see some cool stuff.

Find out what it took to make the Google apps video.

Tip – Use Blackboxes inside Phoeinx

Blackboxes are self-contained filters made in Aviary’s effects editor, Peacock. You may or may not know that you can use these Blackbox file directly inside Phoenix. Use the Filter > Import Custom Filters to open the Blackbox browser where you can chose from the ever growing list of filters. Once a Blackbox filter is loaded into Phoenix it will open a dialog where you can change parameters of the filter if applicable. You can access any imported filters with the Filters > Custom Filters option.

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