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Blender Icons: Blender Art Book Call for Content

13

Dolf Veenvliet (of Sintel and Entoforms fame) wants to produce a book with the best Blender art and he's asking for your input.

Dolf writes:

Hello everyone,

After the Blender Conference in 2010 I had an idea... or, well call it the seed of an idea. There are a lot of art books around, a lot of CG art books as well. But no Blender specific ones yet. So I had a bit of a poke around the community to see where we stand... and you know what... there's lots of great visuals around. Stuff I would love to see published!

So I talked to Ton, and mailed around to some publishers, then talked to a bunch of our better known artists to see if anyone was interested. And, everyone was really positive about the idea! I was immediately sure that this is something we can make happen. So earlier this year I built a small website with a submission system at the same time I was quietly working on my entoforms, and graphicall.org.

Since the Entoforms crowdfunding campaign is wrapping up in 1.5 weeks (get some whilst you can!!) I think this is the perfect time to open up the website for submissions!

Go to www.blendericons.com to submit your work! As soon as enough high quality works have been submitted, production will start (and probably pre-sales as well).

Thank you all, and lets make this an awesome book! Dolf (macouno)

p.s. thanks pablo n soenke for submitting some images so I could make a little mockup book ;)

Great idea, Dolf! I'll be sure to buy one when you're ready.

About the Author

Avatar image for Bart Veldhuizen
Bart Veldhuizen

I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-) I also run the Blender Artists forum and I'm Head of Community at Sketchfab.

13 Comments

  1. Great idea Dolf. I am not up to the standard I would like to see yet. But I would like to buy a copy to point at my arty friends. :)
    Nolan

  2. I'm interested in this but I'm wondering do the proceeds of this book go to the Blender Foundation and are the artists compensated in any way?

  3. Hi guys, thanks for taking an interest.

    Since already a few have asked similar questions I created a FAQ page: http://www.blendericons.com/frequently-asked-questions/

    Sean: This is an independent production, not done by the Blender Foundation or the Blender Institute. Both the foundation, and the institute would require the art to be released under a Creative Commons-license. Which is great... I love the CC-license and use it for all my personal works... But I asked around and a lot of artists do not want to release their works as CC. That is their choice, and I'm not going to force anyone to change. All I ask for is the rights to publish the submitted work in this one book, and to use them to promote this one book. But that also means... it can not be a foundation or institute book.

    About "compensation": Perhaps, if enough books are sold (lets first see if there's enough high quality works though!) I can consider sending artists who are published in the book a copy of the book... but that's a long way off. I will do what I can.

    First and foremost... being recognised and published as one of the very best Blender artists out there is the biggest reward I can offer!

  4. It's worth noting that this is the exact same policy used in many other CG art books, include the very popular EXPOSÉ series from Ballistic.

    I, for one, am happy to see someone trying to make a book like this happen. It's long overdue, in my opinion. And I'll certainly be more than happy to make a submission.

  5. Its a great idea and all, but unless you give some form of compensation (a free copy at the very least) to the artists, they will feel you are just trying to make a quick buck of the open-ness of the Blender community.
    Atleast that's how I feel.

    One idea: Do a short discription/history of certain/all artists including more than one piece of their work, or perhaps a little story the artist wrote about the work. Make it a little more interesting than just a book full of pictures

  6. It should be noted that this is the same policy used in a lot of CG art books, such as Ballistic's Exposé series.

    I, for one, am incredibly pleased that someone has taken the initiative to assemble a book like this one. It's well overdue in my opinion. And I will be more than happy to submit my work in the hopes that it gets included.

  7. I agree with Greg, that this book must include a short story or even a short tutorial about certain effects that are special in an artist picture. Some making of stories and such.

    All in all, a great idea. Good luck!

  8. Nice idea. Anything that promotes Blender is good!

    With no real GI at the moment, Blender art made with internal renderer will look inferior to those created in other similar packages. Please accept those that use external rendering engines as well. Thanks.

  9. Hi guys,

    Some text will be in the book, including some short descriptions of the more interesting works... but first and foremost it's about the images.

    Sim: Yes you are allowed to submit images rendered with an external renderer.

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