# Art Jams



## TigerBeacon (Apr 14, 2013)

Has anyone made these and if not, is there anyone interested in forming one?

I'm sure, seeing that everyone is from different art communities, that art jam might mean slightly different to you. The one I'm talking about is basically a livestreaming chat, were people are broadcasting their arts in progress and commenting/giving each other advice or just generally talking while they work. Sometimes its under a certain premise to challenge people, and sometimes its just someplace to chat while working and getting feedback. I did this once before with people in Tinychat (which can broadcast to at least six people at once if I remember) and they were a lot of fun as well as extremely motivating to work. 

What do you think?


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## Taralack (Apr 15, 2013)

I would join this sort of thing but I literally do not even have time to do any sort of personal artwork.


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## FireFeathers (Apr 15, 2013)

That sounds like a lot of fun, actually. I was going to say there would be techinical issues with multiple people streaming at once, but I'll give a look into tinychat.  I used to host study/ class sessions before where everyone would paint the same still life and we'd compare and critique afterwards.


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## TigerBeacon (Apr 15, 2013)

FireFeathers said:


> That sounds like a lot of fun, actually. I was going to say there would be techinical issues with multiple people streaming at once, but I'll give a look into tinychat.  I used to host study/ class sessions before where everyone would paint the same still life and we'd compare and critique afterwards.



Yes, that's around something I mean, just a little more casual. :3

I've actually wanted to find something that is similar but isn't as intensive as TinyChat- it uses a lot of features that hog a lot of resources. There are really simple video streaming sites that have a very simple chatbox added to them that can work just as easily, but there could be better alternatives, like Tokbox. Will have to go try them out, though.


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## Taralack (Apr 15, 2013)

Google Hangouts? 

Would have suggested Skype or join.me but you need a subscription to stream multiple people's desktops.


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## Arshes Nei (Apr 15, 2013)

One of the drawbacks is that when you stream at the same time, it's not uncommon for the artists to get distracted by others drawing at the same time. I mean if it's someone you don't know you might be interested in the technique and it can stall you because you want to see what the other person is doing.

Drawing Jams are usually fun, like OPen Canvas and Paint Chats you'd group together and draw, but you are limited to the software. 

When you stream people can use their own programs. 

For me, I will get into "the zone" and often have to shut out people when I'm in certain stages of drawing, not very social.

The other drawback is a technology issue. It's less to do with bandwidth but allotted screen size once you do one of these. If you are streaming 4 at a time, that's less screen size per drawing. A sketch can look really bad because streaming usually plays it at a lower resolution. Most people don't have their viewers at full screen either - with good reason. They want to chat. If you view it at full screen the chat window is gone.


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## TigerBeacon (Apr 15, 2013)

Toraneko said:


> Google Hangouts?
> 
> Would have suggested Skype or join.me but you need a subscription to stream multiple people's desktops.



I tested this out and it seems exactly what I'm looking for! You can  choose which persons's screen to focus on, pop out the chat box and everything. You can even choose to focus on the program you're using itself (i.e: Sai) rather than the entire screen, which is just awesome.  Just need to see how it fares with more than one person. 



Arshes Nei said:


> One of the drawbacks is that when you stream at the same time, it's not uncommon for the artists to get distracted by others drawing at the same time. I mean if it's someone you don't know you might be interested in the technique and it can stall you because you want to see what the other person is doing.
> 
> Drawing Jams are usually fun, like OPen Canvas and Paint Chats you'd group together and draw, but you are limited to the software.
> 
> ...



I think the Google Hangouts solved that by have an ability to enlarge one person's screen at a time rather than having to display everyone's screens at once, causing them to shrink to fit (and still have the chatbox visible) as well as just focusing the capture on the art program itself rather than what's displayed on-screen. Can't really say for certain on its reliability for fully occupied video chats without having a group to test it on, but I like it so far. And as far as I've been doing them I've never really had one that can display perfect detail the way a single Livestream video would. I don't really expect them to be crystal clear, but I also don't expect that to be entirely necessary unless you're a nut for details. 

As for everything else, I guess its dependent on the person. I intended the chat to be something like a get-together not just for artists but also for people that like watching people draw, so I don't think being distracted is an entirely huge drawback. If we'd set up sessions like one-hour drawing challenges, there's no reason why people couldn't 'tune out' the rest of the chat to focus. Although if there was a constant necessity for that in order to work, I don't think there would have been much point joining the chat to begin with. Likewise, they could simply just broadcast their work like any Livestream for people to watch and not really need to interact with them. 

Most of the problems I've had with setting up Art Jams was just trying to find people who had the time to hang around there and the means to actually participate in it (most people complained that Tinychat tended to slow their computer down a lot or it just wouldn't load up at all, had video problems, etc. which is why I'm trying to find alternatives).


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## Taralack (Apr 15, 2013)

Eh I suppose I'd be game if it's only an hour long. The next problem I have is coordinating time zones lol. Bane of my existence.


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## Nataku (Apr 17, 2013)

This sounds like something fun I'd like to try out. We used to have art jams here in my city every couple weeks, which resulted in a group of artists either hanging out at someone's house, in a local park, or a Denny's with sketchbooks everywhere. Can't quite do the same on a computer, but being as physical art jams no longer happen around here, its something to fill the gap, and new people's art styles to observe.

Like Toraneko - timezones. They are evil. Can we determine a time in which we can all spend some time arting?


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## TigerBeacon (Apr 19, 2013)

When I set up specific times (like for challenges), its usually based on US timezones since the majority seem to live there. So timezone-wise, its based around GMT-6,-7,-8 and -9. Most people work in the day or have school, so safe to say that the best times that most would be available is sometime after 19:00 or 20:00 and extending around midnight. If anything, the weekend would be most ideal to set up jams. 

Would be nice to know what are people's most active times are. A timezone converter can help figure out how you guys correlate to US nighttime schedule and the events can either be adjusted or just have an AM and PM jam.


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## Summer (Apr 23, 2013)

I would love to do something like this. I do not work alone well and I often find myself checking forums(such as this one) or my other arts sites when I should be getting work done.


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## Schwimmwagen (Apr 23, 2013)

I'd like to do something similar, like learning together and practising together and exchanging info and all, but I couldn't do the live thing.


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## Nashida (Apr 26, 2013)

Hopefully not too late, I'd love to do something like this. Only reason I may have trouble is because timezones.

Then again maybe not. I'm at GMT+8, Beijing time, so for example right now it's 12:10 in the afternoon (and my lazy ass should be heading to work in a half hour).  I'm 12 hours ahead of EST and 15 ahead of PST. So, if you did an art jam, say, at 20:00 Friday I'd be around because it'd be 8:00 AM Saturday for me.


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