Produced by Lee Tusman in collaboration with Code&Share[  ] Community and Cantina

Imagine if all illustrators were required to use the same brand and design of #2 pencils or if all photographers could use only one type of camera and film and pay a monthly fee for their continued use. This is the situation today for today’s largest (and best-marketed) digital artmaking suites like Adobe Creative Suite. But a whole world of other exciting, experimental and artist-friendly tools exist beyond the confines of this. This workshop on creative tools is built for artists, and small DIY communities, covering possibilities of image production, drawing, photographing, organizing and experiments.

In this workshop we will start with a brief overview of artmaking tools that are alternatives to commercial offerings and then launch into a range of many other experimental and exciting artist software tools such as zine making tools (Electric Zine Maker), digital painting software (Krita, JS Paint), painting tools that allow one to collaboratively draw with a computer (NoPaint), 3d object scanning (Meshroom), and many more. Participants will create mini projects with these tools which we will document with photos and screenshots. By the end of the session we will produce a collaborative zine about these tools and showing the work we’ve created, with the goal of making this resource available for artists everywhere.