Four Ways to Combine Audio With Your Artwork

Yesterday I showed you my "Studies in Casein" exhibit, created with the new Google Open Gallery toolkit. Now, here's the link to my "Studies in Watercolor" Exhibit.

I set up this exhibit with the "immersive layout" option. This mode presents the art full-screen, with the video and audio on autoplay (adjust your volume). Clicking on the image thumbnail opens up the scalability feature and pauses the video/audio.

For sound recording, I use a Zoom H1 Digital Recorder. If you're interested in adding the dimension of sound to your artwork, you can bring this lightweight unit into the field when you go painting. It records stereo sound in MP3 or WAV formats, and gives you automatic or manual level control.

Imagine being able to let your collectors hear the actual sounds of the crashing surf alongside your seascape painting. Or imagine letting your painting students know what you were thinking while you did your on-site demo. As artists, we can create not only paintings, but also various packets of other media: text captions, step-by-step photos, video clips, and audio samples, which we can reconfigure on various platforms, some of which are not even invented yet. At its essence, art is about lived experience, and an audio clip can add an evocative real-life resonance to what you've captured visually

There are at least four ways to combine audio with your artwork.

1. You can add audio to your artwork by uploading the audio file to Soundcloud, and then embedding the Soundcloud file in a blog post. For an example, see my blog post about England.

2. Or you can combine sound with your plein-air in a YouTube video, as with my 'Talking Portrait' above. This was edited in iMovie on a Mac laptop using "Ken Burns" camera moves.

3. Or Apple's Keynote presentation software lets you add an audio clip. Here's how.

4. Finally, you can combine audio with an online exhibit using Google Open Gallery's toolset.

Google Open Gallery is currently only offered by invitation, but you can apply here, and tell them I sent you.