[ubuntu-art] Starting the Edgy Eft release process

[Frank Schoep]

Hello artists,

I have several important issues I want to inform you about, so please take the 
time to read through this e-mail if you want to get involved in the Edgy Eft 
release.

First of all, Kenneth Wimer and I have been selected to be Artist in Chief for 
Kubuntu and Ubuntu respectively. This means that we will try to help everyone 
out when things are unclear, but we will also be the ones deciding on the 
direction of the distribution's artwork.

Last week Troy, Kenneth and I attended the Ubuntu Developer Summit near Paris 
to lay down a solid foundation for the upcoming Edgy Eft release. For this 
release we have focused on getting a process in place which will make 
contributing artwork both more focused and easier for new members, and I've 
seen a lot lately, welcome onboard everyone and enjoy your stay!

So, besides producing artwork, the Edgy Eft release will be a testbed for 
refining the artwork process for future releases. The process itself is 
outlined in the Wiki on this page:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Artwork/Specs/ArtworkProcess

As you can see, the process consists of five phases which follow up on 
eachother. For the Edgy release I applied this process to the schedule that 
the developers came up with. This concrete schedule is also up on the Wiki, 
available here:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Artwork/Specs/EdgyArtworkPlan

At the moment of writing this e-mail, the "Target Identification" and 
"Community Involvement" actions should be done by now.

Consider this e-mail to be the "Community Involvement" action, so if anything 
is unclear after this, let the list know so everyone can stay up to date. The 
"Target Identification" phase was done during the Developer Summit last week, 
I will summarize this is in a follow up e-mail shortly.

Next up in the process is the "Ponder" phase which is about coming up with 
general ideas, textures and colors for the default Human artwork. I will send 
out a kick-off e-mail for this phase after summarizing "Target 
Identification" earlier this evening. "Ponder" will take up the rest of this 
week and next week up until July 6th.

Once I sent out the e-mails on the process phases, feel free to ask questions 
and make suggestions regarding the initial process plan.

Moving on to the next important thing is that we have Kenneth Wimer, the 
Kubuntu Artist in Chief, actively participating on the ubuntu-art mailing 
list. We want you, the community, to provide ideas and artwork for both 
Ubuntu and Kubuntu, so that both projects can benefit from a talented pool of 
artists.

We want to actively share good ideas, compositions and more between Ubuntu and 
Kubuntu to bring the artwork for both projects to a higher level. We're very 
enthusiastic about this, we hope you are too.

The last thing I want to let you know about in this e-mail is the introduction 
of the so-called Art Council. Troy has sent you all an e-mail earlier today 
about applying for a position there. I'm sure he will fill you in on the 
details if you have any questions on this subject. Let him know either via 
this list or personally via e-mail.

I hope this all provides a valuable starting point for getting involved in the 
upcoming release cycle. The next three months will be all about getting high 
quality results in a structured manner. See my upcoming e-mails on how we're 
going to do this in practice.

I'm looking forward to hearing from you all.

With kind regards,

Frank Schoep